Muslim woman with Jewish caricature (illustration)
Muslim woman with Jewish caricature (illustration)Reuters

A shocking case in Spain of anti-Semitic incitement online displays just how the internet is being used to call for murder against the Jewish people, and how the legal system in Europe can play a role in countering the trend.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday expressed its approbation of the arrest of a 28-year-old foreign national in Ribaforada, Spain, who had shared extreme anti-Semitic content and videos online, with the Spanish Ministry of the Interior noting on Saturday the "gravity and brutality of the content."

The unnamed foreign national posted numerous videos, one of which featured three visibly Muslim women chanting "catch and kill all the Jews. Strike them and make the Jews bleat like animals. Exterminate the Zionists. Exterminate them, exterminate them, the world will be better off."

As they chanted, one of the women in the video stabbed a doll in the image of an Orthodox Jew with a knife, giving a physical representation to their shrill call to murder.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said, "if you call for Jews to be killed, you should be prosecuted and go to jail. That should be the standard, especially in Europe where we have seen several anti-Semitic murders over the past few years."

"Spain deserves praise for upholding that principle in this case, even though Spain and other European governments have failed to prosecute other instances of clear incitement to murder Jews," said Foxman.

An in-depth ADL poll conducted in 100 countries found last May that 29% of respondents in Spain have anti-Semitic attitudes, with 48% agreeing with the statement: "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust."