White Power Groups Pose As Palestinian Supporters To Stir Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitic, White supremacist groups are exploiting the opposition to the Israeli war against Hamas by masquerading on social media as groups that are fighting “Zionism and Zionist hate.”
Since the Hamas attack against Israel on Oct. 7, white nationalists have shifted to pro-Palestinian rhetoric to gain greater attention. One of the on-line groups growing in popularity, “Stop Zionist Hate,” pretends to be a non-governmental organization (NGO) that is the “Leading non-partisan American based organization fighting Zionists and Zionist hate.” The group claims to have 27,000 followers on its X site, formerly Twitter.
The group cloaks itself as one of many left wing organizations that have formed to support the Palestinians in Gaza. A closer examination of the organization shows it is populated by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
“But the vast majority of its content is anything but vanilla,” said Elad Nehorai, a writer who specializes in antisemitism, extremism and their intersection. His writing can be found in the Daily Beast, The Forward and his newsletter. He is the organizer of XOutHate, a campaign of Jewish leaders calling for major advertisers to drop ads on X.
In a story on MSNBC, Nehorai wrote that Stop Zionist Hate achieves “high engagement and awareness rates by sharing upsetting and horrifying examples of hate — in Stop Zionist Hate’s case, from ‘Zionists’ (usually far-right supporters of Israel) directed at pro-Palestinian activists, Muslims and others.”
“Since white nationalists are not focused only on Jews, accounts like Stop Zionist Hate are not in any sense about helping Palestinians,” Nehorai wrote. “The goal is, in marketing parlance, to segment their audiences. By focusing only on Israel and spreading only antisemitism, they can achieve one objective. But the technique, if unchecked, will be used against others.”
The @StopZionistHate account on X is crafted to appear to be a legitimate, fact-based organization. It uses a corporate-looking logo and boasts its fact-checking by “our very own news wire” which it calls “TruWire, offering “Breaking News From Around the Globe.” The @StopZionistHate site has links with #Trump2024ToSaveAmerica.
One tweet on @TruWire referred to a recent demonstration in New York City in support of Palestinians. Below a photo of the protest, the site offers a fairly objective report that “New Yorkers march in silence through midtown today to honor the memory of the Palestinians killed in recent months. They were seen chanting, ‘ceasefire now.’”
But the tweets get progressively darker. TruWire goes on to tweet, “Watch: Israeli soldier brags about killing a 12-year-old Palestinian girl. He regrets that he didn’t find babies to kill.”
And “South Africa initiates legal proceedings against the State of Israel in the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention.”
Another tweet reports, “Breaking News: 17 Palestinians killed and a large number of injured arrive at Kuwait Hospital as a result of an Israeli airstrike on a house belonging to the Diab family near Al-Nakhla Street, Central Rafah.”
A fact check by checkyourfact.com, however, determined that the video was not shot in Lebanon or Palestine but was posted by Jamil Alhasaan, a Syrian journalist, reporting on the conflict in Syria. Alhasaan tweeted that the attack was in Qardaha, a town that is the hometown of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Stop Zionist Hate also doxxes and engages in mass harassment campaigns to get supporters of Israel fired. One post shows pro-Palestine marchers demonstrating in Roanoke, Va., while a counter-demonstrator identified as James Nottingham, an employee at Yokohama Tire, shouts “Kill all Palestinians.” The post urges readers to complain about Nottingham by emailing company safety director, Neil Dalton@yokohamatire.com or the Executive VP, Production,.Osamu.Zushi@yokohamatire.com.
A related post on Stop Zionist Hate explained that “Nottingham’s actions have also drawn attention to his personal life, including his connection to Bobbilou Nottingham,” who is identified as Nottingham’s wife who works at Carolin Clinic, a pediatric care clinic in Roanoke.
Another post claims that “A Palestinian-owned restaurant named Burgertory was irreparably burned in Australia yesterday, in what is alleged to be a zionist terrorist attack. Just before the arson attack, zionist hate groups targeted the owner online. There is still no suspect.”
A further check, not noted in the post, showed that the police ruled out religious or political motives for the incident.
Nehorai said that social media audience growth has exploded for white nationalists on X who have pivoted to pro-Palestinian content. It notes that Jackson Hinkle’s tweets have grown from 500,000 to 2 million followers; CensoredMen from 200,000 to 700,000; Lucas Gage, 100,000 to 200,000 Keith Woods, 70,000 to 150,000; Jake Shields, 400,000 to 550,000; Ryan Dawson, 75,000 to 150,000; and Lord Bebo, 155,000 to 275,000.
Hinkle has been described as a MAGA, right wing conspiracist who is one of the most zealous users on X. Hinkle hosts the political show “The Dive with Jackson Hinkle.” Hinkle has attracted attention for his tweets regarding the Israel-Hamas War and was labeled by The Jewish Chronicle as one of the “most viral misinformation spreaders” in regards to the conflict. With posts reaching more than 20 million views as of November 2023, Hinkle reached 2 million followers on X, where he offers a premium subscription to those willing to help him “DEFEAT THE ZIONIST LIES.”
Hinkle has begun spreading the idea that “Zionists” at @RockstarGames are releasing “sexualized video games for children,” a classic antisemitic trope about Jews’ exploiting children. Rockstar Games Inc. is an American video game company and there is no evidence that Rockstar Games is Zionist or related to Zionism in any way.
In August 2023, Bloomberg reported that Hinkle had requested antisemitic AI-generated images of “satanic George Soros” using a tool called Midjourney. In October 2023, Hinkle shared a fake news release stating that the United States was sending billions of dollars in aid to Israel. He also published fake news on the arrival of the U.S. Marines in Israel, using an image from July 2022 in Romania that was unrelated to Israel.
Hinkle has a history of posting pro-Russian and far-right commentary. In April 2022, the Tech Transparency Project said the show was peddling “Putin propaganda” on the Twitch social media site. Hinkle has since been removed from Twitch and YouTube.
Counterextremism.com reported that Gage is an American neo-Nazi who served as the former chairman of the National Youth Front, a white nationalist hate group. On Dec. 20, he was suspended from X for three months for violating platform rules about violent speech.
Shields is a mixed martial artist and submission grappler and MAGA influencer who opposed the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent vote to keep trump off the primary ballot. He also has been a vocal critic of Israel, and cited that “whiteness is great.”
Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, has maintained relationships with the far right in the U.S. O’Brien is a leading figure in the Irish far-right movement and spoke at a white supremacist conference in Tennessee this summer. Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who met with trump last year at Mar-a-Lago, has hosted O’Brien on his online show several times, while Musk has responded directly to O’Brien on X, particularly around a new anti-hate-speech law in Ireland. Woods is a self-described “raging antisemite.”
Dawson, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, was reinstated on X in January as was Fuentes. Lord Bebo describes himself as “Anti Woke, Anti hypocrisy, Anti fake news!”
An affiliated project of Stop Zionist Hate is the “Raven Mission,” which claims to be a “grassroots watchdog affiliate project of Stop Zionist Hate,” “dedicated to exposing individuals and groups who promote violence towards the Palestinian people and/or deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” A recent Raven Mission post claimed that “HAMAS only exists to resist the occupation. You want to stop HAMAS? END the occupation.”
Another related site is @CensoredMen, which took aim at Gal Gadot, an actress, model and former Miss Israel 2004.
“Gal Gadot, who has an estimated net worth of $30m, cries when asked about how she’s feeling. Not only is she worth $30m, Israelis are partying in nightclubs and eating at 5 star restaurants while children in Gaza are being bombed. Yet she cries. Grade A victim mentality,” @CensoredMen tweeted.
Another site is called “Defund Israel Now,” which claimed that Jews “destroyed Christianity through LGBT propaganda & pornography,… stole tax dollars to bomb muslim countries…[and] censored white voices.”
One @DefundIsraelNow tweet said that “Netanyahu is a jew. He was elected by jews. He is the biggest terrorist of the 21st century. Go figure.”
Another tweet refers to “Things jews created: — zionism (death cult) — pornography (sex trafficking) — federal banking (usury) — FTX (scam platform) — ADL (racist non-profit) — AIPAC (terrorist entity) — Israel (pedophile state) — META (mass censorship) — Las Vegas (degenerate casinos).”
Elon Musk, owner of X, has come under criticism for allowing unedited postings by groups like “Defund Israel Now” and “Stop Zionist Hate.”
The X-Out Hate campaign is a group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists and academics who have joined to call out “anti-Semitism on X” to address the “danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others.” A letter signed by 172 Jewish leaders called on advertisers to boycott X.
In October, the group first called on large advertisers like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Disney to stop funneling money onto X “as antisemitism explodes on the platform.”
“Nothing has changed. Except for the danger Jews are in,” the group wrote in the latest letter.
“Elon Musk is spreading the kind of antisemitism that leads to massacres. And advertisers are funding the platform that allows him to spread his ideology to hundreds of millions people,” the group wrote. “Musk has gone from spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to doubling down on his overt antisemitism.”
The letter cited a tweet by Musk that claimed, “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
The tweet was a reference to the anti-Semitic, so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory that claims that Jews and Democrats are conspiring to flood the nation with non-whites. The letter calls Musk’s statement, “implicit support for Nazism.”