KINSELLA: Haters and the hate are back in class

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Hamas U. is back.

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Across the country — across the United States and Europe — post-secondary students are returning to class. And, with them, the Israel-hating, Jew-hating lunatic fringe are returning, too.

This week, at the University of British Columbia, a blood-red banner was hoisted alongside a real pig’s head: PIGS OFF CAMPUS, said the “People’s University for Gaza.” At the University of Calgary, a monument to Israeli hostages was vandalized within hours of its creation. At Toronto’s Metropolitan University, at its clubs fair, the Jewish Hillel club was attacked by screaming anti-Israel bullies, telling Zionists (ie., Jews) to get “off our campus.” And, at Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., a professor was propagating misinformation about the war in Gaza — in a course syllabus.

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The haters and the hate are back. So, where are students — Gen Z and Millennials, mostly — getting this misinformation about Jews and the Jewish state? Why have so many embraced antisemitism? Because, make no mistake, they have: as one Canadian pollster has revealed, 35% of Canadian Gen Z “support the destruction of Israel,” and 41 per cent say “extreme violence” is “justified against innocent Jewish civilians.”

Young Canadians (and Americans, and Europeans) are getting antisemitic conspiracy theories and disinformation online. And they’re being led by Hamas and its axis into the dark side.

Cyabra is one of the world’s leading firms in fighting disinformation. They uncover fake profiles and disinformation and publicize the results. And they have now published a shocking report about the avalanche of Jew hate that has overwhelmed the internet since Oct. 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 Jews, raped Jewish women and girls, and committed an untold number of atrocities.

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Cyabra found that thousands of fake accounts started to sprout up on social media almost exactly 18 months before the terrorist attack. They were at first mostly benign, posting in Arabic or English about cricket matches or kittens. And then, in the early hours of Oct. 7, the fake accounts sprang to life.

One, called “RebelTaHa,” had just 82 followers before Oct. 7. When Hamas attacked Israel, RebelTaHa’s followers suddenly grew exponentially — just one of his antisemitic posts would be seen 170,000 times. It went viral.

RebelTaHa, Cyabra found, wasn’t real. It was fake. And, with the clever use of hashtags and interactions with 162,000 other fake accounts — and, with boosting by what Cyabra calls “non-state actors” — fake accounts like RebelTaHa reached an extraordinary 530 million social media accounts in just two days.

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What messages were the fake accounts pushing? That taking Israeli hostages would force the release of “innocent” Hamas prisoners. That Hamas didn’t commit acts of murder and rape on Oct. 7 — that, as one fake account put it: “we knows [sic] the value of human [sic] not like apartheid regime of Israel. Muslims are not terrorists we are peaceful, Quran teach us peace not terrorism.” The third message pushed by the fake accounts, Cyabra found, was justification: they falsely claimed that Israeli troops had attacked Muslim worshippers — and even a 12-year-old girl — at the holy al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

All of the fake accounts were very similar. They displayed near-identical behaviour online, and they engaged with each other like real people would do. Said Cyabra, after examining hundreds of thousands of them: “Typically, fake campaigns employ either similar online behaviour or strategic connections between profiles. However, this campaign demonstrated a higher level of sophistication by utilizing both approaches simultaneously.” In other words: someone, somewhere, had gone to considerable expense and effort to create authentic-sounding online narratives on and after Oct. 7.

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Rafi Mendelsohn, Cyabra’s brilliant vice-president, agrees that the fake social media profiles have targeted the biggest users of social media: young people. “That’s definitely what we’ve seen,” said the British-born Mendelsohn in an interview. Hamas and its axis have skillfully used images and emotional language to capture youthful support — and they have falsely claimed that Israel is a colonial, settler, white supremacist state.

Says Mendelsohn: “That colonial narrative has taken hold on university campuses. It’s part of [the anti-Israel, antisemitic] narrative — and it allows them to portray themselves as the underdog. It’s been a very successful playbook they’ve been using for years.”

And, as Mendelsohn and Cyabra say, it’s now dramatically, indisputably working online. Young people are being captivated and captured by online propaganda that is as false as it is hateful.

And we need to stop it before we lose an entire generation.

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