There has been a group on Facebook for a couple of years, called “Israel is Not a Country… …Delist it from Facebook as a Country.” If you go there, now, it looks very much like a spoof site. But that’s because it has been taken over by a group called the Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF), which has changed it’s logo, admins, and description, and closed the group to new membership. It has also managed to deleted over half of the original 48,000+ members.

Is this legal?

According to the JIDF, it is acting “with the advice of legal counsel and within the confines of the law.”

Why bother? Didn’t the Anti-Israel site have “Freedom of Speech?”

Well, keep in mind that Facebook is a private, not a government entity…so “free speech” is granted only as long as the Facebook administrators allow it to be taken. The new description of the group explains a little of why this was done:

This group was one of the most vile, antisemitic, pro-terrorist sites on the internet. Moreover, it was the most active hate group of all, heartily promoting hatred, murder, and genocide while proliferating abominable propaganda paralleled only by the fables of Goebbels. While such content clearly violates Facebook’s own Terms of Use and Code of Conduct, provisions that users agree to abide when they register on the site, Facebook refused to take action. Despite thousands of user complaints over the course of eighteen months, Facebook allowed this group and its ubiquitous antisemitic lies to flourish. Facebook’s own negligence and abdication of responsibility gave us no option but to take matters in our own hands.

We wish to be clear – we have no issues with legitimate political discourse so long as it is contextual, comparative and truthful. However, when it comes to encouraging the murder of Jews and purposefully disseminating misinformation to demonize Jews and to delegitimize Israel, there is a moral obligation to remove the platform of such repugnant hate-mongers. Unfortunately, we do not need to search too far back into history to realize that such evils have a real cost in terms of human lives.

The comments and posts of the original group are no longer available, but “vile” is truly an understatement. To get the gist of the types of conversations that took place there, you can take a look at a couple of smaller groups that are in the same mindset as the original, here and here.

Should the JIDF have done this?

There will be repercussions, that’s for sure. But if there are 48,000 people assimilating freely, some literally conspiring to kill and ahihilate an entire nation of people…what is the appropriate way for them to protect themselves?

I’ve noticed a similarity between the mindset of some in social networks online and that of road-rage. Some people get very aggressive while they are inside their vehicles, protected by somewhat of an “anonymous” identity. Most of these people, in real life, are harmless. But for the mentally unbalanced, that rage sometimes seeps outside the vehicle, and can result in injury or death to the object of their rage.

Social networks online are also vehicles which provide somewhat of a protective barrier of anonymity. However, when we see thousands of people congregating, fueling each others fury, actually making death threats online, and discussing strategies for exterminating an entire race - we need to realize that a few of those people might actually get out of the care and act on that rage. That is particularly true when that rage has actually been boiling for centuries, excalating in recent decades, long before there was anything called Web 2.0..

Also see: Jewish Internet Defense Force ’seizes control’ of anti-Israel Facebook group