The return of populist anti-Semitism

[Mosby]

(April 24, 2020 / JNS) To the lexicon of new terminology introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, we can add the latest entry: “Zoombombing,” or the practice of hijacking private videoconferencing calls on the Internet by unwanted intruders.

In these long weeks of quarantining, self-isolation and social distancing, several Jewish organizational events held online have been Zoombombed by anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist activists. On March 24, for example, an online session of the National Council of Synagogue Youth in Boston was interrupted by a disheveled-looking white supremacist, Andrew Alan Escher Auernheime, who pulled off his shirt to reveal a swastika tattoo. When the Israeli embassy in Berlin held an online commemoration event to mark Yom Hashoah on April 21, neo-Nazi activists broke in during a talk by Zvi Herschel, a Holocaust survivor, bombarding participants with images of Adolf Hitler alongside anti-Semitic slogans.

The Federal Association for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) in Germany has recorded six instances of Zoombombing by anti-Semitic agitators since the pandemic broke out. “People who disrupted offline commemorative events before the coronavirus crisis are now doing it online,” said Pia Lamberty, the education officer of RIAS, in an interview with a German Jewish newspaper. Lamberty also noted that there was a striking “overlap” of imagery that glorified the Nazis and messages that vilified the State of Israel. In one videoconference, she said, a Nazi swastika was displayed alongside a flag that declared, “Free Palestine.”

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This brings me to one of the key observations contained in the annual report on global anti-Semitism published last week by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center. With the onset of coronavirus, pre-modern beliefs about Jews as carriers of disease and as poisoners of the general welfare have returned with a vengeance, and sit comfortably alongside more recent fixations with Zionism and Israel. According to the report, so far “these accusations appear to be promoted mainly by extreme rightists, ultra conservative Christian circles, Islamists, and to a minor extent by the far left, each group according to its narrative and beliefs.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-return-of-populist-anti-semitism/