Dutch Web sites said to be anti-Jewish

:: haaretz :: Dutch social media sites are rife with anti-Semitism linked to Israel, according to a new report compiled by Dutch and Israeli monitors who study online discussion.

Though described by some as "superficial," the report prompted Holland's Political Reformed Party to demand the justice ministry address the issue.

In preparing the 11-page report, the team of Web monitors reviewed two online outlets - the Hyves social network, often described as the "Dutch Facebook," and the discussion forums of the respected, mainstream newspaper Volkskrant for three months, until August.

On Hyves - the most popular social network in Netherlands with nine million Dutch members - the team documented calls to "murder all Jews" and for Adolf Hitler "to finish off his job."

The report says that moderators on Hyves take no action to stop the posting of inflammatory anti-Semitic content on its pages.

"Hyves should consider a new system for moderation," the report states. "Moderators who do not comply with regulations should be barred."

The research team, led by Yochanan Visser, a Dutch Israeli living in Efrat, and members of two pro-Israeli Web-monitoring groups, say they also found "blood libels" about Israeli soldiers on Hyves.

In one post, "Fatima," who described herself as a Palestinian girl from Jerusalem, wrote that her father had been abducted in the dead of night and hacked to pieces. "My dear mother was beaten to death before me by the Jews, the beasts," she wrote, adding that soldiers raped her sister.

The Web-monitoring groups, the Israel Facts monitor and the Network on Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands, trace the text to a discussion group called "Free Palestine, one of 35 different groups that the report defines as either anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian.

"The direct relationship between the conflict in Israel and contemporary anti-Semitism is even clearer now," Visser told Haaretz. "This is apparent in media where impressionable youth shape much of their perceptions." He added this situation was reflected in a recent report by the Center for Information and Documentation Israel, which showed that anti-Semitic attacks increased tenfold during Israel's offensive in Gaza last winter.

"Anti-Semitism is, of course, not allowed on Hyves," the Web site's cofounder, Raymond Spanjar, told Haaretz. "There is too much content on Hyves for us to monitor, but we always follow up complaints on specific content."

Elise Friedmann, the author of the CIDI report, said the study of Hyves certainly did find some examples of anti-Semitism, but "it did not sufficiently place them in context."

The review of the content on the discussion forum of Volkskrant revealed several instances of Holocaust denial, which were all removed within hours of complaining to the moderator.

"The situation in Volksrant's forum can be described as better [than on Hyves,]" Visser's report states. Still it alleges that Volksrant's forum is "dominated" by activists who are "polarizing the debate." Most pro-Palestinian activists, it adds, use pseudonyms, while the bulk of the pro-Israel activists use their real names.

Henk Muller, a Volkskrant journalist who is responsible for the opinion section of the paper's Web site, said Visser's report was "politically oriented and lacking substance."