Amnesty ‘turns its back’ on antisemitism — again

NGO’s vast survey of abusive tweets sent to female MPs and journalists omits Jew-hate

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has been accused of “turning its back” on Jews after it published a vast study on the abuse faced by female politicians and journalists on Twitter without mentioning antisemitism.

The human rights NGO’s report, which analysed millions of tweets received by 778 selected journalists and politicians from the UK and the US, concluded that black women were “disproportionately targeted” by “abusive or problematic tweets”.

Amnesty said that there is not “enough data” to explore the antisemitic, misogynistic abuse of MPs such as Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth, despite the fact that the issue was the subject of a conference in Westminster three weeks ago.

The organisation published a similar survey of Twitter abuse against women in September 2017, also without mentioning Jew-hate.

Writing in the JC, Mark Gardner, the Community Security Trust’s director of communications, said: “Amnesty has, in just over a year, issued two reports on misogyny, racism and social media that make no mention of antisemitism.”

He added that Jews “instinctively expect [their] support, we need it more than ever, but we are still being denied it.

“Jews will fight antisemitism alone, but we will never win alone. To halt and reverse the current trend, we need all those who claim an air of moral superiority and leadership to stand up and be counted.

“This goes for churches, trade unions, politicians, academics and anti-racism groups, of whom Amnesty is one of the most important. Every time they turn their backs on us, we become further isolated and antisemitism is emboldened. Their silences could hardly be louder.”

Claudia Mendoza, the Jewish Leadership Council’s director of policy and public affairs, condemned the abuse against MPs such as Diane Abbott but said it was “even more important” that Amnesty look at Jew hate, considering that such abuse has occurred from within Amnesty itself. In 2012, Amnesty campaigns manager Kristyan Benedict tweeted an antisemitic joke about three Jewish MPs.

Publishing the results of their Troll Patrol project on Tuesday, Amnesty produced a diagram illustrating the ethnic background of those receiving abuse, which differentiated between women of black, Latin, Asian, mixed race and white backgrounds.

Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK, said the survey backs up “what women have long been saying — that Twitter is endemic with racism, misogyny and homophobia”.

Danny Stone, chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust (APT), criticised the failure to include any analysis of antisemitic abuse.

Three weeks ago, research commissioned by the CST and the APT showed Jewish women in Parliament face a disproportionate amount of antisemitic

abuse online. Mr Stone told the JC: “This [Amnesty] report makes for shocking reading; it is appalling, the extent of the abuse women experience online.

“Last month, we helped organise the Sara Conference to shine a light on the growing and frightening overlap of misogyny and antisemitism, particularly online.

“That conference marked the beginning of a conversation which, judging by the omission of Jewish women from this report, is very much required.”

One MP, who asked not to be named, said it was “beyond comprehension” why Amnesty had not identified abuse aimed directly at Jewish women in their study.

Amnesty said its findings were the result of a collaboration between Amnesty International and Element AI, an artificial intelligence software product company.

Using cutting-edge data science and machine learning techniques, they said they were able to provide a quantitative analysis of the unprecedented scale of online abuse against women in the UK and USA.

An Amnesty spokesperson told the JC: “Despite our best efforts, we didn’t have enough data about the Jewish background of the women in our sample — this was publicly available for women MPs in the UK but not for the journalists in our study.

“It was a level of analysis we were keen to make, together with disaggregation of abuse by women’s sexual orientation, but that meta-data is much harder to research.

“That is why we are reinforcing our calls to Twitter to release meaningful data on how it responds to reports of abuse, in particular abusive tweets that direct hate against a protected category.”

Amnesty’s study found black women were 84 per cent more likely than white women to be subjected to abusive tweets. One in 10 posts mentioning black women contained “abusive or problematic” language.

Ms Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary, urged Twitter to take action over “highly offensive racist and misogynist” abuse on the platform.

Milena Marin, senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty, said: “Although abuse is targeted at women across the political spectrum, women of colour were much more likely to be impacted, and black women are disproportionately targeted.”

This shows the Sara conference was required’