There are plenty of people out there who hate Israel – and Jews. Many people have provided advice on how to deal with them (we won’t go into it here), and we Jews and Israelis are used to people disliking us. And we ourselves have plenty of complaints about the state of things. But these hypocrites have no business complaining about us, when they are so transparently full of hate. For example, it could be that the Hawaiian settler described below pays lip service to the Free Hawaii movement. But as they say, “haki balash” – talk is cheap. The bottom line is that he is living a hypocritical life, as a white settler, stealing the land and resources of the indigenous peoples of Hawaii – the exact thing he accuses Israelis of doing.

Any Israeli attempt at making peace is just a ruse to occupy more land – in other words, Israelis are bad by definition, and the only “right” thing they can do is disappear, ie leave “Palestine,” roll up their tents and move to the moon (maybe). There can be no good Israelis – even the Jews whose families have been here for generations are “settlers,” and must leave for their “countries of origin,” where of course the Holocaust-denying Hawaiian settlers of the world will “welcome” them. But about their own hypocritical lifestyle we hear nothing. From them, that is – but I intend to make sure as many people see this as possible. In my opinion, this is an excellent way to deal with internet anti-Semites – expose them for what they are and keep them on the defensive. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” as someone from another religion once said. If you have any comments, please drop me a line at the e-mail address on the main page.

I apologize for the lengthy preamble; now for the “main event.”

You know how during the spring, when you start working in your garden again, you have to get rid of the detritus – the leaves, rocks, etc. – that have piled up in the winter? And you know how sometimes when you move a rock or a pile of old leaves, you uncover a community of very strange and icky looking bugs? And you know how gross you feel when you see those bugs?

That’s how I felt when I prepared this column. I’ve been turning over rocks around the internet, trying to dig up dirt on some of the most prolific anti-Israel and anti-Jewish writers out there. Actually, “dirt” isn’t the right word – they’re already covered up in muck and mire, and even a long, hot bath with their mommy washing their mouths out with soap won’t fix things.

You may not be aware of it, but there’s a burgeoning (and growing) mini-industry on the internet, consisting of blogs that truck in the most despicable anti-Jewish lies out there. Of course, the authors of these sites take great pains to point out that they’re merely “anti-Zionist,” or that “it’s a minority of the Jews who are responsible.” But their writings are straight out of the Dark Ages, with references to Jewish mass murder, well-poisoning (’“Jews poison wells in the West Bank with the condoning of the Israeli government,” says one blog written by a well-known American anti-Semite), and worse – with even the medieval blood libel charge being revived. Well-meaning rational people – both Jewish and otherwise – sometimes attempt to argue back or present facts in the talkback forums on these blogs, only to be shot down or censored, so the only point of view permitted by commenters is the one that confirms the sick views of the blog author.

Why get myself in a tizzy over this? That’s the obvious question, especially since this isn’t anything new. I could answer that in several ways – that in the past, ignoring this kind of thing did not prove beneficial to Jews – quite the opposite. Or I could say that it’s important that we as a community be aware of the how the other side is using internet technology to convert hearts and minds to their hate cause. That’s certainly something we need to understand. The real reason? It just makes me mad to see these people getting away with this crap.

As I mentioned, you can’t “prove” anything to these people; it’s impossible to have a conversation with them. What’s the point of trying to “convince” them of anything? They’ve got their agenda, and that’s it. The best way to fight them, I believe, is to discredit them – to show them up for the liars and hypocrites they really are. In all likelihood, the “true believers” won’t be negatively affected when they see that their heroes have feet of clay; but it may sow the seeds of doubt, and since their beliefs already rest on a termite-ridden foundation of hate, that extra little doubt may be enough to topple them altogether!

So, what I’ve done is gather information – freely available on the internet – on several of the more prominent internet anti-Semitic “personalities.” I’ve brought as many examples as space allows, and I have many others. But in the vast majority of cases, these internet Jew haters are living hypocritical lifestyles, often guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse “the Zionists” of doing!

For example, one of the premier internet anti-Semites runs his site (and home business) from the suburbs of Honolulu, Hawaii. This blogger, who claims to know “what really is happening” in the world, is a radical leftist/liberal type, whose site gets a fair amount of traffic, and seems to be a source of material for many other anti-Semitic blogs. Most of his content consists of links to “legitimate” news sites, with his commentary.

Of course, one of his favorite targets is “the Occupation” by Israel of Judea and Samaria/the West Bank (I put both terms in to ensure that the focus is on the subject, not the politics). “The settlers” are this, the settlers are that, the settlers are worse than Nazis – anyone whose perused any of these sites will get the idea. An opinion and a token will get you a subway ride, as the saying goes – meaning that everyone is entitled to one. But reading his site, I’ve never seen this fellow address his own sins of occupation – the one where he is part of the horde of mainland Americans who have occupied Hawaii, breaking treaties signed with the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii (http://www.freehawaii.org/). Now, that may sound a bit far-fetched, especially to those of us who grew up in the U.S. – but apparently, there are a fair number of Hawaiians who don’t think so. The main point, however, is that it would appear that someone who is guilty of occupying someone else’s land (both the blogger and his wife are definitely not of Polynesian or other South Pacific stock) is the last person who should be wagging his finger at Israelis!

Interestingly, further Googling shows that this person apparently worked in Hollywood, as a visual effects producer, on several TV series and movies. Did he do something to get himself thrown out of “Jewish Hollywood?” Note, incidentally, that I haven’t mentioned this person’s name, or site; the reason is that Wikipedia recently banned a biography page on this guy, because he’s famous only among conspiracy theory nuts. He hasn’t been mentioned in the real media enough, and I don’t intend to help him (if you want details, drop me an e-mail).

Then there’s the blogger who, apparently operating from an apartment in French Hill, Jerusalem, supplies his readers with the up to the minute news – from Gaza! Of course, all the “news” is about how evil the IDF is, how Gazans suffer, etc. Again, I am not making a political call here; Israeli policy in Gaza is certainly something that should – must – be discussed and analyzed. But not here, not by this guy, who purports to promote “peace in the desert.” He’s just the wrong man for the job!

While he may have e-mail contacts in Gaza, it would seem to me to be a bit condescending for him to be speaking for native Gazans, who are probably capable of portraying their own situation at least as effectively as he does, from dozens of kilometers away. What, he’s got some special insight they don’t? But even more – the writer of this blog is himself apparently Jewish, an immigrant from New York, a resident of the State of Israel for over two decades! And while we would defend the right of any member of any ethnic group or religion to take any side s/he wishes in a political dispute, it again seems a bit much for a total outsider to portray a culture and lifestyle that he has no part in. He doesn’t even live in the neighborhood, for G-d’s sake! And the fact that he, too, “occupies” an apartment on land (in Jerusalem) that the Palestinians see as their own – while he purports to be helping them out – is mind-boggling, to say the least.

Finally, we come to “radio personality” Alex Jones (he’s well known enough to have a Wikipedia page already), whom almost every anti-Jewish blogger sees as a guru. Jones is a well-known conspiracy theorist who believes that the world is run by the Rockefellers, the Trilatarel Commission, the Bilderberg Group, etc. He’s been around for a long time and his radio broadcasts are available on many web sites.

I have to admit that I have never heard him utter the word “Jew” outright in connection with any of these conspiracies (not that I’m such a devoted listener), but the hints that “the Jews” are behind it all have been quite broad and leading, to say the least. Well, according to Jones’ Wikipedia biography page, “the Alex Jones Show radio program is broadcast live from Emmis Communications’ KLBJ Radio in Austin, Texas.” The CEO of Emmis? Jeff Smulyan, winner of, among other things, the Jewish National Fund’s Tree of Life Award (http://tinyurl.com/cc2pc6)! Interestingly, I have never seen Smulyan’s name on the lists of Jews who run the media on the anti-Semitic sites. Could it be they don’t want to make their “rebbe,” Jones, look bad? After all, his salary is being paid by “Jew media!”

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Not that the other side is “winning” – when it comes to internet dominance, Israel’s got the competition beat hands down. But the hackers and crackers who are out in force right now, seeking out Israeli and Jewish content web sites to deface, are like swarms of annoying insects. If you spray – i.e. install protective measures on web sites – you can keep them at bay. But if they sniff weakness – security holes that web site administrators are supposed to be on top of – they’ll swoop in, invading web servers and replacing the content with anti-Israel propaganda.

Over the past week, hundreds of Israeli and Jewish sites have been compromised, with anti-Israel propaganda, consisting of messages, graphics and video, installed on sites they take over (you can see a whole gallery of such sites at http://www.arabic-m.com). And propaganda it is; the photos the hackers display of injured Gazans are heartbreaking, but after all, photos aren’t always what they seem, as we learned during the Second Lebanon War, documented at http://tinyurl.com/axlt5f, http://tinyurl.com/8sgvfu, and http://tinyurl.com/g2p9n, among others.

The attacks are sophisticated; you have to give them that, to the extent of being able to hijack a whole domain name server (http://tinyurl.com/7bsauq). According to experts I’ve spoken with, we’re dealing with a professional crew of hackers who are probably working for the “axis of evil” governments in the countries they live in (including Syria and Iran). With the right protection, though, sites can be made safe.

But just “being safe” somehow just doesn’t satisfy in a situation like this; you feel like you want to do more. How is it that they can get away with hacking our sites without feeling some pain on their side? Don’t we have hackers – or any other offensive weapons – to fight back with? What can an ordinary, non-programming person do to defend his or her country?

The answer is yes, there is something you can do – and you don’t have to be a hacker to take some offensive action. Legal, even! As we all know, hacking is generally looked upon askance by the law, and while I don’t think anyone who hacks an anti-Semitic web site has to worry about being arrested, they may find themselves with a lawsuit on their hands.

However, there is a perfectly legal way to get back at bad sites – sites that skew the facts or tell outright lies about Jews and Israel. How? Just by being a nudnik – the more obnoxious, the better. The sites that describe in detail how Israel controls the world and is planning to drag all the goyim into World War III have to be hosted somewhere. All you have to do is run a traceroute on the domain name of the site and find out the actual numerical IP address the site uses. That address is registered to a web site provider, somewhere in the world. Using an online tool, you can track ownership of that address – and when you do, it’s time to open up your e-mail program and write a scathing letter, complaining at the poor quality of sites hosted on the company’s servers (and the fact that it is promoting racism, anti-Semitism, and libelous accusations). Mention the fact that your uncle is a lawyer, and chances are you’ll get satisfaction – doing as good a job of booting a site off the internet as a hacker would, or even better!

It’s actually far less complicated than it sounds. You may already have a traceroute program installed in your computer, but you can also use an online traceroute took; at http://www.geektools.com/traceroute.php, just choose one of the many links (grouped by country; for our purposes, it doesn’t matter which one you select. The Israel links are pretty reliable). Type in the name of the host (www.hostname.com, without the http:// at the beginning). The system will begin seeking out the true home of the host, and after about 13 or so “hops,” it will present you with an IP address.

Copy that address and surf on over to http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp, which will look for the physical location of the server that IP address is associated with – and usually, the name of the hosting company that provides the address. And that’s all you need; you can surf to the hosting site and get the appropriate e-mail, to write your complaint to the system administrator, director, or other bigwig who takes complaints. Chances are the site administrators or owners do not realize what screed they are hosting, by the way; there’s no law that says they have to check up on the work done by their clients. And while they have no legal obligation to respond positively to your complaints, they probably will, in order not to get a bad reputation, as well as to get you off their back.

If you’d rather let someone else do the hacking for you, by the way, check out http://www.help-israel-win.org/, where they have an application you can download and install that uses group computer technology (sort of like SETI, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, http://www.seti.org) – except their application attacks anti-Israel web sites. I don’t know if it’s legal, but it is easy.

But why take chances? With my way, you know you’re safe – and you get the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of your work. I know the anti-Israel crowd is going to flip if people use this tactic, which is easy and requires very little, if any, technical skill; “the Jews own all the web hosting sites,” etc., which could be, but is unlikely. Fortunately, there are plenty of people – of all types – who have self-respect, and who don’t want to be known as the type of people who spread lies and hate. If anyone wants to take this job on (it’s really not hard, and it does get results) and doesn’t know how to proceed (after reading the instructions carefully, of course), please write and I’ll do what I can to help.

You’d think that it would be difficult to disprove the Holocaust, what with all the documentation and testimony – but there they are, ready at the drop of a hat to “prove” that there was no way millions of Jews could have been burned in the furnaces of the death camps, because the ovens were too small and too inefficient to burn the bodies.

They have a great deal of difficulty understanding that six million Jews could be killed over the course of eight or so years. Yet you never hear them disputing the Rwandan genocide, which, had it gone on for a similar amount of time at the same rate of murder, would have claimed about 25 million victims.

But like so many other things in life, Holocaust denial – and deniers – are one of those annoyances that never seem to go away. As long as there is anti-Semitism in the world (and it’s almost always linked to anti-Zionism today), there are going to be those who will ignore the plain facts. These people can’t be – and refuse to try to be – educated.

You can’t argue with these people (although if you were going to, anything you would need to know about how to do it would be here). There is only one response appropriate for Holocaust deniers, but it’s not appropriate to discuss in a column like this.

I’m much more concerned with the normal people, Jews and non-Jews, who accept the reality and historicity of the Holocaust. For all the information, books, stories, personal testimonies and school projects, there are still many people who have only a sketchy idea of what the Jews of Europe went through during the Shoah.

According to Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, “There is tremendous ignorance about the Holocaust, people who don’t know what the Holocaust is. What I’d like to see you do is to fight ignorance. What we can do is to learn, study and remember.”

If this is true for educated adults, it’s even more accurate for kids, at the grade school, high school and even university levels. That lack of education, says Lipstadt, means there is a vacuum when it comes to knowledge about the Holocaust, and vacuums tend to get filled – one way or another. Thus, without preventive measures, Holocaust deniers get an opportunity to spread their poison.

There are several archives and compendia of Holocaust information on the Internet, but the well organized ones do not lend themselves to casual surfing (i.e. you have to know what you’re looking for), while many others give only cursory attention to many important details. What’s needed, in my opinion, is a resource that will be approachable by kids and others who are more in tune with the cyber way of doing things, enabling them to access information using a format they understand and are used to. Like a wiki.

A wiki, as most people know by now, is a collaborative effort by many people working together to build a body of information. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, attempts to define and classify everything within the sphere of human knowledge. But there are many other wikis that deal with more limited areas of knowledge – like geography, history, TV and specific TV shows. (A partial list of public wikis can be seen here.) Wikis are also big in business and especially in schools, because they allow many users to work together on a project, creating results as well as community.

That’s why the wiki model would be my choice for recording and disseminating information about the Holocaust, especially the aspects of it that are not as well known to many people, such as life in communities in Europe before and during the war, individual and family stories and experiences, and the fate of the survivors. While many schools and organizations have done individual projects in some of these areas, there is no single compendium available for them to pool their information, to allow themselves and others to get a fuller picture of the events.

Imagine a scenario where schools from around the world would work together on wiki pages describing the experiences of Jews in Polish villages occupied by the Nazis, and their subsequent detention in ghettos and deportation to work and death camps. A page could be dedicated to each village, with descriptions of the communities, daily life before and during World War II and the fate of individuals whose stories have been told. Chances are that survivors and their children, who may have been interviewed already in the context of a class project, are scattered throughout the world.

Schools and groups working together could contribute what they know, with others filling in the gaps for a more complete picture. Eventually, you would get a rich, detailed view of life in prewar and Holocaust-era Europe, where the experience of those who were persecuted gets a perspective usually found only in books – with students and others committed to the information that they are contributing to, accessible to them using methods they can understand.

It’s also the perfect antidote to the Holocaust deniers, showing them up for the isolated nut jobs they are, instead of the “academics being persecuted for their alternative views” persona they try to cloak themselves with. Once the facts are out there in an easy to access format, using resources available to everyone, these jerks don’t have a chance. Other benefits of using a wiki can be seen here.

So what do you need to start a wiki? Not much – just some dedicated people willing to run it (and especially to make sure that only relevant information goes in), a place to host it and wiki software, like Ziwiki, which will not only let you set up a wiki, but host it as well. You could also build the framework off-line by using one of the many free wiki software packages available.

There are lots of organizations that could take this project upon themselves. One of them should, not only because the deniers need to be shouted down, but because the stories of the Holocaust need to be told – in a way that everyone can hear.