In the minutes and hours after Australian Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two Christchurch mosques, the other users on 8Chan were busy replying on the thread he created on the website to announce the March 15 attack.
There was vitriol and violence and vile bigotry in the responses, and many cheered the killings.
But, in an environment where the actions were being celebrated as an attack on Muslims, a shift in opinion emerged.
“Why didn’t he kill a bunch of Jews?” one user asked just an hour after the attack began.
Another anonymous user replied: “That’s a very good question.”
In the space of 90 minutes, the word Jew or various iterations of the word were mentioned 21 times in that thread, while Muslim appeared 16 times.
Australia’s Jewish community has been watching on with fear as the online hatred seeps into the real world, with the far right, which has long targeted Muslims, slowly turning attention to them.
One Jewish leader labels a spike in anti-Semitic graffiti as a “swastika epidemic”, while the most authoritative record of the issue — the annual Anti-Semitism in Australia report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry — found a 59 per cent increase in incidents last year.
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff says the “online world” is partly behind the “alarming spike in anti-Semitic incidents”.
“The terrorists responsible for the attacks on the Pittsburgh and San Diego synagogues were active on social media platforms frequented by neo-Nazis and alt-right ideologues,” Alhadeff says.
Read the article by Mark Schliebs in The Australian.