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European Jewish student group sues Twitter over its handling of antisemitism and Holocaust denial
BERLIN (JTA) – Europe’s main Jewish student organization is fed up with the antisemitism, Holocaust denial and other hate speech burgeoning on Twitter — so they are taking the social media company to court.
The Brussels-based European Union of Jewish Students and the Berlin-based HateAid non-profit group on Wednesday announced they have sued Twitter in Berlin District Court for failing to uphold its own pledge to remove hate speech from the platform.
The action — which included the placement of a hashtag prop in front of the German parliament building, in an inversion of a symbol that Twitter itself popularized — was sponsored by the Berlin-based Alfred Landecker Foundation, as part of its Digital Justice Movement, started by HateAid.
The move comes as Germany prepares to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with ceremonies and events across the country.
But that is not enough, said Avital Grinberg, president of the EUJS, which represents some 160,000 European Jewish students. “Remembrance of the Shoah must not be merely expressed through emotional speeches, but also through clear positions, resolute action and protective laws,” she said.
The announcement of the lawsuit comes a day after Twitter reinstated the American Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, the latest in a string of people who had posted antisemitic material to the platform to be allowed back since the billionaire Elon Musk bought it last year. Fuentes immediately tweeted antisemitic comments and was suspended again.
But the site does not remove antisemitism, according to the student group’s lawsuit. Armed with six specific cases in which they claim Twitter did not take complaints seriously, the Berlin law firm of Preu Bohlig sued Twitter on Tuesday, demanding the removal of antisemitic content that is illegal under German law, said Torben Duesing, a partner in the firm, at a press conference Wednesday in the German capital.
Their aim is twofold: to move a social media mountain, and to encourage targets of hate speech to speak up. The six cases — all of which were posted in the last three months — were not described, to avoid giving them further publicity, organizers said.
But the groups did say that in one case relating to Holocaust denial, Twitter had explicitly refused to remove the content.
Europe has been a challenging frontier for technology companies, which have had to take steps to ensure digital privacy and change their handling of misinformation because of European laws and regulations. Now, the students’ lawsuit aims to leverage Germany’s particularly vigorous laws barring Holocaust denial and the glorification of Nazi ideology to force the platform to remove it. There are similar laws in other EU countries.
The lawsuit focuses on clarifying whether Twitter has a contractual obligation to its users, under its legal terms of service, to remove antisemitic tweets that contain sedition, including trivialization and denial of the Holocaust.
Just because Twitter doesn’t respond adequately to complaints doesn’t mean one should give up trying, said German Jewish writer and activist Marina Weisband at the press conference. All Twitter users around the world agree to the terms of service, “which is designed to protect users” from hate speech, she said. But if Twitter doesn’t enforce these terms, what are they worth?
Twitter claims to share the view that “Jewish rights are human rights,” said Grinberg. “But the reality appears to be the opposite.”
There has as yet been no response to the suit from Twitter, which has not had a public relations team since shortly after Musk’s acquisition, when he slashed the staff. The company is already subject to an advertiser boycott that has sharply curbed its revenue, the result of a push by the Anti-Defamation League and others in response to Musk’s lack of action around hate speech on the platform.
The ADL released an analysis last year finding that Twitter removed only 5% of 225 tweets that it reported as “strongly antisemitic” — comments accusing Jewish people of pedophilia, invoking Holocaust denial, and sharing conspiracy theories — over nine weeks last summer. It also found that antisemitism spiked on the platform following Musk’s acquisition.
In 2021, a report by the British-based Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 84% of reported posts on social media platforms containing antisemitic hate were not reviewed by the platforms. According to the survey, Twitter intervened in only 11% of the cases.
Twitter does promise to police its platform and has lately has suspended the accounts of users whose antisemitic comments made headlines. That was true last year for Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and again on Wednesday for Fuentes after his reinstatement.
But more is needed, said the students and attorneys behind the European lawsuit.
“We know that one lawsuit is not enough to make Twitter a perfect place,” Josephine Ballon, HateAid’s lead attorney. “We know that it takes more than that, but we are convinced that it is precisely these kinds of lawsuits that will put new tools” in the hands of minority groups and individuals.
“Social media is the most important debate platform of our generation,” said Grinberg. The lawsuit, she said, is “the response of resilient Jews to the failure of Twitter, social media, politicians and the law.”
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The post European Jewish student group sues Twitter over its handling of antisemitism and Holocaust denial appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows
Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, carry a banner calling for Israel’s elimination. Photo: Reuters/Dilara Senkaya
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.
In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.
In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.
“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.
“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.
Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.
“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.
According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.
The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.
For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
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ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board
The Anti-Defamation League named Rev. Johnnie Moore, who led the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to its board of directors last week.
Moore became the public face of the foundation over the summer as it faced blame for hundreds of Palestinian civilians being killed while attempting to access aid at distribution centers that critics said were risky and inefficient.
But the ADL described the foundation, which was created with support from the U.S. and Israeli governments, as a “historic effort to provide nearly 200 million meals for free to the people of Gaza,” in a press release.
The ADL’s leadership has become more protective of Israel in recent years as it has shifted away from its historic work on civil rights issues unrelated to antisemitism. That change included a 2017 reworking of its governance structure, which had been run by a committee of several hundred lay leaders, to a more traditional nonprofit board.
The United Nations reported in August that 859 Palestinians had been killed near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, mostly by the Israeli military. Doctors Without Borders said that the centers had “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty” with children being shot and civilians crushed in stampedes.
Moore’s role involved defending the organization. He blamed Hamas and the United Nations for causing mass starvation in Gaza and presented the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as the best means of distributing food to civilians without allowing it to be diverted to militants.
“Hamas has been trying to use the aid situation to advance their ceasefire position,” Moore said during a July presentation to the American Jewish Congress.
The foundation shut down in December.
An evangelical leader and former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump’s with no background in international aid prior to his work with the foundation in Gaza, Moore brings a Christian perspective to the ADL’s board at a time when evangelicals are increasingly divided over Israel and antisemitism. “As a Christian, I consider it a responsibility to stand alongside ADL in this critical moment for the Jewish community and for our nation,” he said in the statement announcing his appointment.
He was appointed alongside Stacie Hartman, an attorney and lay leader based in Chicago, and Matthew Segal, a media entrepreneur who former President Joe Biden named to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. They join a mix of philanthropists and business leaders, including Jonathan Neman, the CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen, and Max Neuberger, the publisher of Jewish Insider.
The post ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board appeared first on The Forward.
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Man Charged With Hate Crime for Car Ramming at Chabad Headquarters in Brooklyn
Police control the scene after a car repeatedly slammed into Chabad World Headquarters in Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The driver was taken into custody. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Police in New York City charged a man on Thursday with a hate crime and other charges after he allegedly rammed his car repeatedly into Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn.
The suspect, 36-year-old Dan Sohail, has been charged with attempted assault as a hate crime, reckless endangerment as a hate crime, criminal mischief as a hate crime, and aggravated harassment as a hate crime, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny announced at a press conference on Thursday.
“The hate crime right now is that he basically attacked a Jewish institution,” Kenny explained. “This is a synagogue, it was clearly marked as a synagogue, he knew it was a synagogue because he had attended there previously.”
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement is an influential force in Orthodox Judaism that operates around the world. The iconic 770 Eastern Parkway building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn became the world headquarters of the Hassidic movement in 1940.
The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force is leading the investigation into the car ramming.
Sohail is a resident of New Jersey and has no criminal history in New York City, Kenny said. The vehicle he allegedly used on Wednesday night was registered under his name and, earlier this month, Sohail attended an event at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“We believe that he was in Brooklyn last night to continue this attempt to connect with the Lubavitch Jewish community,” Kenny said. Sohail was due in court on Friday.
Footage from the incident showed Sohail drive his vehicle multiple times into the rear door of the 770 Eastern Parkway building in Crown Heights, according to Kenny, who added that the suspect stepped out of his vehicle, removed several blockades from his path, and cleared snow away from a sidewalk before ramming into the building.
Later, when talking to police, Sohail claimed his foot slipped and that he lost control of the car because he was wearing “clunky boots,” Kenny said. No injuries were reported and the damaged synagogue door is currently being repaired, according to Yaacov Behrman, head of public relations at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“It is clear the incident was intentional,” Behrman added. “The attacker removed the metal bollards that typically block the ramp and protect the entrance shortly before driving into the building. The bollards have since been restored.”
The car ramming took place the same day as the 75th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson being chosen as the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, said in a statement on Thursday night that the incident “underscores a painful and undeniable reality: acts of hate, intimidation, violence, and antisemitic aggression are no longer isolated incidents or abstract threats.”
“Condemnation alone is insufficient. Real deterrence requires prompt, decisive action by the justice system — through swift prosecution and meaningful consequences — to discourage further incidents and ensure public safety,” he said. “As this incident occurred while the anniversary of the beginning of the Rebbe’s leadership was being observed worldwide, we reaffirm our faith that the world is meant to be refined — not ruled by fear or force, but cultivated as a place of moral clarity, responsibility, and goodness. We remain committed to that vision, even in the face of events such as this.”
The ramming incident occurred amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City.