hateful, scary things

The fear of self-deception is part of the human condition, or at least the modern one. Maybe everything is not as it seems. Maybe it is much darker, more threatening.
This went through my mind when I tried to figure out why a run-in this week with some comments on the website “YouTube” has made me feel markedly less secure.
The story starts with a video competition that the American Jewish Committee spearheaded in order to get young people, 18-26, to submit their creative depiction of “My Israel,” leading up to the state’s 60th anniversary.
In spite of partnerships with some of the leading organizations that work with Jewish students, attractive marketing, and some fun prototypes on the site, the submissions were coming in slow.
This was revealing in and of itself, suggesting either 1) that young Jews are not part of the YouTube, digital video-making trend, 2) that open questions spark less creativity than more narrow frameworks, or 3) that the relationship between most young Jews and Israel remains very tentative and that few people have found “their authentic” connection.
We decided to move in a fourth, easier area: doing better at getting the word out.
Interested in replicating the competition, the Asper Institute at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya had made a short video promoting “the many stories of Israel,” intended to drive interest in the competition.
And the final ingredient: a colleague of mine had read about a group that helped videos “go viral” (i.e. get tremendously popular) and we were interested in testing it out.
So the short spot was sent out to see if it could attract some notice.
Less than 24 hours later, “Inspired by Israel” had some 700,000 hits on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uijjgU7PB8c) and 1,500 comments, making it a “favorite” according to the site’s lingo. That was what we had hoped for.
What we hadn’t anticipated was the hate. The vast majority of the comments, well over 1,000, were as anti-Israel as they come, and more filthy and anti-Semitic than anything I had seen before. This was not political polemic or passion, it was pure, unadulterated hate – and its purveyors were proud of the display.
“Kill all the Jews,” “Israel is a cancer” – those were the “nice” entries that can be repeated.
To increase the sense of having been invaded, our my.israel.org video competition website was hacked. Suddenly the titles were switched – from “My Israel Journey” to obscene hate-filled language about Israel and Jews. The first entry, my first shock when looking at the site, read “your security sucks and so does Israel.”
And finally, back on YouTube, videos with similar titles started popping up next to the original Asper Institute one. “Re: How Does Israel Inspire You?” had a masked man asking in a low, slow, threatening voice whether you have ever had – as he presumably has – your mouth filled with blood. Another, which I didn’t watch, showed a pile of excrement with a blue Jewish star superimposed.
Various actors brought each situation under control. The comments about the video were edited and new ones are now being moderated. Our my.israel.org site was restored. And the most anti-Semitic of the similarly titled YouTube videos disappeared, presumably censored by YouTube itself.
A believer in fighting bad speech with better speech, I was nevertheless relieved when all the hatefulness was out of sight.
With them out of the way, there is also a tendency to rationalize: who writes comments on YouTube anyway? Isn’t it the perfect, depersonalized outlet for people who cannot share their frustrations in any other way? And perhaps the video, which is a little sexy, a little sure of itself, could possibly be perceived as callous to the difficult and painful daily situation in Israel and the territories. And certainly, hopefully, most of the respondents were from places where we know already that they are besieged by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda.
But the experience is immediate enough that there is still something breath-taking about it. Something that has made me hug my family tighter in recent days and keep them closer in sight.
And I go back to those thoughts about the human condition, about the ultimate of those fears – a fear that is political because it has to do with groups and not individuals, and a fear that is too at home in the Jewish psyche, still wounded by the experience of centuries of hate: that our neighbors actually hate us, that our comfort is actually an illusion.
As the head of AJC’s young leadership division, I’ve spent the last years preaching about the importance of taking proactive action, whether it be in promoting energy conservation or in pressing for peace in Israel, and moving away from the defensive. I believe strongly that we need to take risks because not taking them is the biggest risk of all.
I stand by all of that. But this week has opened my eyes, and in a very personal way, to the backdrop of this work. And it has added to its urgency.
Rebecca, Ajc.org/access