Last updated March 13th 2016
Secret Tel Aviv has been quoted twice in US Jewish newspaper Algemeiner this week… which in itself is pretty cool. Even more cool is that by carrying our post, Algemeiner helped have a Jewish hate-page removed from Facebook.
25th July 2014:
A violent mob of more than a dozen men in France assaulted a Jew at his home in a Paris suburb after confirming that his photograph had been published by a French Facebook page identifying Jews to be targeted for physical intimidation, The Union of Jewish Students of France, the UEJF, said in a statement on Friday.
The Facebook page, ‘Jeunes Révolutionnaires Français’, JRF, or ‘Young French Revolutionaries’, posted the names and photos of 32 Jews. The assault on one of those listed took place on Thursday night in Bobigny, Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. The assailants were armed with iron bars.
On the ‘Secret Tel Aviv’ Facebook page, Daniel Cohen called the group anti-Semitic, and exhorted Facebook users to report the JRF page to site administrators for removal.
On Facebook, Cohen wrote, “An anti-Semitic page is publishing names and pictures of French Jews in order to target them physically! A few have already been attacked at their homes, one last night by 15 people on one Jewish guy. We need to remove this page!”
The JRF captioned its page with the photos of the Jews to be targeted, “Smile, you’re caught! JRF watches! # AntiLDJ,” referring to the LDJ, the French initials of the Jewish Defense League, an organization created to teach Jews how to defend themselves from anti-Semitic attacks. The title page of the group’s Facebook presence features a large Palestinian flag and calls for members to attend a rally on Saturday in connection with the international Al Quds Day protests around the world where police are preparing for violence against Jews.
The UEJF condemned the page and provided testimony from the assaulted Jew in Bobigny, according to France’s Le Monde Juif, or The Jewish World on Friday. The UEJF said three men went to the victim’s house and asked him, “Are you the guy in the photo on Facebook?”. They then said they were there to “break the Jew” and do to him “the same as Ilan Halimi,” a 23-year-old who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by a gang led by Youssouf Fofana, described by The Jewish Chronicle as, “the extraordinarily cruel, Paris-born fifth of seven children of immigrants from the Ivory Coast.”. Halimi was found naked, handcuffed and bound to a tree near a railway station in February, 2006, and his body had been mutilated. Still alive, he died on the way to hospital. Halimi’s murder was made into a movie by French Jewish film director Alexandre Arcady entitled, 24 jours: la vérité sur l’affaire Ilan Halimi, or “24 Days: The Truth About the Ilan Hamili Affair,” inspired by a book with a similar title written by the victim’s mother, Ruth.
In Bobigny, after they confirmed him to be the Jew in the photo, the three men were joined by 15 more, armed with iron bars, who assaulted the victim, the UEJF said. When another resident in the building appeared, the men fled the scene.
The UEJF said: “For several days, many Facebook pages have been created to encourage physical violence against young Jews. Photos were published, with the identities, phone numbers, and contact information. This young man was directly affected by such a Facebook page. It is unacceptable that the Jews are the target of Facebook calls to murder.” The UEJF said it will file a complaint against the administrators of the Facebook page for incitement to racial hatred and incitement to violence.
In the French media, the LDJ has been blamed for calling for a strong reaction by Jews threatened with violence over the past two weeks since Israel began its Operation Protective Edge to stop Hamas’s rocket fire from Gaza. But Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF, the umbrella organization representing the Jewish community in France, told The Daily Beast on Friday that was not instigating further violence, and those accusations were beside the point. “I am shocked when I hear journalists saying if the De La Roquette synagogue was attacked, it is because of the Jews,” Cukierman told The Daily Beast. “This is propaganda.”. “We had eight synagogues being attacked,” he said. “I am worried about the fact that synagogues are being attacked and not worried about these self-defense groups.”
UPDATE: Facebook has removed the Jeunes Révolutionnaires Français page, which was no longer hosted on the social media platform, as of late Friday evening.
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23rd July 2014
Dutch IDF Volunteer Livid After Al Jazeera Columnist Uses Her Photo, Calls Her a Jihadist
A young Dutch woman on Wednesday appealed for help on Facebook to counter slurs against her by a columnist for Al Jazeera, who used her photo without permission and called the blonde Israeli Navy recruit a jihadist.
Before describing “Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera columnist Hanine Hassan, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, the former home of the late unofficial spokesman Palestinian Professor Edward Said, chose to single out and humiliate Katie by featuring her by name, linking to her photo on Instagram and making her an object of scorn, in a long screed vilifying IDF soldiers and the thousands of foreign volunteers who served honorably for the Israeli Defense Forces.
“Her name is Katie. She is from the Netherlands, and chose to serve in the Israeli navy instead of remaining in her country.”
“Will her government label her and the rest of the hundreds of Dutch youth serving in the Israeli military as jihadstrijders (jihad fighters), the name given to the hundred or so that went to Syria? Katie, a Dutch-Israeli dual citizen, is after all a jihadist in occupied Palestinian lands.”
The Algemeiner removed Katie’s full name from a screenshot of her post on the ‘Secret Tel Aviv’ page on Facebook, where it’s since been deleted, as she sought desperately to find out how she could remove herself from Al Jazeera’s sights.
In the post, Katie said, “I’m in the Netherlands right now but I need your help urgently! Again there has been a false post about me being a jihadist with a link to my picture.”
She asked, “Does anyone know how I could do something about it, maybe sue them to take it down?”
On Al Jazeera, Hassan went on to indict U.S. GI’s after World War II who volunteered to serve in Israel’s War of Independence, when the Arab League refused the “two states for two peoples” concept introduced by the United Nations, and declared war on the nascent state. Hassan wrote, “In the 1948 war, as many as 4,000 World War II veterans from the US, Canada and Europe carried out military operations against Palestinians, serving the Zionist project with their expertise in warfare, artillery, naval and aerial combat… The late Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, later attributed the successful outcome of the war to the support of foreign fighters: ‘They came to us when we most needed them, during those hard and uncertain days of our 1948 war of independence. In supporting and developing Israel’s military power, these western recruits deliberately contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns, the dispossession and depopulation of Palestinian communities, and the massacres inflicted on them.”
She said, ”Israel is applying outright treachery in its recruitment of young Jews worldwide, through tens of programmes… There are many faces to the Israeli occupation, some of which are well-known, and some of which are hidden. The indirect reinforcement of the Israeli army with European and American soldiers is one such opaque form of complicity.”
But it was Hassan’s post on Al Jazeera, which Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has proposed be banned for its incitement against Jews and hate speech against Israel, that showed the scholar’s own “opaque form of complicity.” By targeting Dutch IDF volunteer Katie, and using her image without permission, Hassan contradicted her own doctoral thesis through moral equivalency, doing to Katie online exactly what she accuses Israel of doing in Gaza.
After Hassan’s byline, Al Jazeera said: “Her research focuses on the long-term effects of humiliation as a tool of oppression by Israel in the occupied Palestinian Territories.”