FlaglerLive

Since 9/11, two billion Muslims globally have faced collective punishment. Constructed as folk devils who imperil western societies, Muslims have been framed as inextricably linked with the support and promotion of violence. When these racist narratives are espoused by politicians, they falsely equate the support of Palestinian people with support for terrorism and instill fear and moral panic about the Muslim presence in this country and elsewhere.

Traditionally, antisemitism in the United States was promoted by far-right organizations and movements, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and skinheads. More recently, progressive and left-leaning movements that are critical of Israel’s policies – especially with regard to the Palestinian population in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 – have become linked to antisemitic practices.

Why should a few companies – or a few billionaire owners – have the power to decide everything about online spaces that billions of people use? This unaccountable model of governance has led stakeholders of all stripes to criticize platforms’ decisions as arbitrary, corrupt or irresponsible. In the early, pre-web days of the social internet, decisions about the spaces people gathered in online were often made by members of the community.

In the summer of 2010, the author went to volunteer on Kibbutz Re’im, close to the Gaza border, to both strengthen her relationship to Israel as a North American Jewish woman and learn about socialist communities. Then she went to the Gaza border.

Google, Microsoft and others boast that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make searching the internet better than ever for users. Rather than getting a list of links, both organic and paid, based on whatever keywords or questions a user types in, generative AI will instead simply give you a text result in the form of an answer. But it may destroy the US$68 billion search engine optimization industry that companies like Google helped create.

Lebanon, which is teetering on the edge of economic and political collapse, risks becoming entangled in the escalating war between Israel and Hamas. Hezbollah has launched multiple attacks on Israeli targets from Lebanon, prompting return fire from the Israel Defense Forces. Over a dozen people have died, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also at least a few civilians on both sides of the border, including a Reuters photojournalist.

From blood-harvesting Satanists who stealthily run the world to shapeshifting alien lizards invading the world, conspiracy theories often offer alternative explanations of unsettling events. They all centre on a proposal that a malicious group of people is behind strange or political happenings. Conspiracy theories have another thing in common – they go against mainstream explanations and lack concrete evidence.