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Sadly, still endemic. |
Source: Milo Comerford and Lea Gerster, “The Rise of Anti-Semitism Online During the Pandemic,” ISD for the European Commission
While the delivery vehicles may seem whiz-bang modern, the narratives are depressingly hoary. The well-poisoning theme is ancient. But it’s now morphing into storylines that try to recast SARS-CoV-2 as a “zionist bioweapon”,by fabricating Jewish links to laboratories in China, for instance.
A contradictory meme is somehow circulating in parallel. It says that that SARS-CoV-2 either doesn’t exist at all or exists but is harmless, and is instead a figment invented by Jews and the gentiles they have corrupted, such as Bill Gates or the Clintons , in their quest to control entire populations and establish a “New World Order.”
This so-called NWO genre of antisemitism also taps into an ancient narrative, one that was most notoriously exploited by the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This entirely fictional text, produced over a century ago in Russia and translated into many languages, pretended to document how Jews were making secret plans to rule the world by manipulating the media, finance and government.
In some of antisemitism’s current strains, vaccination is the alleged tool chosen by the conspiracy, Albert Bourla, the Jewish chief executive of Pfizer, features prominently in these libels. Some posters claim that the vaccines are meant to kill or sterilize gentiles. To get around obvious logical hurdles such as Israel’s pioneering role in mass inoculation, other users fantasize that the Israeli shots are only placebos.
On and on it goes, in never-ending loops of paranoia and delusion. As it always has in Europe, and elsewhere. The researchers had to restrict themselves to just a small sample of countries and social networks. But from that, we can extrapolate how much of this garbage is out there.
The study’s authors felt compelled, as one does, to offer thoughts on regulatory or legal tweaks to mitigate the problem. And the social networks, for their part, should certainly think harder about how to drain their cesspools of bigotry while still hosting legitimate free speech. But the sad truth is that even as human technology keeps bounding ahead, human nature and culture lag woefully behind, often literally in the Middle Ages. If only there were a vaccine against stupidity and hatred.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."
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