Watchdog Decries ‘Anti-Semitic Whirlwind’ on Mexican Twitter
A Spanish phrase about Jews set off “a whirlwind of anti-Semitic” messages on Twitter and became the second-most popular hashtag among Mexican users, according to a watchdog.
“The hashtag #EsdeJudios exposes the antisemitisim of Mexican Tweeter surfers,” said a statement by the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism.
The international organization said the phrase, which means “just like Jews,” was second-most popular in Mexico on Jan. 18.
The Forum documented Holocaust jokes on Twitter feeds from Mexico and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. One of them, by a user identified as Erik Negrete Ozuna, said the difference between Jews and pizzas was that the latter don’t scream in the oven.
“There appeared again the ovens, the soaps and the ashes,” the statement by the Forum read, “but there were also classical antisemitic labels: stingy usurers for example, and references to Israel as an occupying force.’
Nahui Ollin, another Twitter user, attached the hashtag #JustlikeJews to a tweet reading “making films about the evil Nazis and shooting down Palestinians to steal their land.”
On Friday, the hashtag’s frequency was between five and ten times an hour and some of the tweets condemned anti-Semitism or were pro-Jewish and pro-Israel.
Separately, a Jan. 24 French court order required the micro-blogging platform to divulge details about users who violate French law by spreading hate speech.
The Union of French Jewish Students filed the lawsuit after anti-Semitic jokes and statements proliferated among French Twitter users under the hashtag #unbonjuif (“a good Jew”).
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
