Jewish Internet Defense Force
Encyclopedia
The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) is an organization that uses social media to mobilize support for campaigns against websites and Facebook groups that promote or praise what it regards as Islamic terrorism or antisemitism. The group's website describes the JIDF as a private, independent, non-violent protest organization representing a collective of activists. The JIDF's work has been termed "hacktivism
" by some media outlets.
The group says they "specifically target hateful material or material which blatantly promotes hatred or violence, no matter where it can be found." The "About" page of the website says "We believe in direct action both to eradicate the problems we face online and to create the publicity that will cause those with companies like Facebook and Google to take the needed action themselves." The group focuses its attention on websites like Facebook
, YouTube
, Google Earth
, and Wikipedia
. The JIDF has redirected anti-Israel Facebook groups to other pages it prefers and changed the names of Muslim members of such groups to "Mossad collaborator," among other actions. A website spokesman told Haaretz that they don't break any laws and that the JIDF "prefers the terms 'seize control,' 'take over' or 'infiltrate' to 'hack.'"
Delist it from Facebook as a country". Matt Hicks of Facebook responded by saying: "As long as the groups meet our terms of use, they can stay up. But we encourage users to report anything that is racist or objectionable. The JIDF claimed the "Israel is not a Country" group was antisemitic and mobilized supporters to complain to Facebook in an effort to have it deleted. After Facebook refused to shut the group down, the JIDF said it somehow took control of the group in July 2008. , two groups with the same names were active on Facebook.
According to a November 2008 article in Haaretz
, the JIDF forwarded lists of Facebook groups that it deemed promoted hatred or violence to the website's administrators, hoping they would be removed. According to a man named "David" quoted in the Haaretz article, Facebook either did nothing or waited months before taking action. "David" told Haaretz that his group then decided to try to technically "intercept Facebook groups and make them impossible to access." The JIDF was particularly upset about Facebook groups praising the shooting of students at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva
in March 2008.
In July 2009, the JIDF and Avi Dichter
took credit for successfully pressuring Facebook into removing a fan page for Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah
. The JIDF said it mobilized supporters to complain about the page to Facebook's owners. The JIDF website claims that it deleted the vast majority of a pro-Hezbollah fan page's 118,000 members. The JIDF sites says it has removed more than 100 antisemitic groups from Facebook. The JIDF said in September 2009 that it took over the Facebook group "Eliminate Israel from Being" and deleted more than 5,000 members before Facebook management "returned control of the site to its administrators."
The JIDF has criticized Facebook for allegedly condoning and hosting Holocaust denial
groups on its network. The group has charged that it's hypocritical of Facebook to remove groups that support the KKK, for instance, while not removing what it considers Holocaust denial sites and has vowed to keep putting pressure on Facebook over the matter.
and has campaigned against the description of "Palestine" as a country.
The JIDF organized a pro-Gilad Shalit
campaign in 2009 on the social networking site Twitter
. During the Tweet4Shalit campaign Twitter users drove the Gilad Shalit name to the second highest trend on the day of his 23rd birthday. Tweets for Shalit ranged from the demand to "Free Shalit" to requests for international supervision of the case.
The JIDF was recognized by the JTA
as one of the "100 Most Influential Jewish Twitterers" and was ranked as the top-ranked Jewish Newswire.
(FAZ) wrote that "the JIDF follows an open political agenda as well. Many of its members protested the clearing of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip in 2005 – they regard this policy of trading Land for Peace as wrong." The newspaper wrote that that "Ultimately the JIDF also wants to propagate ‘Jewish values on the Internet’. This leads to the self-appointed warriors against online-hatred to link their own homepage to a dubious site named ‘thereligionofpeace.com’. The JIDF website itself says "Mohammed was a genocidal pedophile who murdered people who didn't think like he did, or believe the things he believed. Millions of Muslims promote the idea that if we "insult" him (despite the fact that he's dead), that we should be killed." The website says that Mohammad was a "false prophet" and that the "Islamic ideology itself is clearly one of hatred and violence, which is declaring war against the entire non-Islamic world... it is determined to dominate the world, just as Nazism was." The website came out against plans to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero
in New York, and said this was the reason why. "Because Islam is a hateful and violent ideology which preaches hate and violence against ALL non-Muslims (especially Jews, as it is obsessed with us, and dehumanizes us as apes and pigs), we are against ALL mosques. We are against Islam, just as we are against Nazism
. Just as we don't wish to see Nazi institutions springing up everywhere, we don't need to see Islamic one's springing up everywhere, either."
In May 2009, CNN
wrote that the JIDF is "sometimes guilty of sweeping generalizations of its own", citing an 2008 interview published on Facebook critic Brian Cuban's site in which a JIDF representative discussed "the issues surrounding [then-candidate Barack Obama
's] terrorist connections as well as his racist and anti-Semitic church, which has supported Hamas
and the Rev. Louis Farrakhan
", and the reply when asked how the Jewish and Muslim communities saw the JIDF, that "99.9% of Muslims hate us".
CNN quoted a JIDF spokesperson as saying he would rather people not focus on those specific quotations as the interview had been "informal" and Cuban "would not let us correct any of our statements after we quickly answered him to help him meet his deadline."
Asked in the Cuban interview "What is the position of the JIDF on the “Palestinian Question” regarding disputes over occupied lands" the spokesman replied: "Palestinians should be transferred out of Israeli territories. They can live in any of the other many Arab states. We are against all land concessions to our enemies. We are against the release of terrorist prisoners from Israeli prisons. We are against the arming and funding of our enemies and the negotiation with them. We are for morals, ethics and common sense and feel Israel must truly act as a “light unto the nations” in order for the world to be safe as we feel Israel is truly on the front lines in the war in which Islam has declared upon us."
Hacktivism
Hacktivism is the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends. The term was first coined in 1994 by a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective named Omega...
" by some media outlets.
Organization and methods
According to the JIDF, the organization "formed as a grassroots effort in 2000, to mount mass e-mail campaigns, in response to the outbreak of the Second Intifada." The website is run by a person who identifies himself as "David Appletree." According to a reporter from The Jewish Week in 2009 he "will not say if that is his true surname". In the same article Appletree accused Facebook administrators of antisemitism for closing down his account. A Facebook spokesperson replied that the account was terminated because the website did not believe he was using his real name, which is a breach of Facebook's "real name culture". Appletree went on to say that he maintains approximately 40 Facebook groups focused on combating terrorism and antisemitism.The group says they "specifically target hateful material or material which blatantly promotes hatred or violence, no matter where it can be found." The "About" page of the website says "We believe in direct action both to eradicate the problems we face online and to create the publicity that will cause those with companies like Facebook and Google to take the needed action themselves." The group focuses its attention on websites like Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Google Earth
Google Earth
Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographical information program that was originally called EarthViewer 3D, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency funded company acquired by Google in 2004 . It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite...
, and Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
. The JIDF has redirected anti-Israel Facebook groups to other pages it prefers and changed the names of Muslim members of such groups to "Mossad collaborator," among other actions. A website spokesman told Haaretz that they don't break any laws and that the JIDF "prefers the terms 'seize control,' 'take over' or 'infiltrate' to 'hack.'"
On Facebook
During 2007, a controversy on Facebook was reported involving "the drop-down list of places members can use to show where they live." A Facebook group, "Palestine Is not a country ... Delist it from Facebook as a country!", had been formed in 2007 which petitioned Facebook management to remove Palestine from Facebook's list of countries. Several Facebook groups formed to support or oppose this removal including "Israel is not a country!Delist it from Facebook as a country". Matt Hicks of Facebook responded by saying: "As long as the groups meet our terms of use, they can stay up. But we encourage users to report anything that is racist or objectionable. The JIDF claimed the "Israel is not a Country" group was antisemitic and mobilized supporters to complain to Facebook in an effort to have it deleted. After Facebook refused to shut the group down, the JIDF said it somehow took control of the group in July 2008. , two groups with the same names were active on Facebook.
According to a November 2008 article in Haaretz
Haaretz
Haaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
, the JIDF forwarded lists of Facebook groups that it deemed promoted hatred or violence to the website's administrators, hoping they would be removed. According to a man named "David" quoted in the Haaretz article, Facebook either did nothing or waited months before taking action. "David" told Haaretz that his group then decided to try to technically "intercept Facebook groups and make them impossible to access." The JIDF was particularly upset about Facebook groups praising the shooting of students at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva
Mercaz HaRav massacre
The Mercaz HaRav massacre, also called the Mercaz HaRav shooting, was an attack that occurred on 6 March 2008, in which a lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, after which the gunman himself was shot dead. Eight students...
in March 2008.
In July 2009, the JIDF and Avi Dichter
Avi Dichter
Avi Dichter is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Kadima. He is a former Minister of Internal Security and Shin Bet director.-Biography:...
took credit for successfully pressuring Facebook into removing a fan page for Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah
Hassan Nasrallah
Hasan Nasrallah, became the third Secretary General of the Lebanese political and paramilitary organization Hezbollah after Israel assassinated the previous leader, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992. Hezbollah in its entirety is considered a terrorist organization by The United States, the Netherlands,...
. The JIDF said it mobilized supporters to complain about the page to Facebook's owners. The JIDF website claims that it deleted the vast majority of a pro-Hezbollah fan page's 118,000 members. The JIDF sites says it has removed more than 100 antisemitic groups from Facebook. The JIDF said in September 2009 that it took over the Facebook group "Eliminate Israel from Being" and deleted more than 5,000 members before Facebook management "returned control of the site to its administrators."
The JIDF has criticized Facebook for allegedly condoning and hosting Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
groups on its network. The group has charged that it's hypocritical of Facebook to remove groups that support the KKK, for instance, while not removing what it considers Holocaust denial sites and has vowed to keep putting pressure on Facebook over the matter.
Elsewhere on the Web
JIDF's measures "include reporting Wikipedia editors it claims are anti-Israel, and taking action against entries seen as including one-sided or false accounts of the history of Israel and the Mideast conflict," Haaretz wrote. The group has sought to have Palestinian villages listed as having been destroyed during the foundation of Israel removed from Google EarthGoogle Earth
Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographical information program that was originally called EarthViewer 3D, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency funded company acquired by Google in 2004 . It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite...
and has campaigned against the description of "Palestine" as a country.
The JIDF organized a pro-Gilad Shalit
Gilad Shalit
Gilad Shalit is an Israeli – French citizen and Israel Defense Forces soldier. On 25 June 2006, he was captured inside Israel by Hamas militants in a cross-border raid via underground tunnels near the border with Gaza. The Hamas militants held him for over five years, until he was released on...
campaign in 2009 on the social networking site Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
. During the Tweet4Shalit campaign Twitter users drove the Gilad Shalit name to the second highest trend on the day of his 23rd birthday. Tweets for Shalit ranged from the demand to "Free Shalit" to requests for international supervision of the case.
The JIDF was recognized by the JTA
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world. The JTA was founded on February 6, 1917, by Jacob Landau as the Jewish Correspondence Bureau in The Hague with the mandate of collecting and disseminating news among and...
as one of the "100 Most Influential Jewish Twitterers" and was ranked as the top-ranked Jewish Newswire.
Views
In October 2008, the German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...
(FAZ) wrote that "the JIDF follows an open political agenda as well. Many of its members protested the clearing of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip in 2005 – they regard this policy of trading Land for Peace as wrong." The newspaper wrote that that "Ultimately the JIDF also wants to propagate ‘Jewish values on the Internet’. This leads to the self-appointed warriors against online-hatred to link their own homepage to a dubious site named ‘thereligionofpeace.com’. The JIDF website itself says "Mohammed was a genocidal pedophile who murdered people who didn't think like he did, or believe the things he believed. Millions of Muslims promote the idea that if we "insult" him (despite the fact that he's dead), that we should be killed." The website says that Mohammad was a "false prophet" and that the "Islamic ideology itself is clearly one of hatred and violence, which is declaring war against the entire non-Islamic world... it is determined to dominate the world, just as Nazism was." The website came out against plans to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero
Ground zero
The term ground zero describes the point on the Earth's surface closest to a detonation...
in New York, and said this was the reason why. "Because Islam is a hateful and violent ideology which preaches hate and violence against ALL non-Muslims (especially Jews, as it is obsessed with us, and dehumanizes us as apes and pigs), we are against ALL mosques. We are against Islam, just as we are against Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. Just as we don't wish to see Nazi institutions springing up everywhere, we don't need to see Islamic one's springing up everywhere, either."
In May 2009, CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
wrote that the JIDF is "sometimes guilty of sweeping generalizations of its own", citing an 2008 interview published on Facebook critic Brian Cuban's site in which a JIDF representative discussed "the issues surrounding [then-candidate Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
's] terrorist connections as well as his racist and anti-Semitic church, which has supported Hamas
Hamas
Hamas is the Palestinian Sunni Islamic or Islamist political party that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas also has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades...
and the Rev. Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan
Louis Farrakhan Muhammad, Sr. is the leader of the African-American religious movement the Nation of Islam . He served as the minister of major mosques in Boston and Harlem, and was appointed by the longtime NOI leader, Elijah Muhammad, before his death in 1975, as the National Representative of...
", and the reply when asked how the Jewish and Muslim communities saw the JIDF, that "99.9% of Muslims hate us".
CNN quoted a JIDF spokesperson as saying he would rather people not focus on those specific quotations as the interview had been "informal" and Cuban "would not let us correct any of our statements after we quickly answered him to help him meet his deadline."
Asked in the Cuban interview "What is the position of the JIDF on the “Palestinian Question” regarding disputes over occupied lands" the spokesman replied: "Palestinians should be transferred out of Israeli territories. They can live in any of the other many Arab states. We are against all land concessions to our enemies. We are against the release of terrorist prisoners from Israeli prisons. We are against the arming and funding of our enemies and the negotiation with them. We are for morals, ethics and common sense and feel Israel must truly act as a “light unto the nations” in order for the world to be safe as we feel Israel is truly on the front lines in the war in which Islam has declared upon us."
See also
- Internet activismInternet activismInternet activism is the use of electronic communication technologies such as e-mail, the World Wide Web, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster communications by citizen movements and the delivery of local information to a large audience...
- Internet HaganahInternet HaganahInternet Haganah is a "global intelligence network dedicated to confronting Internet activities by Islamists and their supporters, enablers and apologists." It is composed of U.S...
- HonestReportingHonestReportingHonestReporting is a non-governmental organization that monitors the media for what it perceives as bias against Israel. The organization has affiliates in the United States, UK, Canada, Italy, and Brazil...
- Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in AmericaCommittee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in AmericaThe Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...