David Friedman on Cyber Anti-Semitism

Dear Friends: In light of the tragic events at the Holocaust Museum yesterday we thought we would re-play an interview we conducted just a few weeks ago with Mr. David Friedman of the Anti-Defamation League. Suffice it so say that his remarks about the "democratization of extremism" on the Web were sadly prescient as we learn about the cyber trail of online ramblings left by this homicidal extremist.

Read the "On Faith" comment boards and you can't help but notice that there are a lot of--how else do I phrase this?--oddballs posting there. Some are just your garden-variety eccentrics with scads of free time on their hands and a love of the manifesto genre. But others traffic in the most odious anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic and homophobic provocations (all sorts of other forms of discrimination could be added to that list).

Today's VIDEO guest on Faith Complex is David Friedman, regional director of the Washington D.C. chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. He is a leader who presents his ideas with unusual clarity and precision. Mr. Friedman's group has combated anti-Semitism for nearly a century and the sad truth is that they never seem to run out of "business."

In our interview we focused on the upsurge in Judeophobia that was witnessed in the aftermath of the Madoff scandal. Much of this anti-Semitic sentiment was disseminated on the web--that Wild West of free speech.

One of the major issues to emerge from our discussion concerns how hate speech in cyberspace should be regulated (or if it is even desirable or possible to regulate it). Mr. Friedman looks to responsible web providers to manage their sites, their comment boards, what have you, and in the process draws some important distinctions.

For starters there is a difference between extremist sites devoted exclusively to promulgating hate and comment boards owned by respectable media organizations that get overrun or hijacked by bigots of one sort or another. Friedman also addresses the question of the anonymity which the web (in theory) provides; this may be the single greatest factor which enables an anti-Semitic troll to do his or her thing. One last point of real interest concerns the new relation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that the ADL has observed in some of its valuable studies.

Some of the ADL reports mentioned in our interview can be found here and here. We hope you enjoy this interview and that it motivates you to write an intelligent, reasoned, and civil note on our comment boards.

WATCH THE VIDEO