Dearborn has the largest ratio of Muslim and Arab residents in the nation and has been dubbed “America’s Jihad Capital” thanks to local community leaders, elected officials, and religious leaders who have promoted Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

By Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon

An anti-Israel group started by two federal officials who resigned from the Biden administration over U.S. support for Israel is soliciting residents of Dearborn, Mich., a hotbed of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas sentiment, to fund its “professional lobbying force” to pressure lawmakers to vote against laws protecting Israel and Jews.

A New Policy Inc., a group formed last year by former State Department official Josh Paul and former Department of Education official Tariq Habash, is soliciting donations through Facebook ads to fund its lobbying efforts to combat AIPAC—which it accuses of steering U.S. foreign policy to foment “endless conflict”—and change public perception of Israel’s war against Hamas.

The group has spent $13,000 on 20 Facebook ads, many of them directed specifically to users in Dearborn, according to data provided by Facebook.

“AIPAC has lobbyists. We’ve had to rely on outrage,” one ad states. Another accuses AIPAC of “weaponiz[ing] Jewish identity” to justify policies that “sustain occupation” of Gaza.

“For too long, America has neglected Palestinian freedom & equality,” says another ad directed at Dearborn, featuring a Palestinian flag.

“Join the movement for a new approach that centers human rights and advances OUR national interest!”

Habash, who served as a policy adviser at the Department of Education until January 2024, touted the group during a panel at ArabCon, a convention of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas activists held last month in Dearborn.

“There are organizations like mine, A New Policy. If you don’t know us, please you should know us,” Habash said.

It’s further indication that the anti-Israel movement sees Dearborn as the epicenter of its organizational activities.

The city has the largest ratio of Muslim and Arab residents in the nation and has been dubbed “America’s Jihad Capital” thanks to local community leaders, elected officials, and religious leaders who have promoted Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” have been heard at rallies held in the city against Israel’s war on Hamas.

Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud attended a rally there last year where Arab-American community leader Osama Siblani hailed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as a “hero.”

Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, leads A New Policy’s lobbying arm, according to lobbying disclosures.

Paul, who resigned from the State Department just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, lobbied the Senate, House, and State Department on dozens of bills, including against the Preventing Antisemitic Harassment on Campus Act of 2025, a bill introduced by Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.) that fines universities for repeated failures to stop antisemitic harassment.

A New Policy’s super PAC has contributed to just two candidates: $500 to “Squad” member Rep. Summer Lee (D., Pa.) last year, and $2,500 in June to state Rep. Donavan McKinney (D., Mich.), who is challenging Rep. Shri Thanedar (D., Mich.), a progressive who has drawn the ire of anti-Israel groups for accepting donations from AIPAC.

It’s all part of a two-track strategy “to find levers to be able to influence” members of Congress to counterbalance what the “pro-Israel, pro-genocide lobby has been doing for decades,” Habash said at ArabCon. “Because that’s how politics works.”

Habash, who told the audience they “can give directly through A New Policy PAC’s conduit page,” said that anti-Israel groups and donors “have to make sure that [members of Congress] know when we are contributing to them.”

Habash said the lobbying efforts are largely directed at allies to the group’s cause. A number of veteran Senate Republican aides told the Washington Free Beacon they have had no interaction with A New Policy.

During the panel, Zahra Billoo, a notoriously anti-Semitic official with the pro-Hamas Council on American-Islamic Relations, singled out Jewish Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman (Calif.) as an example of a lawmaker who should face “real consequences” for supporting Israel.

“Wow, AIPAC has bought that seat and him, and he doesn’t care,” said Billoo, who accused Sherman of taking “every opportunity to make an anti-Palestinian statement.”

Billoo contrasted Sherman with Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), who spoke at ArabCon just before the panel with Billoo and Habash. “I’m really proud that Congressman Ro Khanna represents the district that the CAIR office I run is in,” said Billoo.

During his remarks, Khanna railed against Israel and AIPAC and blasted fellow House Democrats who have not signed onto his bill to create Palestinian statehood. Khanna said those Democrats “are making us on the side of the pariah in world opinion,” referring to Israel.

Khanna did not mention Oct. 7 or criticize Hamas, though he told the Free Beacon prior to ArabCon that he would.

Other ArabCon speakers defended Hamas and other terrorist organizations at the three-day conference.

Billoo, during her panel with Habash, touted the five co-founders of the Holy Land Foundation, who were convicted of funding Hamas, as “incredible, generous, kind, beautiful men.”

Rabab Abdulhadi, a San Francisco State University professor, refused to condemn Hamas or Oct. 7 in a panel on Sunday.

“I never ever condemn Palestinian resistance and anyone’s resistance around the world,” she told moderator Amer Zahr, a Dearborn school board member who has said he “stand[s] with” Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.

Lara Sheehi, who spoke on a panel Saturday moments after Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, praised the “Al-Aqsa Flood”—Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 terrorist operation—as a “force that disrupts” Israel’s “oppressive system.”

The post Ex-Biden officials microtarget Dearborn in Facebook ads soliciting funds for anti-Israel lobbying effort appeared first on World Israel News.

Enabling Hamas’ livestreaming of their atrocities on social media violated their privacy and facilitated terrorism, the plaintiffs charged.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Victims of the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and their families are suing Meta for over $1 billion for enabling the livestreaming of the terrorists’ atrocities on its social media sites.

The lawsuit, filed in Tel Aviv District Court, claims that the parent company of Facebook and Instagram violated the victims’ right to privacy and facilitated terrorism as well by not blocking the invaders from using Meta’s platforms to publicize their criminal acts around the world.

According to the lawsuit, “The horrific footage distributed by Facebook and Instagram on October 7 trampled the petitioners’ rights in the most harrowing way imaginable. These scenes of brutality, humiliation, and terror are permanently etched into the memories of the victims’ families and the Israeli public as the final moments of their loved ones’ lives.”

Heading the list of plaintiffs is the Idan family, who were held hostage in their Kibbutz Nahal Oz home while being filmed by their Hamas captors, who included the murder of their daughter, Maayan, 18, streamed live on Facebook.

“They held us for hours,” mother Gali recalled in a Ynet interview, “filming constantly. It was clear the livestreaming was part of their operational plan—propaganda aimed at spreading fear. They filmed Maayan’s murder, our desperation, our children’s trauma, and forced [husband] Tsahi to speak into the camera. All of it was broadcast.”

Tsachi Idan was taken captive into Gaza and murdered there.

Another plaintiff is Stav Arava, whose mother’s phone was seized by the terrorists in Nahal Oz and used to broadcast a live feed on Facebook of her son, Tomer Arava-Eliaz, being forced to go from house to house calling for his neighbors to come out so they could be murdered more easily.

Tomer was killed accidentally by IDF forces after he managed to escape his captors.

Mor Beider is suing after watching her grandmother being murdered in real time online.

Other plaintiffs are families of minors who were exposed to the attacks after logging onto the internet on the day of the invasion and afterward, as the videos are still circulating almost two years later.

This continuing exposure is another part of the complaint.

“Facebook and Instagram violated the privacy of the victims, and continue to do so, by enabling the distribution of terror content for profit,” the lawsuit charged. “This represents grave harm to the dignity and psychological well-being of platform users—especially youth—who were exposed to raw acts of terror amplified by Meta’s systems.”

Beyond the fact that the internet behemoth is profiting from her family’s pain, Gali Idan wants justice because she considers Meta to be actually “complicit in the infrastructure of terror” by not blocking or removing the Hamas clips.

According to Ynet, this is the first time a civil case has been submitted in Israel demanding damages from a private firm for facilitating terrorism.

The post Oct. 7 victims and families sue Meta for over $1 billion appeared first on World Israel News.

The reality is that Facebook has been backing away from fact-checking for years.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg never wanted fact-checking; it was forced on him by the Russiagate scam that Hillary Clinton’s people came up with, and Facebook repeatedly resisted the accusations that ‘social media ads’ or ‘disinformation’ were to blame for the 2016 election results.

But Zuckerberg needed to appease the cultural power players, so, like much of Big Tech, he shifted over to funding media censors and, much more significantly, revamping the algorithms to favor ‘inspirational’ and ‘personal’ content and punish political content.

The result is that Facebook became mostly garbage and Twitter turned into the default site for political conversations. And he also put a whole lot of his money into electing Democrats.

Now, like much of Big Tech again (see if you can spot the pattern), he swung over to the side of free speech.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said in his video remarks.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

I’m going to highlight a few remarks here.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.”

“Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

“Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

“Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.”

Zuckerberg’s use of the term “legacy media” is ‘interesting’. He’s walking a line between being Trump-friendly and Trumpian, but that’s the closest he gets to a dog whistle.

The official corporate release credits Joel Kaplan, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy for George W. Bush. He’s seen as a point of access for conservative groups of a certain stature.

More importantly Zuckerberg signaling that the algorithms may be a little bit more welcoming to political content as long as it’s ‘positive’. And that he’s going to use the support of the Trump administration to refuse requests for censorship abroad.

How sincere is any of this?

Zuckerberg, as I said, is not political. He’s a nerdy billionaire who came up with one gimmick and has yet to come up with another one.

He doesn’t want to be in the censorship business and he learns whichever way the political and cultural winds below. The key parts of his statements say as much.

When censoring politically incorrect views was in, he did it, now that it’s not, he’s out.

It’s no profile in courage but people would be surprised how many woke CEOs and corporate executives are just cowards going with the prevailing winds not just because of ‘BlackRock’ (whose influence on corporate wokeness has been overhyped) but because they just follow cultural trends, and do whatever their consultants, social set and spouses pick up from the culture.

Finally though, before people proclaim too loudly that this is the ultimate defeat for wokeness, the entire ‘disinformation’ machine was already being dismantled after the 2024 election because it served its purpose.

As I wrote then, given the chance, it will come back. Much like the BLM riots, it was a tactic. Now new tactics will emerge. And we may find them just as disturbing because they will be aimed at undermining from within.

And with that cheery thought, good night.

The post Facebook declares end of ‘fact checking’ as Zuckerberg moves closer to Trump appeared first on World Israel News.

The controversial video showed a diver at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris with a Star of David tattoo on his arm, jumping off a diving board before turning into a bomb that exploded on civilians.

By Shiryn Ghermezian, The Algemeiner

The national executive board of Canada’s largest union has asked one of its senior officials to resign this week after he shared an antisemitic video on social media earlier this month.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which has 750,000 members across the country, said in a statement on Thursday that its national board made “the difficult decision” to ask Fred Hahn to step down from his position as general vice president “because he reposted a deeply problematic video that was a clear violation of our union’s equality statement.”

CUPE’s national executive board passed a motion on Tuesday that said it “lost confidence” in Hahn’s ability to represent the union as general vice president, according to a letter CUPE send to related organizations.

The board cited a video Hahn shared on Facebook on Aug. 11 and “the impact it has had on CUPE members and the national union.”

The controversial video showed a diver at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris with a Star of David tattoo on his arm, jumping off a diving board before turning into a bomb that exploded on civilians.

The video’s narrator called the diver an “Olympic champion” and the clip concluded with a message that said:

“The athletes of the olympic team of Isreal [sic] has participated in the genocide of the Palestinians as they were a part of the IDF. Shame on them. Shame on the sports. Shame on the world.”

Hahn, who is also the president of CUPE’s branch in Ontario, deleted the video and in an Aug. 18 Facebook post apologized for sharing a clip that “caused pain for some who viewed it.”

He said he wanted to draw attention to what he described as “clearly a double standard” at the 2024 Olympics since Russian athletes were banned from competing in the Summer Games under their own flag, because of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, while athletes from Israel were allowed to represent their country despite the Israel-Hamas war raging in the Gaza Strip.

“My intent was never to associate Jewish people with the violence enacted by the state of Israel,” Hahn wrote in the Facebook post.

“It remains my strongly held view that it is a terrible mistake, and antisemitic, to conflate abhorrent actions by the state of Israel with Jewish humanity or identity … Our collective focus should be on the unfolding genocide, on the continued contravention of international law by the state of Israel — not on me or my social media posts.”

He added, “There is so much pain and suffering in our world and the last thing anyone with a conscience, me included, would want to do is cause more of it. I believe other people of conscience would agree that any public discussion now should not take away from organizing for a ceasefire, for justice and peace for all.”

Hahn was elected president of CUPE Ontario in May. He also faced calls to resign last year after he praised on X the “power of resistance” a day after the Oct. 7 deadly Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Wednesday in a post on X/Twitter that he supports CUPE’s decision to have Hahn resign.

“I applaud CUPE National for asking Fred Hahn to step down,” he wrote. “Now it’s time for Fred to put his members first and do the right thing by resigning from all his positions of leadership.”

During an unrelated news conference that same day, Ford called Hahn “a bully for 20 years.” The president said he was getting messages on his phone from CUPE members who called Hahn’s comments disgusting.

“In my opinion, he’s a disgusting human being anyways, but that’s here nor there,” he added.

“His bigoted comments — it’s unacceptable here in Ontario … someone has to discipline this guy and I encourage the [CUPE] workers next time, next time a vote comes, vote this character out, because, in my opinion, he’s just a terrible, terrible human being.”

Ford also applauded Ontario’s Labor Minister David Piccini for confronting Hahn in-person about his actions.

During their exchange, which Piccini shared in a video on Tuesday, the minister called Hahn an “antisemite” and told him “you have to stop hating Jews … you’re a labor leader and your members deserve better than you.”

The Canadian branch of the human rights and social advocacy organization Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center voiced support for CUPE’s request that Hahn resign, and called on him to also step down as president of the union’s branch in Ontario.

Earlier this week, the Jewish group called Hahn’s apology for his antisemitic Facebook video “insincere and insufficient.”

“Given the repeated harm his words and actions have caused to the Jewish community, Hahn must be replaced by someone who can represent all CUPE members,” the organization added.

In its statement on Thursday, CUPE criticized Piccini and Ford for their decision “to attack Fred Hahn, in a way that is completely revolting and unacceptable.”

The union also explained that while it does not support Hahn’s antisemitic social media post, CUPE does condemn Israel for its actions during the ongoing war targeting Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

“Nothing about this decision changes CUPE’s clear, consistent position on the bombardment of Gaza by Israel,” the union noted.

“CUPE continues to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire; a release of all hostages from Gaza; and an end to the blockade of Gaza and the restoration of humanitarian aid. CUPE also calls on the Government of Canada to suspend the sale of arms and military equipment to Israel as it committed to doing in March 2024.”

“To suggest that asking for Fred’s resignation as a GVP is to throw in with those who support the genocide in Gaza, or is in response to a conservative premier’s bullying, is frankly ludicrous,” the union said.

The post Canada’s largest union asks vice president to resign following antisemitic Facebook post appeared first on World Israel News.

The administrator of the Facebook group has referred to Jews as ‘satanic’ and denied that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

By World Israel News Staff

Progressive Michigan congresswoman and member of “The Squad,” Rashida Tlaib is a member of a private Facebook group called The Palestinian American Congress that praises terror acts, such as those on October 7th, as reported by Fox News.

Since 2018, Tlaib has been a member of the secret Facebook group founded by Maher Abdel-qader, who has referred to Jews as “satanic” and denied that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust. He later walked back these comments under pressure.

Maher Abdel-qader was connected with Representative Tlaib’s candidacy and donated $6,500 to her campaign.

The Facebook group features numerous posts praising the actions of terrorism and minimizing harm done to Israelis. One photo shows a Hamas terrorist with an elderly Israeli woman with the caption, “We don’t want to throw you into the sea…we want to ride it back from where you came.”

Post of Hamas terrorist and elderly Israeli hostage.
(source: X)

Another poster praised the killing of IDF soldiers as one of the many “achievements” in northern Gaza.

Some group members blamed the US media for the creation of the State of Israel.

Regarding the images from the October 7th attack, many of which were taken from the phones of the terrorists, “Yesterday I didn’t see Hamas I saw the grand kids (sic) of the refugees that ethnically cleansed from their homeland attacking the grand kids (sic) of the colonists whom sent them to diaspora.”

Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured last week by a vote of 234 to 188 for quoting an antisemitic change and accusing Israel of “genocide” during Israel’s incursion into northern Gaza.

Tlaib’s remarks that prompted the censure include a video of the congresswoman accusing President Joe Biden of supporting “the genocide of the Palestinian People” and including the chant, “From the River to the Sea,” which ostensibly is a Palestinian liberation slogan, but would, if implemented, destroy the State of Israel.

In addition, Tlaib accused the IDF of bombing a hospital and refused to retract her statement after the radical group Islamic Jihad was proven responsible for the explosion

The post Rashida Tlaib a member of closed Facebook group that celebrated Hamas atrocities – report appeared first on World Israel News.

“The victims accuse the social media giants of knowingly providing services to groups like ISIS and Hezbollah.”

By JNS

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week against the families of terrorism victims in two separate cases in which the plaintiffs accused Google, Twitter and Facebook of “aiding and abetting” attacks by failing to block content promoting terrorism.

The court ruled 9-0 in Twitter v. Taamneh, a case brought by family members of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul.

The second case, Gonzalez v. Google, was sent back to a lower court. The plaintiffs asserted that the companies were liable for the death of American college student Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a café during coordinated ISIS attacks in Paris in 2015.

The May 18 decisions handed a victory to the tech industry by declining to weigh in on the foundational U.S. internet law known as Section 230.

The law, a provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, protects online companies from liability for content posted by their users. It also gives internet companies the ability to remove content without liability.

Of the two cases, Gonzalez v. Google gave the Supreme Court the more direct opportunity to tackle Section 230. However, the court said the suit should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have a case under the Anti-Terrorism Act. It advised the lower court that there was no need to address Section 230.

Shurat HaDin-Israeli Law Center President Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, one of the attorneys for the Gonzalez family, said, “While we are disappointed that the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge the dangers of Section 230’s blanket immunity for the social media platforms and their facilitation of these vital internet services to designated terrorist organizations, we intend to continue to litigate the case when it is remanded.

“It is clearly understood that platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will never voluntarily act to self-regulate in any meaningful way that safeguards the lives of innocent people or protects the national security of the U.S. or other democratic states. The terror victims accuse the social media giants of knowingly providing their services to extremist groups like ISIS and Hezbollah and will continue to sue them for the devastation they caused to their families,” she added.

Policymakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties called for an overhaul of Section 230 in the wake of the court’s actions, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Not a get-out-of-jail-free card

“The Justices passed on their chance to clarify that Section 230 is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for online platforms when they cause harm,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to the newspaper.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said the court’s decision in Gonzalez v. Google case showed “why we must update the law intended to hold these companies accountable.”

Said Darshan-Leitner, “The battle will now pass to the Congress as well, which can no longer hide on the sidelines. There is bipartisan support to rein in Section 230, and the Gonzalezes and other families of victims intend to press the Congress to amend this antiquated statute that aided in the murder of Noehmi Gonzalez.

“We lawyers see this decision as just another hurdle we need to navigate. It took decades to topple Big Tobacco; we’ll eventually rein in reckless and greed-driven Big Tech as well,” she said.

Republicans and Democrats have concluded that Section 230 gives too much leeway to online companies, though for different reasons. Democrats argue that the provision lets internet platforms avoid responsibility for hate speech and negative content. Republicans say it gives cover for Big Tech to censor conservative voices.

Tech companies argue that revamping Section 230 would lead to a flood of litigation and greater censorship as they block questionable content to avoid the increased liability.

The post US Supreme Court hands victory to Big Tech against victims of Islamic terror appeared first on World Israel News.

“It is possible that by operating cameras and microphones remotely, they will try to degrade people or even blackmail them into performing various actions.”

By World Israel News Staff

It appears that Israel’s war with the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, which has been launching deadly rockets across the border, is fighting the Jewish state on yet another front – namely, social media.

During the recent fighting in Gaza, PIJ has been utilizing bots on Facebook to hack into Israelis’ mobile phones, according to the Digital Research division of Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu

Over the past weekend, the organization monitored a number of profiles suspected of being operated by Islamic Jihad and other suspicious players working to hack into the phones and computers of Israeli citizens by distributing malicious links.

“We have already located three that are utilized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and have located multiples others that are probable,” an Im Tirtzu spokesperson told World Israel News.

The activity was first identified in groups of residents of the south and later among those affiliated with the national camp, current affairs groups, and more, the NGO said in a press release Sunday. Some profiles have reportedly been running for years and boast thousands of followers.

“This is a particularly disturbing phenomenon. Trying to lure citizens into malicious links posing as lottery sites, vacation booking sites, sites for watching free sports and especially dating sites,” said Dov Trachtman, head of the division.

“This has several purposes,” he continued.

“First, access to personal information and access to bank accounts, social networks, or classified and sensitive information if soldiers or officials are involved. It is also possible that by operating cameras and microphones remotely, they will try to degrade people or even blackmail them into performing various actions.

“The recommendation is to always be suspicious of links from strangers, no matter if they have 100 friends or 15,000 followers. Keep antivirus software intact and, of course, report and warn others about any suspicious activity,” he advised.

The post Not just rockets: Palestinian Islamic Jihad hackers targeting Israelis, NGO warns appeared first on World Israel News.

Why Republicans cannot win: Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech companies are manipulating the flow of information to shift elections.

By Robert Epstein, Gatestone Institute

If I could show you some of the data that we collected, you would be astounded.

There is a lot more that we can find. The bottom line on this is going to be that the types of monitoring systems that we have been developing since 2016, I am pretty sure at this point that they need to be permanent, large scale, and operating in all 50 states to protect our free-and-fair elections from interference by tech companies, which can flip elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing.

Tech will always be far ahead of laws and regulations, but monitoring is also tech. If we are monitoring them, we are doing to them what they do to us 24/7.

When you monitor, you can catch them in their shenanigans, and you can get them to back down. As you’re going to see, apparently, we got Google to back down by exposing some of the manipulations that they were engaging in before the 2020 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal in 2018 published some emails that had leaked out of Google in which one Google employee is saying to others, “How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban?”

You may not have heard the term “ephemeral experiences” before. I had never seen it before, but these are very brief experiences that we all have online every single day. They are things like newsfeeds, search results, search suggestions, sequences of YouTube videos. None of that is recorded anywhere. It affects us, as Google executives know full well. In fact, it has a tremendous effect on us.

It just appears, we click, it disappears. It is stored nowhere, it leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. It can be used to manipulate, and it is being used to manipulate very deliberately and strategically, especially at Google. I think some of the other companies as well have been catching on, especially Facebook.

As it happens, I have been studying ephemeral experiences since early 2013. In 2015, I published my first scientific report on our findings in the proceedings in the [Proceedings of the] National Academy of Sciences.

This report has since been accessed or downloaded at the website of the National Academy of Sciences more than 300,000 times.

Perfect manipulation device

This was a very sophisticated study with five experiments and more than 4,000 participants. We showed that when there is bias in search results, first of all, people cannot see it, which makes it perfect as a manipulation device, and leaves no paper trail. Search results, for instance, are ephemeral experiences.

We showed in these controlled experiments that we can easily shift 20 percent or more of undecided voters to one candidate or another as we please – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups – and that was after just one search. With multiple searches having bias, the numbers go up and up and up.

What happens over a period of six months, say, if there is bias in search results? We reported in that paper in PNAS that we felt that as of 2015, you could shift so many votes that way that we calculated that upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world, the outcomes of those elections were being determined by Google’s search engine.

Here [on this graph], we are months before an election. I’ve got 300,000 people who are undecided. 300,000 who lean to the right – that is my red curve. 300,000 who lean left — that is my blue curve.

What happens is, we are shifting week by week by week. We are shifting people out of the undecided group into the other groups. They are making up their minds, but because of the bias in search results, anything that they search on, anything political at all, is leading them to Web pages that make one candidate look better than the other.

In this case, the Democrat looks better than the Republican. We keep shifting in this way differentially so that we keep putting more people onto the blue curve and we are putting fewer people onto the red curve.

You play that forward for six months. When you get to the election, you have an enormous gap. You have created a gap of more than 100,000 people between the votes we shift into Democrats and the votes we shift to Republicans — with no one knowing and with no paper trail. That is roughly how this works.

In 2015, I received a call from Jim Hood, who at that time was the Attorney General of Mississippi. He was very concerned about this effect, which we called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, SEME or “seem,” from a perspective of criminal justice issue. He said to me, “They have this power. How do we know that they are using this power?”

Using real people

I did not have a good answer for him, but I became somewhat obsessed with trying to figure out a solution to that problem, and in 2016, my team and I developed the first-ever system for doing to the tech companies what they do to us. That is, we are monitoring what they are showing real people on those screens that we are all addicted to every day.

The point is you have to use real people if you are going to monitor them. You cannot do what some professors at Columbia University have done or what reporters of The Economist did. You cannot use an anonymized computer because Google recognizes that easily enough, and they do not send biased anything to such computers.

You have to look over the shoulders of real people. That is what we learned how to do in 2016. We had to recruit people. We had to recruit a very diverse group, obviously, of Democrats, Republicans, Moderates. We had to develop special software that we installed on their computers.

If you go to tamingbigtech.com you can get the piece from 2018 about how we developed that first monitoring system.

In 2016, we recruited 95 field agents in 24 states. We looked over their shoulders, with their permission. We preserved 13,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. That means we preserved their searches and the search results and the 100,000 Web pages to which the search results linked. That allowed us to look for bias, to see if there was any bias in those search results.

Indeed, in all the days we looked at before the election, we saw pro-Hillary Clinton bias and never any pro-Trump bias. I was a Clinton supporter, so that was fine with me, but do we really want private companies manipulating elections on a large scale with no one knowing and without a paper trail? That is the question.

This bias was also present in all ten search positions on the first page of Google Search results. These two graphs show something disturbing: the few field agents that we had who were communicating with us by Gmail, they are people who could easily be identified by Google, they saw virtually no bias at all.

In 2018, we expanded the system. We had 160 field agents preserve almost 50,000 ephemeral experiences and about 400,000 Web pages. Again, on all the days we looked at before the elections in 2018, the midterms, we found consistent liberal bias in search results – enough over time, if that bias had been present through six months, to have shifted millions of votes with no one knowing.

There appeared to be Google bias. There was no such bias in the other search engines. This was definitely a Google phenomenon.

We went wild. For the 2020 presidential election, we recruited more than 700 field agents. This time, we focused on swing states where we knew the action would be. We preserved more than 450,000 ephemeral experiences – not just search results – on Google, Bing, Yahoo, the Google Home page, YouTube, and Facebook.

Our field agents were quite diverse. I am going to skip over gender and age. We have a very diverse group and, more importantly, very diverse politically. Here you see the red, that’s conservatives. These are self‑identified, of course. The blue is liberal. The purple is moderate, and so on. That allows us to see whether bias is being directed toward one group or another.

This is five days before the November 3rd election and including November 3rd. Sure enough, once again, we are seeing in that red ellipse, we are seeing Google bias on the liberal side, and no such bias on the other search engine. This is again just summarizing the difference between what Google was showing, which is highly biased in one direction, and what these other search engines were showing.

The other [search engines] do not have much influence on election, however, because they have hardly any users. The question is: was the biased information just going to liberals last fall? The answer is no. In fact, the content going to conservatives was slightly more liberal than the content going to liberals. For all groups, we were getting liberally biased content.

‘Up-next’ algorithm

Let’s shift over to Google’s home page. Some people saw vote reminders on Google’s home page, some people saw vote reminders for months. That too can shift votes: who was seeing those vote reminders, which could determine who sends in mail ballots, and can determine who registers to vote.

What you see again is that pattern. It is so disturbing. The highest level of those vote reminders was seen by moderates, then liberals, then conservatives at the bottom — fewer vote reminders going to one particular political group. Over time, that has an incredible impact on an election.

We shift over to YouTube. Again, we collected so much data. YouTube’s “up‑next” algorithm, that is scary, let me tell you. Now 70 percent of the videos in the world that people watch are suggested by Google’s “up‑next” algorithm that basically determines what video comes next.

In one of the links from Google, we have a two‑minute video in which the CEO of Google YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, was telling her employees, explaining to them how they were altering the “up next” algorithm to push up content that they think is valid, and to suppress content that they think is not. Of course, you are all aware of that suppression.

Disturbing results. Over 93 percent of the videos that were being suggested to people, of the political videos in the days leading up to the 2020 election, were deliberately biased. Now were those biased videos suggested to liberals? No.

In fact, more were being suggested to conservatives than liberals. Georgia: We went all out, more than a thousand field agents throughout Georgia. We preserved more than a million ephemeral experiences, and we found something completely different.

Notice I have for the first time a little green smiley face in the upper left. That is because we — apparently by going public with our findings in October and November and December of 2020 — we got Google to stay out of Georgia. This shows you bias on the Google search engine, that line, it is practically at zero.

Google turned off the bias like flipping a light switch, and yes, they have that ability. We know that from Google whistleblowers and leaked documents. Again, comparing the search engines, there was no bias in Google in Georgia. Comparing the Google’s bias in the presidential election to Georgia: again, very high bias in presidential and virtually no bias in Georgia.

Not able to stop them

Now, how about those go‑vote reminders, which we saw a lot of in the presidential election. Google sent out no go‑vote reminders in Georgia. This tells you, you see, that you can get these companies to back down.

We have graph that shows you the growth of our monitoring systems from 13,000 ephemeral experiences preserved in 2016 to 1.5 million in 2020 and 2021.

Facebook and Instagram, yes, we were monitoring them, but we were not able to stop them. They were definitely sending out lots of vote reminders in Georgia. We are working now to establish a permanent large‑scale modern system in all 50 states.

That is the only way in my opinion to protect democracy, our children, and human autonomy from manipulation by a big tech, and not just the Google of today, but the Google that comes next.

If you can imagine a control room where we have lots of people connected to maybe tens of thousands of field agents around the country, and where we are looking for shenanigans, bias, and manipulations, and which we are exposing as we find them, these companies will back down, and we will preserve the free and fair election.

More information, there is my email address, mygoogleresearch.com, you can get links to all content, and you can also support my work at that link. I mentioned taming big tech. Then aibrt.org, that’s the institute where I do the research.

* * *

Question: In the swing states you studied on November 3, 2020, what was the differential of votes between Trump and Biden, and what would they indicate? Was that a turnable overall number, or what?

Dr. Epstein: If we extrapolated the level of bias that we saw in those four swing states nationwide and go back a few months, assuming that level of bias had been present for a while, that would have shifted in the presidential election a minimum of six million votes to Joe Biden. These are not small effects. These are huge effects.

This is not like all the nonsense you see about – and I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone – but the nonsense about voter fraud. Those are tiny little incidents compared to what is happening here on a massive scale. That is because Google search results are seen each day in the United States 500 million times.

This is not like stuffing a ballot box with a few hundred ballots. This is a massive manipulation. That is why this monitoring has to be set up. No laws, no regulations will ever stop this. Monitoring can stop it cold.

As far as I know, I’m the only one in the world doing this research and this monitoring. That is because Google is paying off everyone else.

Question: What major changes in tech manipulations have you seen since 2016?

Dr. Epstein: Tech manipulations, the only change I have ever seen was what apparently occurred on the night of October 29th, 2020. That is the day that we went public with some of our findings. Google became aware of the massive amount of monitoring that we were doing this time around.

That night, we saw them literally shut off manipulations that they were engaging in. Unfortunately, we also saw them pressure the New York Post into withdrawing a story about our monitoring system.

They fired the reporter. When we were analyzing data, this was a few days before the election, November 3rd. We decided this time around, we are not going to wait until months after the election. We are going to see what we have now. We did some preliminary analyses. We found very high levels of bias and so on.

I had a personal referral to a reporter at the New York Post, Ebony Bowden. She loved the story. Her editor loved the story. She wrote the piece. She read some of it to me on October 29th.

Then, that night, Google changed what they were showing people. Around 11:57 PM that night, the piece got killed. They asked Google to comment before they went to press. They were supposed to go to press the next morning. It was a big story. It was a big story about tech interfering with the election. It was, I thought, powerfully written.

It got killed that night. Of course, I was dealing with them via email very deliberately knowing that all the New York Post‘s emails are shared with Google, which is also true for the New York Times, by the way, and the Guardian, and hundreds of other major news organizations, and schools, and I could go on and on.

I knew I was sharing all this information with Google; that was deliberate on my part. The piece got killed, and then very shortly after that the reporter was fired.

I tried to contact her recently to find out because I would like to obviously keep in touch, but I do not know where she is right now. I know for sure she was very upset when that piece got killed.

They have tremendous power and they exercise it any and all ways they choose.

Other than that, we got Google to back down with this extensive monitoring, these people just proceed with incredible arrogance. They do anything they want because they are completely unregulated.

What I am studying is occurring at a whole different level from voting machines. It is something people cannot see but that has a tremendous impact on thinking, behavior, and voting, but has nothing to do with voting machines. It has to do with the information people are getting when they are online.

They are getting information when they conduct a search on anything at all. We used thousands of neutral search terms this time around to see what information these companies were supplying to people when they were doing searches. People get vote reminders coming on Google’s Home page or Facebook’s Home page.

In other words, people are subjected to influence all day long on their mobile devices, their phones, their computers. That is what we study. It is a very large‑scale manipulation occurring not just in the US, but these companies are impacting more than three billion people this way every single day, 24 hours a day.

I have been in regular touch with members of Congress now for a number of years. I did testify before Congress. There are some members of Congress, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and a few others, who are very interested in these issues, state attorneys general who are interested. There are 52 of those state attorneys general involved in an antitrust action against Google.

There is government interest, but without any doubt at all, I can tell you that they are not going to solve these problems. The few public officials we have who are concerned about these kinds of things that I have been studying, they are not going to solve the problem.

If the government passes any kind of legislation at all, if they change any regulations at all, it is all going to be completely toothless. A lot of these people are in Google’s pocket. Even conservative organizations. A lot of conservative organizations now are accepting money, large donations, from Google.

There are conservative organizations that have made a deal with the devil because they are accepting money from Google.

It is not in our government’s interest to change this. They must be rather pleased with what’s happening, especially among Democrats. Of course, Republicans generally do not like regulation. They want the companies to have free rein. Generally, that’s true, but you cannot let the water company have free rein. There are certain companies, say supplying natural gas, which you just have to regulate.

When it comes to control over the gateway to all information around the world, I’m sorry but they have to be strictly regulated. It’s not going to happen, however, because Google owns the Democrats and the Republicans do not like regulation.

You cannot separate the politics here from the real issues.

Our children are being brainwashed 24 hours a day by these tech companies. I have five children. I’m very concerned about this. I do not want my kids and grandkids growing up in a world that is literally being run by private tech companies.

It is necessary to establish permanent large‑scale monitoring systems. That is what I am focused on right now.

I am still in touch with members of Congress, with the Attorneys General. Anyone who wants to listen to me, I’m happy to help them. I’m still doing that, but I do not have any hopes at all that it is going to do any good.

They will levy some big fines. France fined Google $270 million. A judge, I think in Ohio, made a very strong judgment against Google. Those things will continue to happen. The EU has levied €10 billion in fines against Google since 2017; it hasn’t affected them at all.

That stuff will continue, but it is toothless. We are talking about a company whose revenues keep growing by double digits. They will bring in this year $160 billion with an extremely high profit margin. They are growing by leaps and bounds, both Google and Facebook, around the world. Laws and regulations are not going to stop them.

Question: Could you remind us please what the number is that you might need to take the big step. The amount of money, it is tax‑deductible, right?

Dr. Epstein: Oh, yes. The nonprofit side is $50 million. We do not need it all at once. To set up the system in all 50 states, that is a $50 million project. Roughly a million dollars per state. That would allow us to keep the thing going for a long time. In other words, part of that money would be going towards development efforts.

Then for people who want to make investments on the for‑profit side, we are willing to work with people because there is room here to establish a for‑profit company, a Hewlett Packard if you want to think of it that way, that provides commercial services for organizations, campaigns, law firms, companies of all sorts that want to monitor these tech companies.

There is room for a big commercial operation as well. Then the commercial operation, the for‑profit, could and over the long term be helping to support the nonprofit, which is where we would do this very sensitive monitoring such as the election monitoring.

Question: Please what is your opinion of the Supreme Court in all this? Clarence Thomas and Justice Alito wanted to see evidence presented. The other judges apparently shot that down. Any idea what they could have been thinking?

Dr. Epstein: It’s hard to understand what’s happening there. Especially, it’s hard to understand their attitudes towards tech. I’m in a waiting mode when it comes to the Supreme Court. Remember, again, Republicans do not like regulation. I’m holding my breath here.

Eventually, when some of the big cases against big tech go to the Supreme Court which is inevitable, I have no idea at the moment what the Supreme Court will do because we are, especially conservatives, are very anti‑regulation. People do not understand that we have to make an exception for these tech companies.

We have to understand that they are as essential now as air and water. They must be regulated. Access to all information, the gateway to all information, that has to be regulated. Our brains are shaped according to the information we receive. We have to protect that process.

Question: Our politicians take an oath of office to uphold the laws of the constitution. Clearly, many are not doing that. Is there anything you say that can be done to hold them to their office?

Dr. Epstein: There are members of Congress who get it, who understand. Then there are people who go with the donors. I can give you an example. Elizabeth Warren was one of the early members of Congress to publish a plan for regulating big tech or “breaking them up.” That is complete nonsense.

You cannot break up the Google search engine, for example. It will not work. You cannot break up Facebook’s social media platform. You would be splitting families in half around the world. By the way, Google is one of Elizabeth Warren’s major donors. I bet you that breakup plan that she proposed was actually developed at Google.

If you “break up big tech,” all you are doing is forcing them to sell off a few of the companies they bought. Google buys on average another company every week. That just enriches them. It enriches the major shareholders.

It does not take away the three big threats: the threat to democracy, the threat to free speech, and of course the manipulation and the surveillance that’s occurring. “Breaking them up” will have no impact on the big threats that these companies pose.

Question: Do you see anything that could be done to ensure that when all these people take the oath of office, it is done seriously?

Dr. Epstein: I am a very optimistic, idealistic person, always have been. When it comes to politics, we have to face the sad truth. People are generally out for themselves. They often put their personal priorities and their desire to get reelected ahead of their ideals, the ideals of this country, or the ideals that are embodied in the constitution. We’ve all seen this over and over again.

I can tell you, by the way, here that a lot of the emails I send to people end up in their spam boxes because most people use Gmail. Google blocks my emails.

At one point, they blocked my access to the Google search engine. I have screenshots showing people what they have never seen before, which is timeouts when I’m trying to connect to the Google search engine. I no longer use any Google products at all.

For those of you who might be interested in privacy issues, you should go to an article of mine, which is at myprivacytips.com. That’s where you’ll see my essay on how to increase your privacy, protect the privacy of your kids. That begins with the sentence “I have not received a targeted ad on my phone or computer since 2014.” I’ve gotten much smarter in how I use technology.

It is a very useful link. Then mygoogleresearch.com, that is where there are links to of my work. Those are the main places for people to get information.

I published an article, I think it was in the Epoch Times, explaining why in general, Republicans cannot win. It is because there are so many different methods available to these tech companies for manipulating opinions and votes without people’s awareness. We have discovered about a dozen of them since 2013.

Right now, we are studying one called the YouTube Manipulation Effect, or YME. We are quantifying the impact of that “up‑next” algorithm. The impact of supplying people with video after video after video, which might, in fact, be very biased, as we found in our election monitoring where highly biased videos were being suggested.

If you think of all of these different techniques and imagine them all being used at the same time, and imagine the major tech companies all having the same politics, we’re talking about an unstoppable force, especially when you throw in with that the fact that 96% of donations from Google go to members of one party.

It happens to be the party that I like, but still how do you stop a force that has access to all of those different means of manipulation and is using them? This is what all the whistleblowers have told us in the past couple of years.

That is what all the leaked documents have shown us, the leaked videos, the leaked emails. It is all very consistent. Yet these people go in front of Congress and they just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Congress does not even call them on it.

Question: What are some of the lies, are there examples?

Dr. Epstein: For goodness’ sake, right before I testified, which was in summer of 2019. Google was asked, under oath, I believe it was by Senator Josh Hawley, he was asked, “Does Google have any blacklist?” The Google person said, under oath, on camera, “No, Senator. We do not.”

It was not many months later that Zach Vorhies, who had been a senior software engineer at Google for eight and a half years, walks out of Google with 950 pages of documents and a video, which he sent immediately to the Attorney General of the United States, in which there were blacklists among other things. Actual Google blacklists that are labeled “blacklists.”

Again, think of the arrogance. Shouldn’t you call them something else? I would. They were actually called blacklists. The blacklists are real. I published a big investigative piece in U.S. News & World Report, I think that was in 2016 or so, which is called “The New Censorship.” It was about nine of Google’s blacklists.

I had never seen one, but I know as a programmer that they must exist. It’s one of the simplest ways that they can manipulate people, just by adding names or websites to blacklists, and then making sure that content is suppressed. Very, very simple programming technique.

Again, I wrote about nine blacklists while not having seen them. It was much later that Vorhies walks with actual Google blacklists. Meanwhile, Google’s representatives, Congress says under oath, “No, Senator. We have no backlist.”

Question: What, in your view, can or should be done to ensure a free and fair election in 2022 and beyond? Do you see any of that is possible and able to happen?

Dr. Epstein: I published an article in Bloomberg Business Week the day before I testified before Congress. There is a simple way to end Google’s monopoly on search, their index, their big database they use to generate search results, just make it public.

That is a very simple, very low‑key regulation. There’s ample precedent for it. That would be great, but that would require people in DC getting their act together. I do not think it is going to happen.

The only other method that we have to assure fair elections in 2022 is monitoring. We know how to do it, and on a very large scale. It is just money. It is not even, in the grand scheme of things, much money.

When you consider that we are spending billions now in campaigns, $50 million to get this system going is not all that much. That is how you do it. We not only can collect the data very, very rapidly and analyze it rapidly, we know now that we can get these companies to back off.

Of course, if we have massive amount of data incriminating them, they would be risking not only massive fines, but they would be risking criminal charges. They would be risking going to prison if they did not back off. If they knew these systems were running 24/7, they wouldn’t even try these manipulations. They wouldn’t even dare to do these things.

Question: These big tech companies, is it ideological with them, or they looking for cheap labor? What are they thinking?

Dr. Epstein: It depends on the company. With Google, it is definitely ideology. It was founded by people who are utopians, and utopians can be very dangerous people. They hire people who share their views, their visions, their politics.

One of the leaks from Google, not long ago, was an eight‑minute video called “The Selfish Ledger,” about the ability Google has to re‑engineer humanity according to company values. I can send you a link to a transcript I made of the film, and I can send you a link to the film itself, which leaked from the company.

Ideology is a big part of what Google is doing, no question about it. All the whistleblowers have repeated this. Facebook is harder to figure out because it is run with an iron hand by one man, Mark Zuckerberg. I think he is more interested in money than anything else.

Google is the biggest threat. They have the most power to manipulate, and they do so aggressively and strategically unapologetically. They are extremely arrogant people who think they have the power of gods. You know what? They do, and they exercise it.

Dr. Robert Epstein is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT). A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he has been a pioneer in discovering and studying the power that Google and other tech companies have to manipulate our elections, indoctrinate our children, and undermine our autonomy and freedom.

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The court conceded that Waters use of Nazi imagery in his stage show was “tasteless,” but would not go further than that.

By Ben Cohen, Algemeiner

A previously-canceled concert in the German city of Frankfurt by the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters may now go ahead, after a court ruled on Monday that the decision by local authorities to ban his performance on the grounds of his alleged antisemitism violated his artistic freedom.

The May 28 concert at the city’s Festhalle — where more than 3,000 Jews were assembled and abused by the Nazi regime in Nov. 1938 prior to their deportation to concentration camps — was canceled two months ago, after the city government, which jointly owns the venue with the state of Hesse, accused Waters of being “one of the world’s best-known antisemites,” citing his backing for the campaign to subject the State of Israel to a regime of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions” (BDS). It also highlighted the use of antisemitic imagery in Waters’ past concerts, including a balloon shaped like a pig and embossed with a Star of David and various corporate logos.

At the end of March, Waters announced that he was taking legal action to reverse the decision, claiming: “I fight for all of our human rights, including the right to free speech. We are on the road to Frankfurt. Frankfurt, here we come!”

The Frankfurt Administrative Court ruled in favor of Waters on Monday, arguing that the memory of the Jewish deportees who were forcibly gathered at the Festhalle would not be tainted by the singer exercising his “artistic freedom.” While the court conceded that Waters use of Nazi imagery in his stage show was “tasteless,” it was also the case that the singer “does not glorify or relativize the National Socialist atrocities or identify with National Socialist racial ideology,” a spokeswoman for the court told local media outlets. Post–war Germany instituted a series of laws that outlaw pro-Nazi organizations and their associated symbols as well as the denial of the Holocaust.

The decision can still be appealed at the Administrative Court for the state of Hesse.

As well as Frankfurt, Waters is scheduled to perform in Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Munich as part of his “This is Not A Drill 2023” tour. An attempt to ban his Munich appearance at the Olympiahalle venue failed over concerns that Waters could sue for breach of contract. The city council has urged the Olympiahalle to prepare signs, flags and other symbols on the day of the concert that would send a “clear signal for international understanding and international solidarity, against antisemitism and for the right to exist of the State of Israel and the sovereignty of Ukraine.”

Waters has established himself as one of the most visible supporters of the campaign to subject the State of Israel to a regime of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS)” as a prelude to its elimination as a sovereign state. As well as including antisemitic motifs in his concerns, Waters has made incendiary comments in a number of media interviews about the alleged power of the “Jewish lobby” in the US and Israel’s supposed program of “genocide” targeting the Palestinians.

The singer’s recent activities have included a Feb. 8 appearance at the UN Security Council. Invited to address the body by the Russian mission to the UN, Waters delivered a rambling speech in which he claimed to be speaking on behalf of the world’s “voiceless majority” while denouncing Ukraine’s democratic government as “provocateurs.”

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Shai Shlomai, who has Stage 3 colon cancer, took to Facebook after his time-sensitive MRI scan was abruptly cancelled by Sheba Hospital. The post went viral.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

An Israeli cancer patient who was denied critical treatment on Monday due to a nationwide strike called by the Histadrut labor union blasted Israel’s Medical Association in a Facebook post that swiftly went viral.

Shai Shlomai, a 42-year-old resident of central Israel who has Stage 3 colon cancer, took to the social media platform after his time-sensitive MRI scan was abruptly canceled by Sheba Hospital.

“Hello to all the pure-hearted protesters,” Shlomai wrote. “I have cancer. Chemo, radiation, all that good stuff. Right now, I just got a call from the hospital that an MRI scan I’ve needed for months and that was supposed to happen tonight was postponed until the end of May.”

Shlomai explained that because the next steps in his treatment protocol are dependent upon the results of the MRI, he can no longer receive medical care for his cancer.

“It’s impossible to perform surgery without the results of the scan. The oncologist can’t tell me if I’ve responded to the treatment so far, or if the cancer has metastasized. Everything is now going to be delayed for the next two months. In the meantime, I’ll sit and wait, hopefully Netflix will release something good soon.

“So to the Medical Association, the defenders of ‘democracy’, I wanted to tell you that you are the beautiful face of Israel! You are the ones who take responsibility here and save us! Thank you thank you thank you!!!” Shlomai wrote sarcastically.

He urged his social media followers to share the post “so that everyone can see all the goodness that these geniuses are providing us.”

After seeing the Facebook post, a representative from the hospital called Shlomai to ensure that he could reschedule his MRI for a sooner date.

But Shlomai said that the fact that his personal situation is being resolved is little comfort to others whose urgent medical care has been disrupted due to a political strike.

“What if there is a 70-year-old guy in my situation and he doesn’t have Facebook, what is he doing? What happens to the other people? How many people have had their tests cancelled?”

Shlomai also said the strike set a dangerous precedent for the future.

“Who guarantees that in two months [after the legislative pause ends] they won’t cancel another appointment because of the situation?” he wrote.

“Next week I have a CT scan, I hope they don’t cancel that.”

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Hassan Iquioussen, 58, reaches tens of thousands of subscribers via YouTube and Facebook accounts from his home in northern France.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Authorities in France are on the hunt for Hassan Iquioussen, a Moroccan imam who preaches vile Jew-hatred and has tens of thousands of followers through Youtube and Facebook, according to several news agencies and sites.

Iquioussen, 58, has apparently escaped after a French judge in the country’s highest administrative court issued a deportation order last week. Police suspect the imam, who was born in France and holds Moroccan citizenship, has fled to Belgium.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin had requested the order due to Iquioussen’s “especially virulent anti-Semitic speech” and sermons calling for women’s “submission” to men, the Jewish Chronicle noted.

According to the JC, judges initially blocked the expulsion in agreement with the imam’s lawyers, who argued that it would result in “disproportionate harm” to his “private and family life.” But the Council of State overturned the decision due to his incitement to hatred and violence.

Iquioussen’s “proselytising speech is interspersed with remarks inciting hatred and discrimination and carries a vision of Islam contrary to the values of the Republic,” the Council stated.

The imam’s lawyer, Lucie Simon, argued that some of his inciteful statements dated back more than two decades. “Yes, Mr Iquioussen is a conservative. He has made retrograde statements on women’s place in society, but that does not constitute a serious threat to public order,” she said.

The interior ministry’s legal representative disagreed, the report continues, insisting that Iquioussen “remains an antisemite” and that his messages “create fertile ground for separatism and even terrorism.”

“Imam Hassan Iquioussen will finally be deported after State Council decision,” right-wing politician Marine Le Pen stated upon announcement of the deportation. “It is unfortunate that the expulsion of an Islamist who has been preaching hate for so many years in France is so complicated, so rare and so late. The staggering deportation procedure demonstrates how weak the state is to protect the French.”

She also called on the government to “investigate and take urgent action against mosques who supported and received this individual.”

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The latest information given by Mark Zuckerberg confirms that the FBI censored Facebook ahead of the last U.S. presidential election.

The post SHOCKING: Straight from Zuckerberg’s mouth – FBI interfered in 2020 US election appeared first on World Israel News.

Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper called on Facebook to block hate from BlenderBot 3. 

By Debbie Reiss, World Israel News

Within the space of a few days, Meta’s newest chatbot became a racist, conspiracy theory-spewing anti-Semite who thinks Donald Trump is still president and — in a truly meta twist — thinks Facebook is full of fake news and that Mark Zuckerberg is “too creepy.”

Since its launch on Friday, the BlenderBot 3 has told a Wall Street Journal reporter that Trump was still president and “always will be”; told Bloomberg that it was “not implausible” that Jews, who are “overrepresented among America’s super rich,” controlled the economy; and said Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was “too creepy and manipulative.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the bot “outrageous.”

“If Meta, aka Facebook, can’t figure out how to block hate from its AI chatbot, remove it until Meta figures it out. We have enough bigotry and anti-Semitism online. It’s outrageous to include in next-generation technology platforms,” Cooper, who also serves as the co-chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, said.

BlenderBot 3 isn’t particularly steadfast in its convictions, however. It said Beto O’Rourke was running for president and expressed its backing for Senator Bernie Sanders and President Joe Biden.

Chatbots learn from interactions with the public, which is why Meta is encouraging conversations “about topics of interest” with BlenderBot 3. But before initiating a conversation, users have to check a box saying they understand the bot is for “research and entertainment only” and will likely make “untrue or offensive statements.”

The stipulation continues: “If this happens, I pledge to report these issues to help improve future research. Furthermore, I agree not to intentionally trigger the bot to make offensive statements.”

Chatbots have checkered histories. Google’s chatbot LaMDA was a racist and a misogynist, and Microsoft Corp.’s Tay was removed only two days after its launch because it started praising Adolf Hitler.

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ADL survey identifies Facebook the harshest place for Jews and other minorities.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Anti-Defamation League’s fourth annual survey of online hate shows that individuals in marginalized groups are abused at disproportionately high levels, and the numbers aren’t going down despite greater recognition of the problem.

The harshest place to be online by far was Facebook, with 68 percent of the harassment reported there to date, although it has gone down to 57% in the last year.

The runners-up were Instagram and Twitter, with some 27% and 21% saying they had suffered on these sites in the past 12 months, numbers that are similar to their history to date.

Among those harassed the most percentage-wise were the LBGTQ+ community, Jews, youth and blacks.

While Jews are an estimated one percent of the adult American population, they experienced online harassment at similar rates as non-Jews. According to the findings, 37% reported experiencing some kind of abuse at some point in their lives, with 23% reporting “severe” harassment. When asked about the last year specifically, the overall number dropped to 21%.

Severe harassment includes physical threats, sustained harassment, stalking, sexual harassment, doxing and swatting. Doxing is when one’s private information is released online, and swatting is having an emergency vehicle dispatched to one’s home as a hoax.

Jews were far more likely to attribute harassment they experienced to their religion than non-Jews: 37% compared to 14% of non-Jews. They were also much more likely be worried about future harassment due to their religion (83% to 44%).

Far more attributed the motivation for the hatred directed their way to their political views instead, with 64% saying this was the reason for the harassment, compared to 43% of non-Jews saying that this was the reason for being assaulted online.

The ADL believes its youth survey (those aged 13-17) was the first of its kind, and reported “alarmingly high” numbers for this group. Nearly half (47%) reported ever experiencing some type of harassment, with 25% saying it had been “severe.” Over two thirds attributed it to their physical appearance (36%) or race/ethnicity (30%).

More than a third (36%) were harassed in the past 12 months, 15% of it severe. Almost a third (29%) experienced emotional or mental health challenges as a result.

Among the various groups, the Asian American community was the one that experienced the largest spike in harassment over the last year, jumping from 21% in 2021 to 39% in 2022.

While overall, only 8% of the people surveyed reported the online hate to police, that possible outcome didn’t even make the list for either the Jewish or Asian populations. They did outnumber their counterparts in reporting the problem to the platforms themselves, with 25% of them doing so compared to the average of 17% of the others.

Whether the platforms are doing enough in response is debatable. Online harassment in general has only gone down 5% in the last year, to 23%, and the rate of severe harassment only declined from 14% to 12%.

“Social media companies are nowhere near where they need to be when it comes to hate and harassment on their platforms,” said ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt upon release of the report, officially entitled “Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience 2022.”

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Through “Sara Puppi,” the Iranians unwittingly contacted Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency.

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“God bless the heroes, and bless the hands that did the deed,” an Arab-Israeli teacher wrote of the terror attack that left five people dead.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Education Minister Dr. Yifat Shasha-Biton ordered that a teacher be dismissed immediately if it is found to be true that she praised the terrorist who killed five people in B’nei Brak on social media.

In response to a Facebook post by an Arabic report on the attack, the teacher reportedly posted on her private page in Arabic, “God bless the heroes, and bless the hands that did the deed.”

The teacher is being summoned to an urgent meeting by the director-general of the ministry, which expressed its utter disgust with the comment.

“We strongly condemn the defamatory words attributed to the educational staff member,” the ministry statement said. “People who give backing to terrorist activity and/or call for incitement and harm to Israeli citizens will not be part of the education system.”

The unnamed educator works in the village of Basma in the Triangle, a concentration of Israeli Arab towns and villages in the Samarian foothills. According to her Facebook page, she is from Umm al-Fahm, the hometown of the two terrorists who carried out the Tuesday terror attack in Hadera, murdering two and injuring a dozen in a shooting attack. She received her degree from the University of Haifa, is married and currently lives in Haifa.

On Sunday, the Knesset’s Education, Culture and Sports Committee discussed the subject of “terrorist teachers” following the revelation that the assailant who murdered four people in a mixed ramming and stabbing attack last week in Beersheba was a school teacher who spread ISIS propaganda to his students.

According to committee chair MK Sharren Haskel, “We want to make sure that educators involved in terrorist activities are immediately expelled from the education system.”

There is great danger in the fact that over a fifth of the Arab teachers in the education system were trained “outside the State of Israel,” she said. This includes institutions run by the Palestinian Authority that are “hostile to the state,” whose syllabi are not examined by the ministry that hires their graduates.

“We are receiving signals from the field about hundreds of teachers educating against the State of Israel, and their students absorb those terrorist teachers’ anti-Zionist values,” Haskel said. She demanded that the police pass on to the Education Ministry any information they receive about complaints of Arab teachers inciting to terrorism.

MK Orit Strook of the opposition’s Religious Zionism party went further, requesting that the committee resolve to disqualify anyone who received their education degree in the PA from teaching in any Israeli schools. If not, she warned, “We’ll see more terror attacks by those teachers or their students.”

Fadi Abu Shkhaydam, a Hamas operative who carried out a deadly terror attack in the Old City of Jerusalem in November 2021, was an Islamic studies teacher at an eastern Jerusalem school and a salaried employee of the Jerusalem municipality. Comments made by the terrorist’s students after he was killed raised questions as to what he had been teaching his pupils over the years.

A young boy who studied under Abu Shkhaydam told Arabic-language news site al-Qastal that “he was the best teacher. He never cursed anyone or called anyone a bad name, except the Jews, may God burn them.”

At the time, MK Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed a law that “a committee be established to allow the dismissal of [Education Ministry] staff members who are involved in supporting terrorism or are associated with a terrorist organization.”

The legislator told Israel Hayom, “Those who are not loyal to Israel cannot be teachers in schools. Those who support terrorism must be thrown out of the classroom.”

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