WINNIPEG – The most up-to-date technology is helping to spread the oldest hate worldwide.

“There is a growing normalization and acceptance of anti-Semitism in society as a result of online content,” noted Andre Oboler, the CEO of the Australian-based Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI).

Speaking to a Winnipeg Friends of Israel event Aug. 24 (he also spoke to groups at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba), the lawyer and computer science professional outlined the parameters of modern anti-Semitism and its conflation with anti-Zionism, and he provided suggestions on how to counter the growing problem.

The South African-born Oboler stopped in Winnipeg en route to a family bar mitzvah in Toronto. He had previously spoken to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was scheduled to stop in California for another speech on his way home. His lectures were sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, of which he’s a senior member.

Oboler said he founded OHPI in 2004 after he did a Google search for the term, “Zionism” and had to wade through six pages of negative references before he found one positive post – from the Jewish Agency for Israel.

“I contacted the Jewish Agency and asked who was responsible for dealing with [negative definitions of Zionism on Google],” he said. “I was told that no one was dealing with this. So I and some friends started the Online Hate Prevention Institute.” 

He began his talk with an overview of the various definitions of Zionism. “Zionism is a broad tent,” he said. “It includes religious and nationalist Zionists. It is a political liberation movement for the Jewish People, a safe haven and a homeland for Jews in the Diaspora.”

Some people – including Jews – argue that Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism, and many Jews were initially opposed to Zionism, he noted. “While it is true that prior to the founding of the State of Israel, many elements of the Jewish community were opposed to or indifferent to Zionism, today only a fringe group within the Jewish community is opposed to Israel,” he said.

Oboler cited some of the online entries on Zionism that describe it as “racist” and “Nazi-like.” He noted one online post that said Zionists worked closely with the Nazis and helped facilitate the Holocaust.

“The truth is that the Haganah did work with the German government in the 1930s to help German Jews escape to Palestine,” he said. “This was before the Holocaust, when the Nazis were still content to force Jews out of Germany as an alternative to incarceration and murder.”

He also traced the origins of modern anti-Zionism. One element, he said, is the Neturai Karta, a fringe chassidic group founded in 1935 in opposition to Zionism that publicly supports anti-Israel and anti-Semitic extremists.

There are also small groups of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers who are active online. A major difficulty in shutting down their websites, Oboler said, is that most are based in the United States, which has strong freedom of speech laws.

A major purveyor of anti-Zionism was the former Soviet Union, which left a harmful legacy, he said. Russian anti-Zionism evolved from traditional Russian anti-Semitism, but in the early 1960s, when the world began taking notice of Russian anti-Semitism and pressuring the USSR to let its Jewish citizens leave, the Soviets switched gears and began attacking Israel instead. It was the Soviets who introduced the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations in 1975 (it was ultimately repealed in 1991).

Turning to the Palestinians, Oboler said that in order to maximize world sympathy, Palestinian leaders try to downplay the horrors of the Holocaust and equate Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. The cause has found acceptance on the far left, whose online postings echo neo-Nazis on Jews and Israel, he added.

The major driver in transmitting anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic postings is social media, but for a number of reasons, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been resistant to removing hate speech, Oboler said.