On September 18 the New York Times published an article by Ellen Barry titled How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step.
The piece explains how Russian social media accounts helped sow division among U.S. feminists around the time of the 2017’s Women’s March, a massive protest against the policies of Donald Trump that occurred the day after he was inaugurated as president. The article focuses on the Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who has long been smeared as antisemitic over her criticisms of Israel. These attacks usually come from the right, pro-Israel organizations, and liberals Zionists. The NYT acknowledges all that, but says the something changed when Russian trolls became involved:
In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders featured her at a campaign event, a stamp of approval from one of the country’s most influential progressives. That troubled pro-Israel politicians in New York, who pointed to her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to secure Palestinian rights by isolating Israel. Critics of the movement contend that it threatens Israel’s existence.
Rory Lancman, then a city councilman from Queens, recalls his growing alarm as she began to appear regularly at events for left-wing causes unrelated to Israel, like fair wages, where, he felt, “her real agenda was trying to marry an anti-Israel agenda with different progressive causes.”
The news that Ms. Sarsour was among the leaders of the Women’s March, said Mr. Lancman, a Democrat, struck him as “heartbreaking — that’s the word — that antisemitism is tolerated and rationalized in progressive spaces.”
That was politics as usual, and Ms. Sarsour was accustomed to it: the long-running feud among Democrats over the implications of criticizing Israel.
But 48 hours after the march, a shift of tone occurred online, with a surge of posts describing Ms. Sarsour as a radical jihadi who had infiltrated American feminism.
Ms. Sarsour recalls this vividly, because she woke to a worried text message from a friend and glanced at Twitter to find that she was trending. Not all of this backlash was organic. That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Ms. Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”
The NYT says that Russian accounts tweeted about Sarsour 2,642 times. This info is from Advance Democracy Inc, a group that the paper describes as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization”, but it’s a group run by a former FBI analyst that’s behind dubious efforts to connect Trump with Russia. For a detailed breakdown about the group I’d recommend Ali Abunimah op-ed on the article over at The Electronic Intifada.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that there were over 2,000 anti-Sarsour tweets from Russian trolls. In fact, let’s pretend there were 5,000. Why does the NYT treat those efforts as nefarious and dastardly while chalking up domestic attacks to “politics as usual.” As previously stated, Sarsour has been smeared by pro-Israel individuals and groups for years and the abuse has come from both sides of the aisle. The Anti-Defamation League. The Zionist Organization of America. The AJC. Pick your least favorite anti-Palestinian group, Google its name next to Sarsour’s, and you’re liable to find a collection of craven broadsides. It seems that Russian accounts were simply piling on the existing cesspool, but the call is coming from in the house.
This whole saga is presumably difficult for some liberals to process. Since 2016 Russia has readily been implemented as a handy catch-all to excuse any example of Democratic weakness. We’re supposed to believe some Russian troll accounts somehow had more impact on Trump’s win than say, oh I dunno, Hillary Clinton’s support for the war on Iraq. On the other hand, Sarsour is an easy and frequent target for very obvious reasons.
DMFI, a group specifically created to quash a slowly growing concern for Palestinian rights within the Democratic party, certainly isn’t buying the Russia stuff. The organization assembled a long Twitter thread documenting Sarsour’s various infractions, which are things like criticizing Zionism and saying Israeli society is unequal. “So you’ve read the New York Times piece — we did, too,” they wrote. “Linda Sarsour wants to blame her problems on Russia. But Russian trolls don’t excuse her bigotry.” For some reason they tagged J Street in this tweet despite agreeing with the liberal pro-Israel org on the subject of Zionism.
DMFI is run by Mark Mellman, a guy who does polling for Israel’s prime minister. In 2018 one of their board members called for Gaza to be burned to the ground and never faced any consequences for comments. Of course this stuff is all “politics as usual,” but everyone should be concerned about Putin’s Twitter army.
If there’s one positive takeaway from the NYT piece, it’s that Sarsour is portrayed as innocent while the antisemitism charges are essentially dismissed as smears. Maybe that’s an inadvertent byproduct of the Russia frame, but it’s probably progress of a kind coming from the Dems preferred paper. Keep in mind that some of the attacks on Sarsour have come directly from the Biden administration.
Social Media Companies and Antisemitism
This week the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism held a hearing. This is a coalition of lawmakers from the Europe, Israel, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand that are allegedly trying to clamp down on antisemitism across social media, but seem chiefly concerned with suppressing anti-Zionist sentiments.
The event was chaired by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) who expressed frustration with the reps from Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok that showed up. “I think we’re all starting to see — anyone watching this — why we’re eventually going to have to regulate the way that this content is handled, as opposed to just leaving it to you, the companies, to make sure you’re complying with standards that really aren’t very transparent,” she told the panel.
DWS’s big beef seemed to be the fact that only one of the representatives (Meta’s Neil Potts) seemed to acknowledge there was an operative connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. However, even his admission was nuanced. “We understand that there are occasions where the criticism of Zionists is also used to attack people based off of their ethnicity, based off of their religion. So when we hear those attacks based on being Jewish or being Israeli, those are not allowed,” he said. “We have also noticed that there are nuances to that when people call for boycotts, or criticize entities and governments, we do want to make sure that we have space for that speech.”
One of the speakers was Israeli antisemitism envoy Noa Tishby, who spent a good chunk of her remarks attacking the model Bella Hadid for making social media posts in support of Palestinian rights. There was another interesting part of her comments though, in which she revealed the true motivation behind many who push the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Tishby was asked why digital platforms have failed to adopt IHRA.
“The reason that IHRA unfortunately gets a pushback is..exactly because of Israel,” she explained. “…It’s very convenient to condemn Nazis, nobody likes to walk around and call themself an antisemite, but you kind of go ‘I’m not an antisemite, I’m just an anti-Zionist.’ That is considered okay and that is one of those things that we have to make clear: anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Period. End of story. There’s no question about that.”
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, the Knesset member who asked Tishby the question was quick to note that the definition doesn’t include all criticisms of Israel, but it’s probably worth contemplating the fact that some of its supporters apparently think it does.
Odds & Ends
? AIPAC has a tweet attacking J Street for working with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, which is kind of funny because the liberal organization rescinded its endorsement of Tlaib back in 2018 over her refusal to back the two-state solution. You know who agrees with J Street on the subject of a two-state solution? AIPAC.
? I wrote about how Israel’s recent COGAT revisions are merely cosmetic and continue to discriminate against Palestinians.
?? Electronic Intifada published a story about the Israeli attack on APA Images office last year how the website and Mondoweiss started a fundraising effort to help them rebuild.
? This has got to be one the funnier headlines I’ve seen recently. From the Washington Free Beacon: “Fetterman Says He’s a Friend of Israel. His Art Gallery Raises Questions.” The big controversy here is that Fetterman loves Israel but operates a nonprofit that once hosted an art show where a picture of the apartheid wall was shown. Amazing stuff.
?? New analysis from Forensic Architecture and Al Haq shows that Shireen Abu Akleh was “deliberately and repeatedly targeted” by an Israeli military sniper taking “precise and careful aim.” These findings were submitted to the ICC by attorneys for the family of Abu Akleh and two Palestinian journalists standing beside her that day.
?️ Strong, lengthy statement from Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy on Abu Akleh. “There is an increasing foreboding that, as in so many other cases and like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, there will never be the independent, credible investigation and accountability that Ms. Abu Akleh’s family, the Secretary of State, I, and others have called for,” he concludes. “That would further jeopardize the safety of journalists everywhere who courageously risk their lives to inform the public. An independent, credible investigation – meaning not by the IDF and not by the PA – but with their full cooperation, must be conducted and the findings made public. Whether her killing was intentional, reckless, or a tragic mistake, there must be accountability. And if it was intentional, and if no one is held accountable, then the Leahy Law must be applied.”
?? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but Democrats are rushing to smear Rep. Rashida Tlaib as an antisemite for criticizing Israel. At an online seminar organized by the group Americans for Justice in Palestine Action Tlaib told attendees that, “It has become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government and we will continue to push back and not accept this idea that you are ‘Progressive except for Palestine’.”
Tlaib has said as much her whole political career, but for some reason pro-Israel websites picked this one up and the tweets from Democratic lawmakers began pouring in. The usual suspects here…Manning. Stevens. Torres. Nadler. Wasserman Schultz (Big week for her!) Deutch. Shontel Brown etc. The standard pro-Israel orgs also chimed in. The ADL, DMFI, AIPAC. Even J Street got in on the action.
AJP Action released a statement on the situation. “We stand by the comments that Congresswoman Tlaib stated at our event, and reject the ugly and dishonest attacks she’s been subjected to,” it reads. “We also commend her political courage in speaking up for Palestinian rights, knowing full well that these smears and disingenuous attacks are an inevitable consequence of standing up for the human rights of Palestinians in our public discourse. These smears will not deter us from continuing to fight until Israeli apartheid is dismantled, and until Palestine is free.”
? Ben & Jerry’s cofounders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield went on MSNBC to talk about the company’s lawsuit against parent company Unilever. “If I care about the people in Palestine just as much as I care about the people in Israel, is that anti-Semitic?,” said Cohen. “There are mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers in Palestine that I care about. I care about their human rights.”
?️ Our friends at Defense for Children International – Palestine have launched a podcast: “Childhood Under Occupation is a limited-run podcast about child rights and international law, illustrated through the stories of children living in the occupied Palestinian territory and the work of Defense for Children International – Palestine. Through interviews with experts, field researchers, and children, the podcast offers a rare, immersive experience of the lives of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation, including those detained in the Israeli military detention system, and the work of DCIP’s lawyers, field researchers, and advocacy staff working to defend and protect their rights.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
