Pela autodeterminação da Palestina - reportagem isenta

Enquanto o mundo se vira, a Palestina chora. As crianças fecham os olhos pela última vez — não para dormir, mas para passar fome. As mães embalam corpos sem vida em vez de sonhos. Os pais cavam covas com as próprias mãos porque ninguém parou as bombas. Isto não é apenas uma tragédia — é um colapso moral da humanidade. Quando a história julgar este silêncio, o que diremos? Que assistimos ao genocídio e lhe chamamos "conflito"? Que deixamos os bebés morrer à fome e chamamos a isso "política"? Vergonha de cada líder, de cada nação, de cada voz que se calou. O sangue da Palestina mancha não só a terra, mas a nossa consciência para sempre.
Estima-se que  ainda existem dois milhões de árabes em Israel. Se todos em peso tivessem votado no seus próprios partidos árabes no Knesset, o Parlamento israelita, o Bibi nunca teria ganho as últimas eleições, mas sim a coligação de esquerda coligada com os todos partidos árabes Balad, Hadash, Ta'al e Lista Árabe Unida.
Netanyahu sob pressão judicial e internacional enquanto Israel prepara nova ofensiva em Gaza

Twitter hate: 86 percent of anti-Muslim content comes from US, UK, India

Last year, the United Nations strongly encouraged the international community to “take all necessary measures” to combat discrimination against Muslims and “prohibit any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to violence” while warning that anti-Muslim hatred has reached “epidemic proportions.”

Worryingly - this appeal has fallen largely on deaf ears, particularly within the executive boardrooms of social media companies, which have done little or nothing to remove anti-Muslim content from their platforms.

This inaction is having a devastating impact on Muslim minority communities throughout the world, with the microblogging site Twitter becoming a primary source for the proliferation and amplification of anti-Muslim hatred.

The social media company should now focus its attention on user behaviour within three countries in particular, according to a new study, which found the US, the UK, and India contributed a staggering 86 percent of anti-Muslim content on Twitter during a three-year period.

The study by the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) – the apex Muslim body in the Australian state of Victoria which represents an estimated 270,000 community members– found nearly four million anti-Muslim posts made during a 24-month period between 2017 and 2019.

The ICV also flagged a vicious cycle of hatred manifesting in both online and offline attacks on the community globally. Indian users alone generated more than half of these hateful and hurtful posts.

Among India-based Twitter users, researchers blame India’s ruling party – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – for the dissemination and amplification of anti-Muslim hate, saying, “(the) BJP has actively normalised hatred towards Muslims such that 55.12 percent of anti-Muslim hatred tweets now originate in India.”

ICV also pointed to discriminatory laws that deny Muslims citizenship and other civil rights for the rise of anti-Muslim hatred online among Indian Twitter accounts.

In the United States, the proliferation of anti-Muslim hate on Twitter is almost inseparable from the hateful rhetoric and policies of former president Donald Trump, who ranks as the third most frequently mentioned user in anti-Muslim posts, according to the researchers, with many tweets associated with defending his Muslim immigration ban and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, including those that posit Democrats as collaborating with “Islamists” to take over the West.

As for the United Kingdom, researchers attributed the prevalence of anti-Muslim tweets to a multitude of factors, including the global reach of Trump’s anti-Muslim animus, anti-immigration sentiments sparked by the refugee crisis, and the discourse surrounding Brexit, along with the casual racism of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who once compared niqab-wearing Muslim women to “letter boxes”.

By analysing the anti-Muslim content produced by the three countries, researchers were able to identify several key themes, including the association of Islam with terrorism, the depiction of Muslims as perpetrators of sexual violence, the fear that Muslims wish to impose Sharia on others, the conspiracy that alleges Muslim immigrants are replacing white in the West and Hindus in India, and the characterisation of halal as an inhumane practice that typifies the so-called “barbarity” of Islam.

“Even more concerning, however, is our discovery that only a mere 14.83 percent of anti-Muslim tweets end up being removed,” said the researchers, which is continuing to drive an upward surge in hate crimes against Muslim minority communities, and, in turn, even more, anti-Muslim hate speech online.

The 2019 Christchurch Mosque attack is illustrative of this vicious cycle.

The gunman was radicalised by anti-Muslim online content, and in the week after he murdered 52 Muslim worshippers, incidents of anti-Muslim abuse spiked upwards by a staggering 1300 percent in New Zealand and 600 percent in the UK, which triggered or inspired a wave of anti-Muslim violence in England and Scotland, including an attack on a mosque in Stanwell, and stabbing of a Muslim teenager in Surrey.

A recent report documented over 800 attacks against mosques by right-wing extremists in Germany since 2014.

The past month has seen attacks carried out by right-wing Indian Hindu migrants against Muslim communities in Anaheim in the US and Leicester in the UK.

These attacks not only inflict a major psychological impact on Muslims but also on the broader community. It’s unconscionable that Twitter has done little or nothing to remove the overwhelming majority of anti-Muslim content on its platform.

To that end, a 2020 study titled “From Hashtag to Hate: Twitter and anti-Minority Sentiment” is equally damning of the social media giant, having found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim hate on Twitter and violence against Muslims in public.

Focusing on Twitter accounts with high follower numbers, including the US, the study’s authors found that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has been concentrated in American counties with high levels of Twitter usage.

“Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign, and are uncorrelated with other types of hate crimes,” conclude the authors.

But none of this information is new or revelatory to Twitter, given the company issued a statement in 2020 saying it had come together with the independent members of the Cross Government Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred (AMHWG) as part of a “shared commitment to counter hateful conduct online,” adding, “We want to tackle anti-Muslim hatred together, while also working with other groups who share this commitment.”

Twitter, along with Google, and Meta, also promised to eliminate anti-Muslim content from its platform in 2019 – in the wake of the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack. But these promises have fallen well short, as highlighted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which found that social media companies, including Twitter, have failed to act on 89 percent of posts containing anti-Muslim hatred reported to them.

Put simply – if Twitter continues to deny calls to remove anti-Muslim hatred from its platform, then members of Muslim minority groups will continue to be threatened, harmed, or killed. Muslims throughout the West will be exposed to the same kind of attacks seen on mosques in New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Germany, and the US in recent years.

The correlation between online hate and offline hate crimes has been established. Twitter must act immediately.

Zionism and Hindu Nationalism Bring Israel and India Together

When Israeli warplanes, artillery positions and armed drones rained missiles and bombs upon Gaza for 11 consecutive days last month, killing 253 Palestinians, 66 of whom were children, the Israeli Government received predictable support from the United States, but the words of solidarity it received from India has raised eyebrows around the world.

Whereas Congressional Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. offered boilerplate talking points in defense of Israeli military aggression against a largely defenseless civilian population, members of India’s ruling party – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – and its allies unabashedly pontificated their solidarity with the self-proclaimed Jewish state on social media.

Indian journalist Rana Ayyub reviewed tweets posted under these hashtags and found that “a common thread that runs through is a visceral hatred for Muslims and a bloodlust to see Muslims massacred and shown their place,” adding, “Most handles followed by one or more BJP minister or the PM himself.”

Read: Hindutva Ideology: India’s Gradual Move Towards Genocide

These tweets echoed pronouncements made by members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government, including Member of Parliament Tejasyi Surya, who posted on Twitter, “We are with you. Stay strong, Israel,” and a BJP spokesperson, Guarav Goel, who posted, “Dear Israelis, you are not alone, we Indians stand strongly with you.”

These expressions of solidarity with Israel by members of India’s ruling party and its supporters make it easy to forget that the Indian relationship with Israel has been anything but close or even cordial, with previous Indian administrations expressing hostility towards Israel for its persecution of the Palestinian people and occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1938. A decade later India would become one of only 13 countries to vote against the United Nations Partition Plan, which divided historic Palestine into two separate states – thus forming the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948.

Read: What is the Future for India’s Muslims with the Rise of Hindu Nationalism?

India also voted for a UN resolution that condemned Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” stating, “The racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being.”

India’s Cold War alliance with the Soviet Union also made it a natural opponent of the United States’ geopolitical orbit, while its large Muslim population helped the country maintain close ties with the Arab world, particularly the Palestinians – but when the Communist superpower collapsed in 1991, New Delhi hit the reset button on its relationship with Tel Aviv.

A natural thawing of relations between the two former British ruled colonies has blossomed into a full blown “special friendship,” with many likening the bond between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Modi as a full blown “bromance,” one that oversaw a record $1.5 billion arms deal in 2016, making Israel the second-largest weapons exporter to the Indian state. Bilateral trade between the two countries has ballooned from $200 million in the early 1990s to nearly $6 billion today.

This fledgling Modi-Netanyahu “bromance” is not only driven by trade deals, but also by shared values, as both Hindu nationalism and Zionism draw from the same spring of hate – ethno-nationalist ideologies. Whereas Hindu nationalists seek to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra (nation), one absent non-Hindu religious minorities, but particularly Muslims, Zionism aims to cleanse the Palestinian Territories of non-Jews, but particularly Muslims.

Read: India Makes the Lives of Kashmiri Prisoners Worse During COVID19

At the core of the Modi Government’s ideological DNA is the militant Hindu organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has long admired Israel’s brutality of the Palestinian people. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat gave voice to this sentiment when he said in 2016, “Israel was attacked by surrounding Islamic countries on five occasions, but the Israeli people repulsed their aggressions and extended their boundaries due to strong resolve to save motherland.”

Somdeep Sen, an associate professor of international development studies at Roskilde University in Denmark, accurately observes, “The electoral successes of the BJP have meant that what was once a fringe Hindu nationalist love affair with Israel has now become a matter of public policy.”

It’s no surprise then that India has modelled its settler-colonial-project in Kashmir on Israel’s settler enterprise in the Palestinian Territories by turning military outposts into settlements, and settlements into bona fide towns and even small cities. In both projects, the occupying force rules over a restive Muslim majority population, and it’s for this reason India has turned to Israel for its supply of occupation management tools and strategies.