Offensive tweet that caused so much hurt

SANDRA White has been on Twitter for nearly five years. In social media terms, that’s equivalent to several Ice Ages and a fair stretch of the Byzantine Empire.

During those five years, White has tweeted more than 8,000 times and amassed more than 6,500 followers. you would think, then, that she would know how to use the retweet button – a clever little device that allows you to place other people’s tweets into your own timeline. It’s so smart, it even inquires if you want to retweet the first time you press it.

Last week, White used it to retweet a disgusting, anti-Semitic cartoon.

White, who has since apologised, says the tweet was ‘accidental’. Perhaps it was. Touch screens are finicky things, especially when left to their own devices in handbags. But it should nevertheless be noted that White knows her way around social media. This was hardly granny’s first day on Twitter.

The whole situation was compounded by the fact that, according to the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (ScoJec), White then proceeded to leave the cartoon on her Twitter feed for three days. Three days! That’s an awfully long time on Twitter – particularly when you are in politics.

unsurprisingly, ScoJec is unimpressed. It described the cartoon as ‘blatantly anti-Semitic’ and ‘reminiscent of the very worst of Nazi propaganda’.

While the First Minister was quick to issue an apology to ScoJec, the muted reaction by many within the SNP is intriguing. Can you imagine the backlash had a Tory MSP retweeted something similar?

unfortunately, there is a wider context here. Scotland is one of the only countries in Europe that has never had a pogrom. The Jewish population here is small, but highly integrated.

A few years ago, I interviewed Rabbi Chaim Jacobs, one of the country’s Jewish leaders, who has lived in Scotland with his family for almost 50 years.

‘We never felt anything but warmth and friendliness here,’ he told me. ‘Whereever we’ve gone, people couldn’t do enough to accommodate us.’

yet, worryingly, that appears to be changing.

In a report published earlier this year entitled What’s Changed About Being Jewish in Scotland, funded by the Scottish government, ScoJec expressed concerns that the Scottish parliament had a ‘disproportionate focus on Israel’. It also cited an ‘unprecedented surge’ in anti-Semitic incidents in Scotland in the summer of 2014.

Since the last election, 62 of the 355 motions about foreign countries in the Scottish parliament have been about Israel, compared with only 13 about Syria and 15 about Iraq. White has proposed nine of those motions – the highest of any MSP – and supported 20 of the motions that strongly condemned Israel.

ScoJec says that this is one of the reasons why Scotland’s Jewish community is ‘anxious, worried, scared’.

It has a point. While there is no reason that the Scottish government should not have its say on foreign matters, even though it has little influence on international affairs, it seems counter-intuitive and dangerous to do so when it is damaging relationships at home.

White’s tweet – whether accidental or not – has damaged an already fragile trust with a community that feels marginalised. And that’s the sort of wound that can take an Ice Age to heal.