A group that fights for the rights of Jews living in Judea and Samaria is seeking to expose Internet trolls who told a man whose siblings were murdered in the Holocaust to “go back to Germany.” Sick critics also termed the man a “Nazi.”
The story began when journalist Kalman Liebeskind wrote an article in support of the Deutsch family, a family of Israeli farmers living in the Hevron region. The family is facing the destruction of its farm at the hands of the Israeli Civil Administration.
“Mordechai Deutsch lives in Mitzpeh Yair in the Hevron hills,” Liebeskind wrote. “In another few days the state will destroy – without evidence, proof, or explanations – the life’s work of this family of farmers that is trying, but failing, to understand why.”
The story earned more than 470 comments. Many were supportive of the Deutsch family and criticized the Netanyahu administration and IDF Civil Administration over the demolition orders.
However, several comments crossed the line from criticizing the Deutch family to verbal abuse. “Deutsch needs to transfer his hothouses to Deutschland, that’s his real homeland,” one wrote. Another said, “Deutsch is as his name, an ashke-Nazi colonizer who belongs in Europe.”
Mordechai Deutsch’s father Ze’ev was from Germany, but left after his wife and young children – Mordechai’s siblings – were murdered in the Holocaust. Another of Mordechai’s siblings, brother Shaya, was murdered in Israel by Arab terrorists.
The Mattot Arim organization is calling on Maariv/nrg to expose the identities of the “barbaric” talkbackers. The group has also called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to “stop both the real pogrom and the resulting cyber-pogrom against the exemplary Deutsch family.”
Mattot Arim’s demand follows a case in Britain in which a woman who was harassed online won a High Court order exposing her anonymous attackers.
The problem of trolling on the Maariv site was not limited to the attacks on the Deutsch family. Comments made on the same day regarding a rabbi from Bat Ayin who called to refrain from attacking Arabs included such remarks as, “Bat Ayin is a town of terrorists,” and “All settlers are terrorists from age 0.”