Spike in antisemitism across the globe linked to Iranian Twitter accounts

There was an 80% rise in antisemitic hate crimes – including physical attacks on Jews in the US and Europe – during the May conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to the Secure Community Network (SCN), a US-based group.

SCN partially attributes the spike to an “explosion of disinformation” on social media, which it links to Iran.

According to research by the Network Contagion Research Institute – affiliated to Rutgers University and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – this was allegedly spread and “amplified” by Twitter accounts linked to the Iranian regime. These accounts allegedly spread messages such as “Hitler was right” and “kill all Jews” at a rate of 175 times per minute.

According to ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt, “the troll armies of the Islamic Republic of Iran” were behind the Tweets.

SCN said that a study by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University revealed that the Twitter hashtag “#COVID1948” – promoting the idea that the Jewish state was a dangerous virus – originated with an Iranian network in April 2020 and could allegedly be traced to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The hashtag was used to link COVID-19 with various antisemitic conspiracy theories, including blaming a “Zionist plot” for creating the pandemic. These spread rapidly in Iran and across the Middle East and were allegedly officially promoted by Iran’s state-owned media and by its proxies with one Houthi official reportedly saying: “That virus that has spread all over the world – the Jews are behind it.”

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