I think it might be a good idea to have Zboray chat with MK Meir Sheetrit, the driving force behind Israel’s “Biometric Law.” Originally conceived as a means of preventing use of false identification cards and passports, the law has morphed into a test of civil liberties that many activists and citizens’ rights groups believe will make Israel a far less free society.

According to the law, all Israeli citizens will be required to submit their fingerprints and facial profiles to Interior Ministry agents or private organizations working on the Ministry’s behalf. The identification information will be recorded on a special chip in documents such as passport and identity cards. If an individual gets stopped at the airport, for example, the information on the card can be used to check the true ID of its bearer (ie, if the fingerprint on the card doesn’t match the fingerprint on the finger, there may be a problem). Everyone must join the program, and those who don’t could be tossed into jail.

While it sounds a bit draconian, it should be noted that there are many countries using biometric passports and ID cards. What makes Israel’s law different is what happens to the data once it’s collected; instead of remaining just on the card, the information will be transmitted to an Interior Ministry database, where it will be stored, the better to “check up” on miscreants and criminals. Along with the biometric information, the “usual” Interior Ministry information will be stored as well – making it very clear to whomever checks that you are X, with Y kids, who has entered and exited the country Z times, earns D amount annually, etc. While various safeguards are being built into the system, such as “extra strong encryption” and requiring a court order for access to the data, police will have access to the database under some circumstances.

For example, during a discussion of a Knesset committee convened to discuss the law (chaired by Sheetrit, himself a former Interior Minister), the question came up on how to identify individuals who aren’t carrying their documents. Thanks to the database, the answer is easy – just check their fingerprint or face profile against the records, and you know everything you need about the person. But should police have legal access to the database under such circumstances? Yes indeed, attorneys for the police said. Sheetrit suggested using the database as a last resort, requiring them to use “other reasonable means” to identify individuals before resorting to the database. That, said police attorneys, would require keeping the individuals detained for hours, creating a huge inconvenience for those who have nothing to hide; besides, defining what those “reasonable means” might be could be a hassle. In the end, reports of the session said, Sheetrit decided not to pursue the issue, because he was convinced that police had no nefarious intentions in wanting to access the database.

In a perfect world, where we trusted those who have power in society, the existence of the database itself probably wouldn’t matter too much. But we live in an all too imperfect world, says the No2Bio group, which warns that the database could eventually fall into the wrong hands, and be used for the wrong reasons. “Even in the explanatory notes to the bill being promoted by the Interior Ministry that would establish the database, experts warn that the existence of such a database could damage civil liberties, because any leaks could be used by criminals or hostile individuals against citizens,” the group says, adding that ensuring sufficient security would send the cost of the project skyrocketing, costing the state many millions of shekels it just doesn’t have.

In addition, the group says, the information in the database could be used even by authorized parties in the wrong manner, according to the current proposal. “The police will be able to, under court order, request information from the database for investigations into civil violations, as well as criminal ones.” That would include, for example, using the information to identify and prosecute individuals who joined a right wing (or left wing) protest, on charges of “disturbing the peace.” This applies not only to protesters, but also to dog walkers “who do not leash or muzzle their animals properly.” In other words, if the cops are out to get you, they’ll get you! And it’s not just the cops; outside organizations working on behalf of the Interior Ministry will be allowed to collect data, the group says – with your details eventually making their way to your bank, insurance company, employer, etc.

The law passed on its first reading last October, and is now being evaluated for its second and third reading. Much of the opposition to the law in the Knesset is being led by MK Michael Eitan, chairman of the Knesset Constitutional Committee, who feels that government is moving far too quickly on approving this law; indeed, in other places in the world where such databases are being implemented or contemplated – like Britain – the debate on the access limitations by authorities to their planned database has been going on for years.

While many Israelis are extremely upset about the law, others are less concerned – primarily because the government knows so much about us already. Income? Most salaried Israelis electronically transfer their salaries into their bank accounts anyway, so hiding income is pretty much out of the question. Health? Any Israeli who has gone through the army or national service (and that includes immigrants who applied but were exempted) can rest assured that their medical information is available to whatever hospital or health fund needs it.

Identity theft? Well, that is one of the things Sheetrit is very concerned about – he says that there are over 350,000 phony ID cards floating around – but chances are little will change, database or not; computers and card readers can run amok, and police are more likely to rely on their usual “profiling” techniques in order to determine whether the swarthy fellow standing before them really answers to the name “Gottenshtein.” I don’t mean to sound racist, but security is a way of life in Israel – out of necessity. Not that I’m happy that the Interior Ministry is collecting data about me for their collection, but we can’t deny the reality around us. And we have to remember – the people doing the collecting and analyzing are our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and landsmen.

Is that enough? Maybe, maybe not. But as security expert Zboray says, Israel’s big advantage over places like India and China is its people. While those countries are training thousands of computer engineers, says Zboray, they’re not quite ready to compete with Israeli innovation. “The cultural component fosters a lot of innovation and creativity in Israel, and that cultural component – the people, the Type A personalities with their drive, the fact that they are sensitive to issues like security – is a barrier to competition from India and Eastern Europe, where there is a high quality of talent.” We hope – and trust – that we can rely on Israelis’ good sense and the “strong cultural component” (ie, that we’re all Israelis and/or Jews, facing the same dangers, etc.) to push them to keep our information safe.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Israeli debate on biometric database melts down when MP starts screaming at blogger for videoing the proceedings (boingboing.net)

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!”

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tom Brokaw: What Can the Jews Learn from the Holocaust About Their Treatment of the Palestinians? (minx.cc)

And unfortunately, that goes double for Wikipedia’s Arabic language version. What an opportunity to break down stereotypes and promote understanding between strangers, even enemies – and they’re blowing it!

Unfortunately, if we are counting on the “brand name” of Wikipedia to help break down barriers and stereotypes, the site has a lot of work to do, it seems. Wikipedia, with its over 10 million articles (there are only 500,000 in the Encyclopedia Brittanica), is quickly becoming the de facto place to look for information, almost anywhere there is an internet; increasingly, the Wikipedia entry comes up first when you Google for information about almost anything these days.

How does Wikipedia make sure it stays more or less accurate? Through “peer-editing”; it is assumed that when inaccurate information is listed in an article, someone will come in and correct it, or at least present an opposing point of view (http://tinyurl.com/fccjr). According to the site, thousands of articles have been amended or rewritten since Wikipedia came into being on 2001, thus proving the validity of the system.

But what happens when you have a society that has a very definite set of “everybody knows” beliefs – where inaccuracies and outright lies plague Wikipedia articles, but no one does anything about it, because everyone believes them? If somebody writes that the earth is flat in an article, and all the peers believe that the earth is flat, then readers who are counting on the information in Wikipedia are going to read that the earth is flat, and that’s all they’re going to hear. So the system isn’t foolproof.

Unfortunately, this “what if” scenario is not theoretical, but what actually happens on pages I checked out in the Arabic language version of Wikipedia (http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki). Many Westerners get nervous when they see Arabic writing, like there must be some terrorist-oriented message embedded in the text; but thanks to the miracle of Google Translations (http://translate.google.com/translate_t#), Arabic, along with dozens of other languages, no longer need be a mystery. While clearly not professional translations, Google returns a good enough rendering of a page that (usually) gives you a pretty clear picture of what the site in question is trying to say.

I don’t read or speak Arabic, but thanks to Google Translations, I’m able to get a much better insight into the point of view of Arabic speakers online. My method: Type in a search term at the translation site, then copy the resulting Arabic characters and do a Google search for them, then click on the “translate this page” link on results.

Using this method to Google for “hot-button” items like Israel, Jew, Zionism, etc., returns results like you would unfortunately expect, in many cases. Which is what led me to Wikipedia. Interestingly, in Arabic language Google searches, Wikipedia entries were usually at the top of the list, too. That’s good, I thought – wouldn’t Arabic language Wikipedia pages be translations of English language pages on the same subject? Not that I’m such a fan of Wikipedia’s point of view on Israel and Jewish-oriented issues, but it’s a lot more palatable than what many of the “native” Arabic sites present.

But it turns out that Arabic Wikipedia (AW) is not necessarily a translation of English language Wikipedia (EW). While as I mentioned, the Google Translation rendering of these pages is clearly not totally accurate, the discrepancies between AW and EW were so great that you quickly realize that the two versions have very little to do with each other, at least on the hot-button issues. Which to me is a major problem; Wikipedia is such an authority today that if a Wikipedia page says, for example, that the Haganah’s fighting against Arab villages in Palestine before the establishment of Israel is a “genocide,” akin to the Holocaust or the genocide in Rwanda, how can we be surprised when kids in Ramallah, Jenin or Gaza rally behind suicide bombers who wantonly kill Israeli women and children? Wouldn’t we have been happy if Polish Jews conducted an “intifada” against the Nazis? (Note that there is a separate AW page titled “Gaza Holocaust,” referring to a battle in Gaza in March of this year, in which Hamas said 116 Gaza residents were killed).

Of course, you won’t find a hint on AW of what was well documented by the Haganah during the War of Liberation – how residents of these Arab villages actively took part in the war, giving themselves the status of combatants, or how the vast majority ran away when told to do so by the Arab armies invading the newly established state of Israel, the better to clear out and give the Arab Legion a clear field to perpetrate a genocide of their own, against the Jews. Of course, one man’s terror attack is another’s “freedom fight,” as the old saying goes, but you have to really be out there in anti-Israel land to claim that the Haganah conducted a near-genocide against anyone, especially given the well-known and time-and-again proven historical facts.

Among the historic genocides listed on the AW page are the Cambodian genocide, the Rwanda genocide, “French massacres in Algeria from 1830 to 1962” (more about that later), the “Armenian genocide,” (ditto), and others. The next paragraph on this page reads: “Human history has witnessed several cases of mass murder, but the debate is the use of the term genocide by around the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, because this group is the core purpose of genocide, but difficult to demonstrate.” Listed here is “Mongol invasion of Baghdad,” “Annihilation of Native Americans (Indians),” and – “Massacres against the Palestinians by gangs Haganah Jewish at the beginning of the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

Politics, of course, plays heavily on anything having to do with Jerusalem, and the AW page on the city makes for interesting reading. Prominent on the AW page, for example, are references to “the Judaization of Jerusalem.” The introductory line says “Jerusalem is the largest city of historic Palestine under Israeli control today,” and the city’s status “as the capital of a  Palestinian state within a Palestinian declaration of independence,” is the second sentence, while Security Council 476 and 478 are the context for the mention of the city as Israel’s capital (the resolutions condemned Israel’s unification of the city). Interestingly, the history of Jerusalem on the AW and EW pages are quite different, with Canaanites and Egyptians stressed far more strongly on the AW page (the “debate” link on this page makes clear why).

As far as the entry for Jews goes, the article seemed pretty balanced, except for a comparison of Purim to Halloween (wearing costumes and getting drunk), and of Chanukah to Christmas (gift giving) – false stereotypes Western Jews worked hard to debunk. That, and a discussion as to how the Jews and the Children of Israel are not the same entity (not very clear, but appears to be not very complimentary). Plus, a reference to “Aerosmith: Crazy,” which I always thought was a song by that rock group, but turns out to be, when you click on the link, a discussion of a heavy Quranic concept! The entry on Israel recited the country’s familiar history, but key elements (“In 1947, the world witnessed the partition of Palestine, which gave the Jews living in Palestine 55% of the land, when they accounted for 30% of the population”) are just plain wrong.

Besides issues that concern us, Wikipedia gives us an insight into how Arabs see their own history. There is no reference to a century of French genocide in Algeria in EW, but there is a page dedicated to the Sétif massacre, in which French troops shot and killed Algerian rioters (as few as 1,100, or as many as 45,000, depending on who you believe). Most interesting was the AW entry on the Armenian genocide, compared to the EW entry. On the AW page, it appears as if the Armenians were in league with the Russians to fight the Ottoman Turks, and the Armenians died in the general starvation of World War I, like everyone else (ie, there was no “genocide,” and even if there was, the Armenians had it coming, because they acted like “a fifth column” in Turkey, armed by the Russians). The EW page on this subject has the more familiar version of an organized extermination of the Armenians.

The disparity between the two versions is really wide – which means that one of the Wikipedias isn’t getting the story right. I could go on, but you get the idea. Like a Tower of Babel, Wikipedia aims to build a body of knowledge that all humanity can benefit from. But if we’re not speaking the same language – figuratively and intellectually, not just literally – what chance do we have of making that happen? And should Wikipedia be lending its authoritative name to the process?

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.