Posted on 10/15/2012 5:12:05 PM PDT by SJackson
A French nonprofit said it was considering making complaints against some Twitter users following an explosion of French-language anti-Semitic messages.
SOS Racisme, a Paris-based anti-discrimination organization, made the statement on its website after the phrase UnBonJuif on Oct. 10 became the third most popular hashtag among French Twitter users.
Literally meaning “a good Jew,” it served thousands of Twitter users to enter what the French daily Le Monde termed “a competition of anti-Semitic jokes.”
One Twitter account registered to the username “Marcel Leblanc” posted a picture of an emaciated Jewish woman taken in a Nazi concentration camp as his or her interpretation of what "a good Jew" meant. Others tweeted that “a good Jew is a dead Jew.”
Jonathan Hayoun, president of the Union of French Jewish Students, or UEJF, called on Twitter to “put in place a new system to moderate” anti-Semitic tweets. His organization expressed “grave concern” in light of how popular the hashtag has become.
On Monday, the most popular hashtag in France was LaRafle, meaning “the roundup” -- the title of a 2010 film about the Holocaust-era deportation of French Jews that was aired the previous day by TF1, a public broadcaster. Twitter defined the LaRafle hashtag as “related to UnBonJuif.” Many tweets containing the LaRafle hashtag were anti-Semitic, and some users denied the Holocaust.
Michel Zerbib, director the news department of Radio J, France’s largest Jewish radio station, told JTA that anti-Semitic tweeting matches are “a new but unsurprising development, as the virtual space releases many of the inhibitions that limit anti-Semitic speech in the public sphere.”
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Not to worry, our Paris embassy is safe. Wonder if the State Dept bought them Volts and chargers.
Well, this Jew is opposed to censorship. Period. I’d probably respond with #MohammedAtePork or something.
I’m not up on the twitter or tweet thing at all. What the heck is a ‘hashtag’?
Jews will riot, burn embassies and go on murderous rampages! 0bama will suspend the First Amendment and jail Anti Semites.
Right?
Glad that you are against censorship. I want the anti-semites to come out of the woodwork like the good Communist, Fascist and Islamic fanatics that they are.
As someone once wrote, “A little sunlight is a good disinfectant”.
With France, to paraphrase Roy Scheider (in “Jaws”), “You’re gonna need a bigger bottle of disinfectant”.
The whiff to the Third Reich hangs strongly over the Fourth Republic.
Fifth Republic
Lawsuits? Get a grip. It’s called free speech, and sometimes one group is a target, sometimes another. No anti-Semitic jokes, but let Jews be murdered in the street. Real moral.
Did you hear the one about the Frenchman who got beheaded for failing to grovel low enough to an Algerian? Afterwards, he penned the poems that made him immortal.
>> I want the anti-semites to come out of the woodwork like the good Communist, Fascist and Islamic fanatics that they are.
Exactly. Masking the symptoms of cancer is not treatment. Surgery is.
My intuitive guess is that the majority of these antisemitic Tweets are from French-speaking Arabs of Moroccan, Tunisian, or Algerian descent. They’re the usual suspects nowadays in antisemitic incidents in France. What’s your take on this?
The Muslims hate the Jews. Leftist anti-Zionism has become all but open antisemitism. And there are some deeply antisemitic elements on the right. The French taught the blood libel to the Muslims and promoted anti-Jewish attacks in British Palestine in 1919/20.
My take on this? See tagline.
I’ve also predicted we will see concentration camps in Europe again, and in my lifetime. I’m mid-50s.
The only question is who will be running them. If it’s the Islamics, it won’t just be Jews in them.
I’m not at all happy to be making this prediction. Nevertheless, I think it of high likelihood.
Yep. A few skinheads thrown in, but not many.
Actual Frenchmen, just letting off steam. They’d make jokes about Arabs, only they might riot. Arabs do not take ridicule well. So the Jews are safe targets for jokes. We like laughing at ourselves, and have thicker skin when it comes to the humor of others.
The ‘jokes’ are just the symptom. The disease is old fashioned hatred of Jews. You can’t get rid of it by counter-insults or satire or any attempt at humor.
This is the current that led to pogroms, ghettoization and the Holocaust. Many French (not to say most) and other Europeans gleefully assisted the Germans in their efforts to extirpate the Jews. It was the one thing they agreed on. That as many French Jews did survive the war is a testament to the fact that anti-Semitism wasn’t by any means universal but it was there. In spades.
twitchy.com is a good place to see twitter trends for non-twitter people. A hashtag starts a subject, so one can search on a hashtag and get all the tweets (posts) about that subject.
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