The Iranian Role in Stoking Anti-Semitism in the West

As was the case in 2014, Hamas’s decision to fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians has inspired both verbal and physical attacks on Jews across the world, including on the streets of Manhattan and at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Accompanying, and likely inciting, these anti-Semitic outbursts has been a great deal of vicious rhetoric on social media. Researchers who study the spread of such rhetoric have traced much of it to Iran—which also supplies Hamas with weapons and funds. Michael Ruiz reports:

A group of pro-Iran Twitter accounts flooded the platform with “massive surges of unmitigated anti-Semitism” and disinformation, . . . according to a nonprofit, politically neutral research institution. The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, has unveiled its findings, showing a coordinated effort to push hateful content that called for “Death to Israel” and claimed, “Hitler was right.”

The activity had rapidly spiked around midday [on May 12], according to data collected by NCRI, with the most active accounts tweeting and retweeting the anti-Semitic hashtags up to 150 times per hour. The researchers said that while the coordinated accounts all self-identified is Iranian or Persian, it was not immediately clear whether another group or government was behind the effort.

What was clear was that the coordinated inauthentic activity was specifically designed to spread anti-Semitic hate speech and exacerbate violence against Israelis and other Jews around the world. The accounts also pushed the phrase “Kill all Jews” and included images reminiscent of Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as “rats and vermin.”

Read more at Fox Business

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Iran, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, New York City, Social media

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society