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2016 is the first year of the implementation of the sustainable development goals. A renewed emphasis on a Human Rights-Based Approach to all forms of development is apt and timely. While migration and peace building as development challenges are not new to humankind, the world is faced with ongoing wars and conflicts as well as new forms of violent extremism triggering levels of migration, that rival only the one that occurred during the Second World War. As a negative and undesirable consequence, all over the world, there has been a sudden rise in incidents of individuals using hate speech against migrants, forced migration and minority communities or social groups, blaming them for their nations’ struggles. The words used in politics, in the news, in social media, in research studies, national reports and general literature or debate about these human phenomena have consequences. History has shown that rhetorical excesses and unbalanced or biased historical accounts of certain events in relation to any ethnic group, place, culture or religion can give rise to a climate of prejudice, discrimination, and violence. It is these prejudices, discrimination and violence that often compromise individual rights or equal rights to all – the right to cultural and religious expressions, the right to security and peace, the right to freedom of expression, the right to education, the right to information, the right to associate or connect et al. Here, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” is breached. It is this reasoning and conscience that the acquisition of media and information literacy (MIL) competencies can stir in all peoples. Furthermore, the ideological beliefs and dogmas that we firmly hold emanate from our socialization. Socialization is embedded in information and communication and increasingly taking place through technological platforms, media and all forms of learning environments. When taken together and coupled with the incidents of the use of social media by extremist and violent organizations to radicalize and recruit especially young minds, the relevance of MIL to enable citizens to challenge their own beliefs effectively and critically engage in these topics, and thus the integration of MIL in formal, non-formal and informal settings becomes more urgent. A rights-based approach to media and information literacy and to sustainable development – including countering hate, radicalization and violent extremism – can play a crucial role in perceptions of the “other” by encouraging reporting, research and analysis as well as the design and implementation of development interventions that are objective, evidence-based, inclusive, reliable, ethical and accurate, and by encouraging individuals to take sound actions based on their rights and the rights of others.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The Internet’s unprecedented global reach and scope combined with the difficulty in monitoring and tracing communications make the Internet a prime tool for extremists and terrorists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been monitoring these developments for nearly two decades through our Digital Terrorism and Hate Project. Our findings reveal that as the Internet has grown, the escalation of extremist sites has kept pace in number and in technological sophistication.

On October 7, 2023, during the Jewish Sabbath and festival of Simchat Torah, Hamas shocked the world by invading Israel from Gaza across multiple entry points. The results were devastating: the single largest one-day total of murdered Jews since the Nazi Holocaust. Hamas targeted civilian families, assaulted and kidnapped hundreds of other civilians who were taken hostage in Gaza. Evidence suggests that Hamas was preparing for a ‘second phase’ of assaults, targeting the people of Israel. In response to this unprecedented massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of others, Israeli forces invaded Gaza with the stated goal of destroying Hamas.

In the online sphere, the vicious attacks set off a wave of posts, images, memes, cyber terror attacks, and videos on social media, but also on the dark web and adjacent sites. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s (SWC) Digital Terrorism and Hate Project monitors the social media activities of over 7,000 groups, individuals, and online channels, many who support Hamas and other terrorist groups. This report will explore the explosion of cyberterrorist activity against Jewish and Israeli targets in the wake of October 7th and expose some of the key groups and actors that have caused significant disruption and threats to personal safety.

Drawing from ethnographic and documentary data, this article examines the character of the social spaces that white power movement (WPM) activists create on the Internet and the linkages to their real world activism. Specifically, we explain how white power activists use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective action. The WPM’s cyberpresence intersects with and enhances their real world activities by offering multiple opportunities for access and coordination. Virtual contact with the WPM community offers members social support, companionship, and a sense of belonging to a community of Aryan believers. We argue that real and virtual spaces are not completely separate spheres but rather closely inter-twined. Consequently, virtual spaces provide an opportunity to parallel and extend the type of interaction present in real world free spaces that are so critical to nurturing and sustaining white power movement culture. Cyberspace is being used to connect all sorts of people, yet the character of those connections is unclear. Some observers argue that cyberspace is a new place of assembly where real world social communities can be established, sustained, or renewed as virtual communities. In The Virtual Community (1993), Howard Rheingold argues the Intemet introduced a new form of community that can help bring people together on-line around shared values and interests, and create ties of support that extend their real world collective interaction. Sherry Turkle (1995:267), a pioneer in studies of identity and interaction on the Intemet, claims that the virtual realm offers “a dramatic Please direct correspondence to Pete Simi,. We want to thank editors Dobratz and Waldner and the anonymous JPMS reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.