Editors Note
As the examples below show, misinformation has been with us for a long time. The introduction of the internet has shown the ease and effect of spreading it globally virtually instantaneously. This in its turn has given rise to the introduction of new terms such as ‘Fake News’ (fake news: false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared online for the purpose of generating ad revenue via web traffic or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc)
The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke:’
An early example was
the blood libel
which is an old antisemitic trope that claims that Jews use the blood of Christian (or, sometimes, Muslim) children to make their Passover matzo. While generally discarded in modern times in favor of "Jews rule the world" conspiracy theories, the blood libel is still propagated in some Islamic countries and is occasionally still believed even by Western anti-Semites. The consequence of the blood libel myth could be in fact bloody for Jewish populations, as they could result in a pogrom.
A second example example is
‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax, which was shown to be plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature, was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles,
and by controlling the press and the world's economies.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s. The Nazis sometimes used the Protocols as propaganda against Jews; it was assigned by some German teachers, as if factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print
and on the Internepresented by some as a genuine document.
A third example is the
Denial That the Jewish Holocaust Happened
The Nazi regime attempted to establish a system of rule based upon race. The National Socialists (Nazis) saw themselves as a revolutionary movement and their goal as a radical reshaping of existing society The Jews were the chief enemy to be eliminated. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of six million Jews only brought to an end with their defeat
by the Allies at the end of Second World War in May 1945.
Today a group known as the Deniers has tried to prove that either it never happened or wasn’t as bad as it has gone down in history. They became famous in a libel court case from which Denial was made.
The Future
The past two thousand years have seen the spread of antisemitism agains Jews as a result of misdirected verbal/written communication.
The internet and new technology have brought speed and ease of new communication, the repeat of old communication and the generation of
new visual communication that may be false.
ANTI-JUDAISM BEFORE THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Facing History and Ourselves
(Go to site for a wider period)
(Note: the term Antisemitism was introduced in Germany
by Wilhelm Marr at the end of the nineteenth century.
There was no generally accepted equivalent before this.)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, American and French Jews felt vulnerable as their countrie
s debated their loyalty (see reading, Religion, Loyalty, and Belonging). In the mid-1800s, Germans argued over whether or not Jews could belong in the German nation (see reading, Creating the German Nation). All of these debates were influenced by hundreds of years of prejudice, hatred, and violence toward Jews.
Woodcut of a group of men
in a pit being set on fire. 
In much of Europe during the Middle Ages, Christians blamed Jews for the plague. In many towns, officials arrested Jews, confiscated their property, and burned them at the stake.
Judaism, a religious faith that has existed for more than 3,000 years, is the oldest monotheistic religion. Throughout much of the faith’s history, Jews lived in territories ruled by other groups. They were often treated as “the Other” and made scapegoats for calamities and misfortunes suffered by societies in which they lived. Continuous rumors, lies, myths, and misinformation about Jews have existed throughout history, and many of them persist in the contemporary world. Often this hatred has led to violence.
Historians have traced anti-Jewish myths, hatred, and violence back more than 2,000 years to the time of the Roman Empire. Tensions with the Romans led Jews in Palestine to revolt in 66 CE. The Romans responded violently. Historian Doris Bergen explains:
Roman authorities worried that Jewish refusal to worship local and imperial gods would jeopardize the security of the state. At times such unease, coupled with political conflicts, turned into open persecution and attacks. In 70 C.E. the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish life up to that time; sixty years later they dispersed the Jews of Palestine, scattering them far from the region that had been their home.
During this same period, a new faith was born out of Judaism and began to spread across the Roman Empire. Bergen continues:
The rise of Christianity added new fuel to anti-Jewish sentiments. Christianity grew out of Judaism—Jesus himself was a Jew, as were the apostles and important figures such as Paul of Tarsus. Nevertheless, early Christians tried to separate themselves from other Jews, both to win followers from the gentile (non-Jewish) world and to gain favor with Roman imperial authorities. Some early Christians also stressed their loyalty to the state by pointing out that the Kingdom of God was not of this earth and therefore did not compete with Rome. Such efforts paid off; in less than four hundred years, Christianity went from being a persecuted branch of Judaism to being the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. It is significant that some early Christian accounts blamed Jews for Jesus’ death even though crucifixion was a specifically Roman form of punishment commonly practiced during Jesus’ time. The version of events that had Jewish mobs demanding Jesus’ death while the Roman governor Pontius Pilate washed his hands allowed later Christians to emphasize their difference from Judaism and downplay the hostility that Roman authorities had shown toward Christianity in its early stages. All of the false accusations against Jews associated with the Roman imperial period—that Jews were traitors and conspirators, that they killed Christ—remained familiar in Europe into the twentieth century.
In many ways the Middle Ages—from around the ninth to the sixteenth centuries—were difficult times for Jews in Europe. Often crusades against Muslims and Christian heretics started off or ended up with violent attacks on Jews. Such attacks, known as pogroms, were also common responses to outbreaks of plague or other disasters. For example, in many parts of Europe, the Black Death of 1348 sparked brutal pogroms, as Christians blamed Jews for somehow causing the epidemic of bubonic plague. Mobilized by such accusations, Christian mobs—sometimes spontaneously, sometimes urged on by state and church leaders—attacked Jewish homes and communities, plundering, destroying, and killing. The scale of the pogroms varied wildly, from brief local incidents to weeklong massacres that swept through entire regions. In their wake they left among Christians a habit of using Jews as scapegoats, and among Jews, a sense of vulnerability and a repertoire of defenses, such as paying protection money, sticking together, and kea low profile.
In addition to sporadic waves of violence, Jews faced harassment and restrictions of various kinds from governments across Europe. In some cases, regulations forced Jews to live in certain areas or ghettos; sometimes Jews were required to wear identifying badges; elsewhere, state authorities drove Jews out of their territories altogether. In 1492, for example, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain expelled all Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula except those who agreed to convert to Christianity. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews everywhere in Europe faced limitations on the occupations in which they could engage as well as the kinds of property and titles they could hold.
Some church leaders and secular rulers tried to convince or coerce Jews to abandon their religion and convert to Christianity. But even conversion did not necessarily solve the problems of intolerance. Converts from Judaism to Christianity in sixteenth-century Spain found that they were still viewed with deep suspicion and regarded as somehow tainted by supposed “Jewish blood.” . . .
The Protestant Reformation did not improve the lot of European Jews. At first its leader, the German monk Martin Luther, hoped that his break with what he considered the corrupted church of Rome would inspire mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. When the anticipated wave of baptisms did not occur, Luther turned against the Jews, whom he derided as stubborn and hard necked. In 1542 he wrote a pamphlet called Against the Jews and their Lies. That tract, with its vicious characterization of Jews as parasites and its calls to “set their synagogues and schools on fire,” would later be widely quoted in Hitler’s Germany. Other medieval images—the association of Jews with the devil; charges that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes—also survived into the modern era . . .
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PAPAL SUPREMACY
(from Catholicism)
(Editor’s Note
Catholicism had control of western Christianity from its foundation.
In 1517 the German monk Martin Luther pinned his 95 Theses to the door of his Catholic church, denouncing the Catholic sale of indulgences
— pardons for sins — and questioning papal authority. This led to his excommunication
and the start of the Protestant Reformation and a split church.
The Papal States where were the Catholic Pope held direct “temporal” authority in central Italy. They began in the middle of the eighth century, and ended with the unification of Italy in 1870. Today the Pope has authority
only over the Vaitcan City which is part of Rome.)
During the early history of Christianity, Rome became an increasingly important center of the faith, which gave the bishop of Rome (the Pope) more power over the entire church, thereby ushering in the era of papal supremacy.
When Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380, the power of the Pope increased, although he was still subordinate to the Emperor.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Pope served as a source of authority and continuity; however, for several centuries afterward the Eastern Roman Emperor still maintained authority over the church.
From the late-6th to the late-8th century there was a turning of the papacy to the West and an escape from subordination to the authority of the Byzantine Emperors of Constantinople.
When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor in 800, he established the precedent that, in Western Europe, no man would be Emperor without being crowned by a Pope.
After a conflict known as the Investiture Controversy, as well as from the launching of the Crusades, the papacy increased its power in relation to the secular rulers of Europe.
Throughout the Middle Ages, popes struggled with monarchs over power.
PARTIAL LIST OF PAPAL BULLS AND
OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS ON THE JEWISH QUESTION
(go to the Evolution of Antisemitism)
(Editor’s Note
A papal bull is a type of public decree, letters patent, or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church.
It is named after the leaden seal (bulla)
that was traditionally appended to the end in order to authenticate it.
FAKE NEWS AND ANTISEMITISM
ARE ANCIENT BEDFELLOWS
The overlap between disinformation and Jew-hate can be traced from the Roman era to today's social media, writes Charlotte Henry in this edited extract of her new book.‘Not Buying It’
This is an edited extract from
Jewish Chronicle, Charlotte Henry, July 10, 2019
In the course of writing my first book, Not Buying It — The Facts Behind Fake News, the overlap between what I was writing about — predominantly fake news and disinformation in the modern world — and much antisemitism struck me. Indeed the oldest hatred, turned out to be one of the oldest forms of fake news as well, dating back to Martin Luther in 1545, if not earlier.
Whether it is the classic antisemitic tropes of the all-powerful, plotting, money-grabbing Jew or the modern phenomenon of antisemitic anti-Zionism and conspiracies about Mossad, fake news and post-truth thinking sits at the heart of it all.
Social media has, of course, had a huge effect on all of this. No longer are crank antisemites confined to strange meetings and newsletters.
Their bile and hatred can be spread all too easily now. Far-right fascists congregate on websites like 4Chan while hate spreads on mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook. There, prominent Jewish figures like Luciana Berger MP and others are subjected to torrents of abuse because of their religion.
Fighting back is hard and will take some time — but fight back we must. Whether it is through teaching children media literacy in schools, putting pressure on the social media companies to take action against hatred or by simply presenting the facts, now is not the time to sit back.
The eminent historian Deborah Lipstadt has long been on the front line of this fight. She recalled the incredulity with which her refusal to appear on television with a Holocaust denier was met by the producer trying to book her. “She found it hard to believe that I was turning down the opportunity to appear on her nationally televised show,” wrote Prof Lipstadt at the start of her book Denying the Holocaust.
Professor Lipstadt explained that far from this being a one-off, she has had many such requests. She wrote that her refusal “is inevitably met by producers with some variation of the following challenge: Shouldn’t we hear their ideas, opinion or point of view?” Her contention, rightly, is that there is no point of view on the Holocaust — simply fact and (antisemitic) fiction.
It should not require repeating but we know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, alongside millions of homosexuals, Roma and communists. We know that gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps were one of the key ways this horror was enacted. These are not points of view to be contested. Claiming otherwise is not only antisemitic and vile but simply untrue.
However, in 2000 Prof Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, were sued for libel by the Shoah-denying historian David Irving after she branded him an antisemite. Irving lost in a landmark court case.
Famously, the truth prevailed on this occasion and Prof Lipstadt won.
The academic David Hirsh, a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths University in London, who has written extensively about left-wing antisemitism, said in an interview that “Irving was busy trying to portray himself as the victim of the Jews and the victim of the publishers and the victim of Lipstadt and [Anthony] Julius, the big Jewish lawyer.” He was invoking antisemitic memes even as he tried to use the courts to free himself from the label of Holocaust denier. He represented himself in court and tried to distort the situation and portray himself as the victim, even though he had brought the case.
Prof Lipstadt may have won on this occasion but victory for the truth is far from guaranteed.
Antisemitic propaganda is not new. Hatred of Jews based on conspiracy and falsehood goes back centuries, to when the Romans sought to establish Christianity as the sole religion, replacing Judaism. In the 14th century, as the bubonic plague ran riot, the public blamed the Jews for its spread based on the falsehoods that many already believed.
Later, in 1545, Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, published a treatise called On the Jews and Their Lies, which included the claim that Jews thirsted for Christian blood and should be killed. Martin Luther told Christians to “guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy and defaming of God and men are practised most maliciously”. He went on to say that Jews “are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury”. Such lies and tropes exist to this day.
The Nazis deployed ever more poisonous propaganda during the 1930s, including reprinting the Martin Luther document,to create a backlash against Jews. Professor David Welch explained for the BBC that “the Jewish stereotypes shown in such propaganda served to reinforce anxieties about modern developments in political and economic life, without bothering to question the reality of the Jewish role in German society”.
Maintaining that there will be £350 million more a week to spend on the NHS if Britain leaves the EU or that Hillary Clinton is seriously ill clearly pales into insignificance when compared to propaganda that led to the genocide of six million members of a particular religion. However, at its root, there is the same contempt for the truth, the same malice aimed at the “other”.
It should be no surprise, then, that time and time again, classic antisemitic imagery reappears in modern fake news.
David Hirsh explains that “people on the left have been doing it for ten, 15, 20 years. People on the little dusty corners of the left have been doing it for longer. And it was we on the left who took it into the mainstream.”
With the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party, left-wing antisemitism became a full-blown crisis. There are a variety of incidents and issues concerned with this that require unpacking. Some relate to what is known as antisemitic anti- Zionism, in which the perpetrator seeks to hide antisemitism behind criticism of Israel.
Others are just fully fledged conspiratorial antisemitism, in a more traditional vein.
First, Corbyn ally Ken Livingstone was involved in a huge row over antisemitism in the summer of 2016 for repeatedly asserting that Adolf Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. Indeed, Mr Hirsh has coined what he calls the Livingstone Formulation in honour of the former mayor of London. In his book Contemporary Left Antisemitism, he explains that “the Livingstone Formulation conflates everything — criticism of Israel but also other things which do not seem to be so legitimate”.
He cites as a prime example how Mr Livingstone compared a Jewish newspaper reporter to a concentration camp guard before pivoting to attack the government of Israel when he was criticised for doing so.
Like Irving, Mr Livingstone tries to portray himself as the victim in these incidents. In his autobiography, he recalls that episode. Unrepentant, he remembers weeks of clashes as a whipped-up media row in which countless people, including his future mayoral rival Boris Johnson, supported him and urged him not to apologise. He even claimed that “the phrases ‘behaving like a concentration camp guard’ and ‘jumped-up little Hitler’ are common jibes in Britain” and that “no journalist had ever complained before”.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2018. In March of that year, it emerged that Mr Corbyn had been reported to be a member of and active in a number of Facebook groups in which antisemitism and Holocaust denial were rife. He was also found to have supported a mural that contained clear antisemitic imagery. Then came a very weak statement of apology from Mr Corbyn, in which he insisted on his “total commitment to excising pockets of antisemitism that exist in and around our party” and said he’d never noticed the antisemitism in the mural, having only glanced at it quickly.
Not surprisingly, this fell far short of what communal leaders felt was required, and they continued with their planned protest in Parliament Square, which attracted 1,500 people.
At every juncture, supporters of Mr Corbyn insisted there was no problem and, crucially, that it was all a conspiracy cooked up by powerful Jews to try to dethrone their glorious leader.
WHEN SEEING IS NO LONGER BELIEVING
INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S RACE AGAINST DEEPFAKE VIDEOS
CNN Business
(Go to site to see Videos)
Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video – known as “deepfakes” – relatively easy. Making a person appear to say or do something they did not has the potential to take the war of disinformation to a whole new level. Scroll down for more on deepfakes and what the US government is doing to combat them.
Manipulating video is nothing new — just look at Hollywood
It’s been possible to alter video footage for decades, but doing it took time, highly skilled artists, and a lot of money. Deepfake technology could change the game. As it develops and proliferates, anyone could have the ability to make a convincing fake video, including some people who might seek to “weaponize” it for political or other malicious purposes.
Now deepfake technology is on the US government's radar
The Pentagon, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is working with several of the country’s biggest research institutions to get ahead of deepfakes.
But in order to learn how to spot deepfakes, you first have to make them. That takes place at the University of Colorado in Denver, where researchers working on DARPA’s program are trying to create convincing deepfake videos. These will later be used by other researchers who are developing technology to detect what’s real and what’s fake.
Spotting a deepfake
A thousand miles west of Denver a team at SRI International in Menlo Park, California is developing the crucial second component to DARPA’s program: technology to spot a deepfake.
How are they detected?
By feeding computers examples of real videos as well as deepfake videos, these researchers are training computers to detect deepfake videos.
What about fake audio?
Training computers to recognize visual inconsistencies is one way researchers at SRI are working to detect deepfakes. They’re also focusing on fake audio.
Who else is studying deepfake technology?
Researchers at academic institutions like Carnegie Mellon, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and The Max Planck Institute for Informatics are also experimenting with deepfake technology. While not a part of DARPA’s program, their work, some of which is featured above and here, highlights different techniques with which artificial intelligence can be used to manipulate video. *Note: these clips do not have audio.
What happens if we can no longer trust our eyes or our ears?
For more than a century, audio and video have functioned as a bedrock of truth. Not only have sound and images recorded our history, they have also informed and shaped our perception of reality.
Some people already question the facts around events that unquestionably happened, like the Holocaust, the moon landing and 9/11, despite video proof. If deepfakes make people believe they can’t trust video, the problems of misinformation and conspiracy theories could get worse. While experts told CNN that deepfake technology is not yet sophisticated enough to fake large-scale historical events or conflicts, they worry that the doubt sown by a single convincing deepfake could alter our trust in audio and video for good.
What if we can dismiss real events as fake?
Think about it. Would history be different if these recordings were claimed as fake?
these recordings were claimed as fake?
In this excerpt from the now infamous “smoking gun” White House tape, President Nixon is heard agreeing to have administration officials approach the director of the CIA to ask him to request that the FBI stop their investigation into the Watergate break-in. Once the “smoking gun” tape was made public Nixon’s political support practically vanished and he ultimately resigned.
In this clip released by Mother Jones in 2012, Mitt Romney was caught on camera at a campaign fundraiser saying that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the government. The video was a setback for Romney’s presidential ambitions.
What's next?
The emergence of deepfake technology has prompted members of the U.S. Congress to request a formal report from the Director of National Intelligence. Senator Marco Rubio worries about the global fallout after a convincing deepfake goes viral before it’s detected.
A new kind of arms race?
LINKS
The Fake News Research Guide Madison College Libraries
How Fake News Tricks Your Brain National Geographic
We live in a world with many “alternative facts,” which means verifying and fact-checking ourselves and those in our community plays an important role in determining what is real and what is fake.
A guide to anti-misinformation actions around the world Poynter
How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News Time, Katy Steinmetz, August 9, 2018
