The Iranian Role in Stoking Anti-Semitism in the West https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2021/05/the-iranian-role-in-stoking-anti-semitism-in-the-west/

May 21, 2021 | Michael Ruiz
About the author:

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 on Fox Business: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/pro-iran-twitter-accounts-anti-semitic-hate-trending-israeli-hamas