Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

The current situation regarding the Corbynist groups on Facebook from which I have not been expelled:

Understandably, their wrath is turned against the Conservative Party, expressed predominantly through memes, but if any comrade should call for a General Election, the replies come thick and fast, asserting that Starmer’s Labour is worse than the Conservatives. Sir Keir is spoken of as being affiliated to the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and as a ‘puppet’ of the State of Israel. There are several memes which communicate the association of Starmer and the PLP with Israel, usually displaying the donations they have received from British Jewish supporters. The only way to assuage the anger of these comrades is to post a photo of Jeremy Corbyn, either en famille as a benevolent husband and father, or in a photoshop, where the former leader is gussied up as a lion, a superhero or a boxing champion.

There was a time when nearly every post in these groups concerned Israel or some kind of Jewish malfeasance, but I am glad to say, this seems to have abated. Offensive comments about Israel are usually in connection with Israel’s supposed influence over Keir Starmer. Obviously, if Margaret Hodge’s name is in the news, there is a great outpouring of disgust as Dame Margaret was always a favourite topic, producing some of the longest threads, with hundreds of replies (whereas a post about Afghanistan might get no replies, except for the brief assertion that Israel was worse).

Groups which define themselves by opposition to Israel and Jewish community organizations in the UK progress along a slightly different track. In this sense, JVL bears some resemblance to Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies and its sister group, Friends of the Middle East Against Israel. In these groups, negative reportage about Israel is meat and drink and, with some very right wing members in the current Israeli government, they have a wealth of material. There is a preference for drawing on reports from Jewish authors who are either reasonably critical of Israel or unambiguously hostile.

JVL naturally have great animus towards UK Jewish organizations who regard them as a sham group set up to defend antisemitism on the left, and many of their posts defend individuals or groups who have been perceived as antisemitic. Recently they strongly defended Roger Waters after his controversially politicized concerts and, only yesterday, attacked the Campaign Against Antisemitism who successfully dissuaded some venues from showing the film called Oh Jeremy Corbyn – the Big Lie. Today, they take issue with the EHRC report of three years ago, for faulting Ken Livingstone.

The result of this monomania (excuse the word – I am quite monomaniacal myself) is that comments on the JVL page very often dwell on the perceived duplicity and dictatorial nature of Jewish organizations in the UK, including the Jewish press. I long ago gave up expecting that the JVL administrators would remonstrate with their supporters whose enthusiasm became a bit too Sturmabteilung but this does not happen. Sometimes a person from outside the group takes issue with an error or a classical antisemitic trope but in the milieu of such groups, any outsider is always the Few and soon dismissed as a ‘hasbara troll’.

The group called PAIS, Palestinian and Irish Solidarity, where much happiness was expressed whenever Israelis were killed, went from public to private on Facebook. I tried to get back in, but they did not accept my application. I was not using my own name but, had somehow allowed suspicion to fall on my alias.

Engaging verbally in any of these groups is not a viable option. If you intend to look at them, stay shtumm, shtumm wie a shteyn.

Gifs and memes are very much part of online altercations, the more bitter the disagreement, the more insouciant the gif. Typically a gif shows a good looking person, often a celebrity, behind a brief quotation from one of their performances. Sometimes they merely shrug, wink or laugh. They may be intended as a projection of the person who posts the gif. Some gifs are amusing but others are triumphalist. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, there was a gif which displayed a winning boxer, fist raised to show ascendancy, Corbyn’s head photoshopped on the body. This was deployed whenever Labour gained a point in the polls but, as far as I know, they have not made a similar gif for Keir Starmer.

Some memes perform the same work as gifs, for example, the image below, from an account who tweets disobligingly about Jews, essaying an appearance of enjoyment. The meme depicts an attractive woman, partying, while the superimposed words intend to justify the account’s negative statements about Jewish people and Israel.

Another meme shows a confident looking man with the appearance of a 1950s model advertising shaving cream and the words, ‘Imagine if you will a group so disgusting, they have to make laws making it illegal to hate them.’ I have seen this innumerable times from hardcore antisemites. I say hardcore but perhaps it is the meme itself which testifies to them being hardcore.

In antisemitic groups online, some members participate with nothing but memes, even posting the same meme every day. There are many ready-made memes available for antisemitic uses: groups of people in or close to government with the Star of David superimposed on each of them, to denote powerful Jewish influence and, from Holocaust deniers, images of Anne Frank or the entrance to Auschwitz, inscribed with a Shoah denying message.

I’m not altogether averse to using gifs on Twitter and have often posted an image of a sea lion if I believe someone is trying to waste my time with questions, the answers to which they will always reject. I have also used Claude Rains as Captain Renault saying ‘I’m shocked!’ and Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, saying ‘…they pull me back in.’

The word gif, I learn, stands for Graphics Interchange Format and was coined in the 1980s. The coinage of the word meme is attributed to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, writing about cultural imitation, the spreading of an idea by mimesis. I was fond of the Doge memes which abounded some years ago, depicting a Shiba Inu expressing thoughts by means of limited literacy, in brightly coloured comic sans font.

Certain phrases are copied like memes and become ubiquitous in confrontational language. The screenwriter Lee Kern referred to the ubiquity of ‘Rent-free in your head,’ as a riposte to someone making a deleterious comment about a public figure. ‘Toys out of pram’ and ‘Spitting out your dummy’ have been similarly overworked.

There is no harm essentially in the shorthand communication of gifs and memes, the pictogrammar of our age, except when used to convey a thought which would appear intolerable if written down in words, or to confuse the torpid censors of social media platforms.

No doubt I will see many more before the day ends, some friendly, some not.

Just when I think I’m out…they pull me back in.