Settlers Use Whatsapp to Incite Terror Attacks

After a settler was murdered last month, thousands of Judeo-terrorists used numerous WhatsApp groups to organize a terror rampage that left four Palestinians murdered, scores wounded, 30 homes burnt to the ground and 200 vehicles torched:

Records of their WhatsApp group chats, as well as testimony from Palestinian officials and families in the villages that came under attack, paint a picture of an organised campaign of revenge that was incited using WhatsApp, carried out by co-ordinated groups…

Among the genocidal incitement shared via Whatsapp, were calls to “exterminate the beast” and for “revenge against the Nazi enemy.”

The mobs were commanded by IDF soldiers in uniform and a WhatsApp group was managed by a Border Police officer working at the Allenby crossing.

One of the leaders of the pogroms was Elisha Yered, who was an accessory to the murder of a Palestinian. He was neither tried nor convicted for the crime. When the victim’s family traveled for an Israeli court hearing regarding the murder, Yered led chants threatening to burn them alive, shouting “Ali’s on the grill.” And that is precisely what he did during last month’s slaughter.

As I’ve said here before, the settlers are no aberration. They are not even part of the State. They are the State. They run the State. The state is them. Unlike Louis IV’s l’etat, c’est moi. For settlers, it is l’etat c’est nous.

The settlers are ultra Orthodox Jews. The Jewish laws of Sabbath prohibit use of social media, cell phones and certainly acts of violence, including murder. Nevertheless, the pogroms happened on Shabbat. Settler rabbis have evaded this prohibition by claiming that attacks against Palestinians somehow defend Jewish lives, thus permitting them under the halachic guise of “saving lives supercede the [laws of] Shabbat.”

This clearly defiles Jewish law and indicates how deep is the perversion of Judaism. Notably, no American rabbi has denounced this halachic claim. Nor has any called for excommunicating them. Thus permitting settlers to proclaim they are the true and only legitimate practitioners of Judaism.

Meta and genocide

Facebook and WhatsApp have a sordid history as a platform for genocide. During the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, Buddhist extremists used them to incite and coordinate attacks which led to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 indigenous Burmese Muslims:

“The UN reported that social media played a significant role in the Rohingya genocide. The UN also identified Facebook as a “useful instrument” for spreading hate speech in the country.

[Another UN report] found hate speech and incitement to genocidal violence on social media were “fueling the normalization of extreme violence” in Ethiopia. A $1.6 billion lawsuit in Kenya accused Facebook of amplifying hate speech and incitement to violence in relation to Ethiopia’s 2020–2022 Tigray War.

Clearly, Meta’s social media platforms (Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram) have failed miserably in restraining their use as instruments for genocide. They could monitor countries for civil unrest and shut down their networks to prevent abuse. They could close Whatsapp groups based in the West Bank which glorify hate and violence. They could force users to provide verification of their identity in creating such groups. This would offer greater accountability. Anonymity breeds hate.

It is shameful that Meta has permitted mass violence to flourish on its platforms. It earns hundreds of billions in profits on the bodies its victims.

Nor do the countries in which it operates demand such accountability. Instead, countries like Israel and India promoting religious supremacy, force Meta to censor content they find objectionable. In fact, the censors in both countries boast about their success in suppressing “anti-Israel” or “anti-Hindu” content. On the other hand, they ignore Islamophobic content posted by Israeli Jews or Hindus and routinely censor Palestinian content.

Countries facing such unrest could shut down the platforms themselves.  Israel’s Shin Bet, tasked with monitoring and preventing Judeo terrorism, could have ordered such a shutdown. The inaction tells us all we need to know about the State’s view of the West Bank terror rampage.

I have asked Meta for comment and will add it if it responds.