Hating Jews, but supporting Israel

Musk’s short-message service keeps making headlines. Shortly before Christmas, the European Commission announced that twitter.com was being investigated. The Commission suspects that it is guilty of spreading disinformation and illegal content as well as not providing sufficient transparency. It therefore believes that the company is breaching the rules of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Only a few weeks earlier, international media had reported how the plutocratic billionaire who controls Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, used a four-letter word to insult business leaders who no longer advertise on twitter.com. At a public event in New York, he told them to “go fuck yourself”.

The background was that Media Matters for America, a non-governmental organisation, had provided evidence of corporate advertising appearing next to antisemitic and white-supremacist posts on Musk’s platform. In response, the X management filed a lawsuit against the civil-society activists, blaming them of having manipulated the algorithm in ways that made advertising appear next “to fringe content”. 

Musk denies he is an antisemite and recently paid a visit to Israel, where he was welcomed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, the billionaire’s track-record shows that he must harbour anti-Jewish feelings. 

Only shortly before the trip to Israel, he had endorsed a blatantly antisemitic tweet, according to which Jewish people have been pushing “dialectical hatred against whites”. Sam Wolfson summarised the affair in the Guardian: “The owner of the account, which had fewer than 6,000 followers, went on to say he was ‘deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations’. ‘You have said the actual truth,’ Musk said. This was not an unusual stance for Musk, who denies that he is antisemitic. He has flirted with white nationalism many times, and earlier this year he remarked that the Jewish billionaire George Soros ‘reminds me of Magneto’ (the evil X-Men villain, who, like Soros, is a Holocaust survivor).” 

Various observers have noticed that twitter.com has been becoming increasingly toxic since Musk took over and radically reduced content moderation. Right-wing hate speech has increased, making the platform increasingly less attractive for advertisers (Full disclosure: At D+C/E+Z we are assessing whether we really must be present on twitter.com). Musk, however, does not want to bear responsibility, but blames his revenue problems on others.

Before taking issue with Media Matters for America, he had declared that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish organisation that fights antisemitism in the USA, was responsible for his platform’s dwindling ad revenues. Musk stated that the ADL was “trying to kill this platform”. 

 “Accusing a Jewish group of singlehandedly plotting to tank X/Twitter’s value – a task in which Musk, thanks to his own comically bad handling of the site, needed no help – draws itself on antisemitic myths of shadowy Jewish power,” Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist, wrote in the London-based Jewish Chronicle.  

Quite obviously, Musk’s messaging encourages others to post antisemitic content as well. His online behaviour certainly does not confirm his repeated claims that he is not antisemitic. 

Though he has not renounced troubling tweets, he has nonetheless managed to win praise from some Jewish leaders by promising to prevent pro-Palestinian posts with phrases such as “from the river to the sea” or “decolonisation”. He declared them to be euphemisms for genocidal intent. Even the national director of ADL, the very organisation Musk claims wants to destroy his platform, Jonathan Greenblatt, appreciated Musk’s announcement. 

“Musk appears to have learned the lesson that ardent Zionism can function as an alibi for antisemitism,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in her New York Times column. “The move made a mockery of the ostensible free speech absolutism that was Musk’s excuse for allowing so much antisemitism on X in the first place. It did nothing to curb overt white nationalists on the site, many of whom had celebrated Musk’s ‘actual truth’ post. But it was enough to earn him plaudits from some Jewish and Israeli spokespeople.”  

Netanyahu is obviously the most prominent among those leaders, and it fits his track record of teaming up with people who have a history of antisemitism so long as they support his radical Zionism. He is not the only one, however, and Guardian author Sam Wolfson is appalled by such incoherence: “We are now reaching an illogical conclusion where organisations supposed to protect Jewish rights turn a blind eye to antipathy towards Jews as long as proponents support Israel. This does not make Jews safer. It does not even make sense.”

Correction, 27 December 2023, 12:3o pm Frankfurt time: The Musk-owned coporation SpaceX was mistenkenly called Spacelink in the original manuscript.   

Hans Demboswki is the editor-in-chief of D+C/E+Z.
euz.editor@dandc.eu