 A bold claim, you might think – and I’m sure even twitter themselves would be breathless at such an accusation. After all, much of their ethos in the past decade has been to combat the use of their site for racist or hate attacks, with suspensions readily handed out to those who do so.
A high-profile example of that would be twitter’s ousting of US President Donald Trump for his perceived incitement of riots in Washington on January, 6th 2020, and Facebook have also ‘fallen-in-line’ by giving a 2-year ban to Trump for the same. In that demonstration, which turned into a riot and lasted 6-8 hours, 5 people were killed. However, Trump proclaims that he urged people to ‘March peacefully and protest,’ and later repeated that hours later when the riots had turned violent. In contrast, when Democrat Kamala Harris was interviewed about BLM protests, which had also on numerous occasions turned violent – costing over 30 lives in ten months, and causing 50 times the property damage of the Capital riots, with whole City sectors in Portland and Seattle being cordoned off, burned and looted – she responded, ‘They’re not going to stop, and everyone beware! This is a movement, and they’re not going to stop!’ This isn’t to say that Trump should not have been banned from twitter (or Facebook) for incitement, if it had been proven – but just that if you have such a policy, then it has to be applied evenly across the board. The entire tenets of a fair and even justice system and democratic principles are founded on an even and balanced application of laws and rules. So how can it be that Trump was banned for, at worst, a 24 hour infringement, but Kamala Harris gets away Scot-free for a far more open and evident incitement of protests and riots that lasted a year and cost far more lives? Thus the use of the term ‘selective’ in the title heading. But this example isn’t exactly racism, more ‘political or view-led favouritism’. The sort of ‘cronyism’ that business and political leaders and ‘white-supremacists’ are so often accused of. Oh, the irony. Another example of twitter’s ‘uneven hand’ at play has been with the case of David Collier and Sarah Wilkinson. An avid-pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel advocate, Sarah Wilkinson pumps out 6-10 anti-Israel tweets and linked articles a day. In researching these, I noticed that 70% of these articles were either grossly exaggerated or entirely false. In one classic example (one of many pumped out daily), she captioned a picture of a young teen being pulled each end, as if in a tug of war, by Israeli soldiers, ‘The sort of inhuman treatment that Palestinians have to put up with daily.’ It turned out this was a stock picture from 3 years previous when there’d been a disagreement between Israeli settlers, and the teen in the picture was actually an Israeli settler. Again, the irony. Twitter have been repeatedly notified of Sarah Wilkinson’s ongoing, racist-hate campaign against Israel and Jews in general – but still she’s there. Indeed, one of the most vocal in campaigns against Sarah Wilkinson – but also against other rabid anti-Semites – has been David Collier, pointing out numerous examples of Wilkinson’s attacks against Jews in general, including holocaust denial and the usual ‘Jews in control and manipulating’, which was the foundation of Hitler’s purge against them. The result: David Collier gets ousted from Twitter, but Sarah Wilkinson remains. It was only after a heavyweight campaign involving MPs, Rabbis, celebrities and David Collier’s many twitter followers that his account was reinstated. I suppose with the likes of Donald Trump and David Collier being targeted, it was only a matter of time before I too suffered the ‘uneven wrath’ of Twitter. In my own case, I only used to use twitter for promotional news on my books. But in the run-up to the 2019 UK elections, I sent an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn as to why his voracious anti-Israel stance was seen as anti-Jew (and therefore anti-Semitic) by many British Jews. One of my many contacts viewing that letter – originally posted on my Facebook page – was Neil Blair, J.K. Rowling’s agent. Neil, Jewish himself, declared that if Corbyn got in, he was concerned enough that he might well leave the UK. Neil said he was mainly on twitter, and could I post it there as well? I did, Neil re-tweeted it, and it went viral. From that point on, I then became a target of many Corbynistas and anti-Semites – as usual, hiding under the guise of purely being pro-Palestinian, when 99% of them have never met a single Palestinian in their lives – which I have, and count a number as great contacts and friends, including the likes of Bassem Eid, one of their strongest human rights defenders. Other good contacts and supporters on Middle East issues include Fiyaz Mughal, head of Faith Matters. Both would laugh their heads off at the accusation of me being ousted from twitter for breaching their rules on ‘racism and hateful’ conduct, as did many of my twitter followers, who mounted their own mini-campaign to get me re-instated, even tweeting directly to their CEO, Jack Dorsey, but to no avail. To those followers and many others, with now eighteen books to my credit, three with Muslim heroes, and numerous articles on Middle-East Affairs – they saw me as a voice of reason and balance in an often hate-filled and attack landscape on twitter. Adding to my non-racist credentials is the fact my wife of 35 years is Afro- Caribbean, and with my own half-Jewish, half-Irish background, I could practically write the book on ‘prejudice’. So how could this have come about? It appears that day many voracious anti-Israel, anti-Jew twitter posters arrived, intent on stirring up trouble. One (an Arab name, but could have been false) pumped out a series of posts about Weinstein and Epstein, asserting that this was what ‘all Jews did’ – raped young girls. Then he followed that up with a tweet that said there was a rape in the USA every 4 minutes. I tamely responded, ‘I think you’ll find it’s just as bad within sections of Islam too,’ and linked to an article in The Independent about the many Muslim grooming gangs in the North-West of England. And for that, I was resultantly thrown off of twitter. Now I’m not sure you could designate that as ‘racism or hate’, unless you could lay the same charge against The Independent for printing the story in the first place. And it certainly wasn’t to insist this was a widespread problem with Muslims in the UK, since in an earlier article on the subject of terrorism in the UK, I had asserted that 99% of UK Muslims were strong, supportive UK citizens and not radical at all. But perhaps with that earlier poster, to whom I was responding, suggesting that practically ‘all’ Jews or US citizens were likely rapists, my response was mis-interpreted by twitter as following a similar vein. It was not. It was simply trying to put some balance to a ludicrous claim. But I think that in their campaign against ‘racism and hate’ there is something that twitter is seriously missing. The cases of Weinstein and Epstein were deplorable, as indeed were those of Savile and many others that followed, along with the many US-charged rapists. But 99% of these were not racist led, purely those of men preying on girls, a number of them underage, and purely sexually-led, without any racist component at all. The grooming gangs in the UK were somewhat different. They admitted that they preyed on young, white English girls, because of their ‘loose morals’, and wouldn’t have ever dreamed of grooming girls from their own background. They therefore saw these young UK girls as somewhat ‘lesser beings’, and so there was a racial component to their grooming. And sadly I saw the same with this poster on twitter that day. He was suggesting that all/most Jews and USA citizens had lesser morals, and so were therefore ‘lesser beings’ and somewhat unworthy. Taken to an extreme degree, it is sadly this sort of thinking amongst radicals that has been behind 9/11, London Bridge, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo and Nice truck massacres. In other words, the first stage of planning and launching such attacks is the radical thinking/dictate, that the victims are unworthy and ‘lesser beings’. Possibly my response was too reactionary – but then I am obviously aware of a racial component that twitter appears to so far be unaware of. Thus the numerous anti-Semitic and anti-West comments and attacks go unchecked and unimpeded, and any that defend against that get singled out and censured. Which then allows and encourages further anti-Semitic and anti-West comments and attacks. I am not the first to notice this ‘uneven handling’ of twitter, which sadly seems to support and encourage the very racism and ‘hate’ they claim they are against – but, as said, on a ‘selective’ basis. Until twitter cures this problem and blind-spot, they cannot be taken seriously as an effective medium in the modern world. At least, in any democratic society which prides itself on the even-handed and fair treatment of its citizens. John Matthews. June, 2021. |
AuthorJohn Matthews is a leading British writer. His books span genres of crime, action, mystery and legal-thriller and include: Basikasingo, Crescents of the Moon, Past Imperfect, The Last Witness, The Second Amendment, Ascension Day, The Shadow Chaser, Blind School, The Prophet, and his current book series set in 1890s New York with the first days of criminal forensics. Archives
October 2021
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