Police handed shocking dossier of antisemitic abuse from British extremists

Chilling evidence of antisemites, Islamophobes and would-be terrorists operating nationwide was given to senior officers yesterday by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

The centre’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who delivered the Digital Terrorism and Hate Report to police, this week warned of the rising volume of UK “online chatter” in the wake of terror attacks in Pittsburgh and New Zealand.

Every year the centre publishes its “report card” assessing online hate speech and grades the performance of companies such as Facebook and Twitter in dealing with the phenomenon on their platforms.

Among British extremists identified by the Wiesenthal Centre in the report are activists such as Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, who runs a radio show called Eurofolk Radio promoting antisemitism and white nationalism; the British Renaissance Policy Institute (BRPI), founded in 2014 by Jack Sen, a parliamentary candidate for UKIP in 2015 who was suspended for tweeting comments that were deemed antisemitic; the European Knights Project (EKP), a far-right, virulently racist and antisemitic extreme nationalist organisation, also run by Jack Sen; NS131 (Anti-Capitalist Action), a group of British neo-Nazi street artists who spread their ideology through their art.

Its website contains a series of tutorials for street artists, including information on security and guides to being searched and arrested; Aryan Revolution, a Twitter account for a National Socialist Union that idolises Adolf Hitler and the Nazis; and well-known far-right activists such as Lady Renouf, who now runs the website Jewish Republic, among whose claims are that the “brand name packaging of ‘Holocaust’” has been “deployed to conjure a legitimacy” for the state of Israel.

Cooper told Jewish News: “Facebook’s main revenue stream is through adverts. They buy smaller companies and get them to run the advertising division. We discovered that neo-Nazis were using these adverts to market directly to the kind of demographics they were interested in.”

Cooper said his report had downgraded Facebook for the way in which it had been handling hate speech online. “Its response has been that it is an American company and freedom of speech is the basic component of that,” he said.

Although Facebook and Twitter had become “increasingly aggressive in identifying dangerous content, removing it from their platforms, and banning certain offenders”, Cooper charged that “in recent years they have become more permissive of dangerous ads and less pro-active in addressing hate”.

He said: “The Simon Wiesenthal Centre social media report card proves that social media giants can and must do more to degrade the capabilities of racists, antisemites and terrorists.

“The idea of online hate and terror posing a danger is not an abstraction. We’ve seen the impact of foreign terrorist groups who use the internet to spread their hate and organise”.

Cooper added: “Platforms are coming online with extreme frequency and are colonised by ‘Alt-Tech’. They encompass everything from interactive profiles and micro-blogging to chat and popular video games like Fortnite and gaming platforms like Steam, where bigots demean the memory of the Holocaust and celebrate Nazi symbols.”

Cooper, who said he deplored “a lack of political will to hold people accountable for their hatred”, added that Twitter had only “woken up” in recent years when it was point-ed out that Isis was posting 200,000 tweets a day.

See more here: https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/2019-digital-report-card.html