Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

‘This time it will be total extermination,’ a hubristic neonazi assures me on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Neonazis do not appear every day in my notifications and Triple C may even be a former acquaintance who used to send me pictures of gas cannisters and promises of another Shoah. I thought of the person as Colorado Adolf, due to his obsessive trolling of a Jewish politician in Colorado as well as his constant praise for Hitler who, as you see, appears in his profile picture.

Triple C has one follower, currently tweeting as Lady4Gazans. ‘Lady Justice’ as she calls herself in all her numerous Twitter accounts remembers always to say ‘Zionists’ when she calls for global extermination.

It is her habit to refer to the young Israeli women killed or taken hostage on 7 October as ‘whores’ and she often expresses the thought that ‘they should have stayed in Poland.’

The neonazi Triple C has no difficulty in referring to Jews as Jews. His Hitler fandom spurs him to repeat the aims of the Third Reich, which he insists will soon be realized.

Both Triple C and Lady Justice utilize the ‘Happy merchant’ meme, a Streicherish cartoon of a cunning, grasping Jew, persecuting the world yet fearful of retribution. Lady Justice admires Hamas but not the Nazis who she believes were Jews, offering the word Ashkenazi in support of this theory. They are a match for each other, but her longevity as an X account is likely to exceed his by far. When she tweets anachronistically that Zionists killed Jesus, besides being behind various historical disasters, one can infer that she means Jews but the word Zionists serves to keep her in business, as far as X adjudicators are concerned. Both are adept at alternating their accounts, with minimal changes in the name.

Triple C combines letters and numerals, often simply adding a number to create a new account from one which has already been penalized. I believe this was one of his accounts last year – at least, Triple O shared Triple C’s hatred of Jared Polis, the Governor of Colorado.

I know I am not the only person to report these accounts. Anything gruesomely offensive will be reported many times over, but it takes dedication to get a response from X and sometimes there are mixed messages.

There is a skill to staying on X. One has to be careful, in quoting something outrageous, not to have it attributed to oneself, as hate speech. A friend who referred to a country which hanged gay people was banned from Twitter for many months as the words [they] ‘hang gay people’ was taken to be an instance of homophobic hate.

I have been many years now on Twitter/X and must assume that I am often reported, for the offence of Zionism. Nevertheless, I have not undergone a suspension, although I was advised early on by Twitter not to use profane language.

What can one hope for from X Support? A little, I hope, but not very much. X remains an information exchange and locus of mutual support for people of good will, which is what I supposed it would be when I joined Twitter in 2009. ‘People of good will’ begs the question – who are these people? The X wars are founded on disagreement over precisely this question.

I would have supposed that a person who tweets to me that I am going to be gassed would be an open and shut case for X discipline but it ain’t necessarily so.

One day after I wrote the above:

@CCc149139 has been suspended.

@CCc1491398 has deleted all their posts and replies and is kept in reserve.

@ZZz1397870 is active and abusive.

@Lady4Gazans continues in the same vein, always remembering to say Zionists rather than Jews, however anachronistically.

And tonight, when the bodies of three more hostages have been retrieved from Hamas tunnels, Lady Justice rejoices in their death and wishes it on all Zionists, everywhere. Her tweet gets reported by many but we are ghosted by X, as is so often the case.