American Neo-Nazis took advantage of the popularity of Pokémon GO and the “gyms” of the game’s characters in the US by distributing anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic propaganda at those locations, the head of the program to fight anti-Semitism within the National Union of Israeli Students told Ynet on Thursday.
Ido Daniel, the national program director of the NUIS’s Israeli Students Combating Anti-Semitism (ISCA) also said that the past year has seen an increase in anti-Semitism online.
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Daniel said, “The Anti-Defamation League looked at a year in the US election campaign and saw that in terms of anti-Semitic activity, Neo-Nazis and the like on the internet and principally on Twitter, lots of Jewish journalists were attacked with calls to murder, very serious anti-Semitic calls, Holocaust denial. Also, in terms of the numbers, we’re talking about over 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets—and that’s only over the course of a year.”
Daniel said that ISCA representatives contacted social media sites to ask that anti-Semitic posts be removed.
He added that “the hatred on the internet doesn’t remain on computer screens, and there’s a connection between the internet and the physical world.” He showed the propaganda sheets that were being handed out at the Pokémon GO sites with a Hitlerized version of Pikachu, explaining that this is how “the Neo-Nazi movement in America is recruiting youths.”
By Ynet News
