After we broke the news on a Neo-Nazi rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne and identified their leader, our Facebook page was inundated with stupid and antisemitic comments, which we then shared and deconstructed. There was one comment which we did not share as the comment, and the person behind it, requires a deeper look.
The investigation took us from a mild mannered post that nevertheless suggested police investigate the victims of the synagogue fire to rule out the possibility of an insurance job, to posts by the same person that deny the Holocaust, worship Hitler, promote 9/11 conspiracy theories, make allegations of Jews controlling governments and more. This carefully phrased and polite comment not only had dog-whistles of antisemitism, but came from a raging antisemite who had tones down their language while commenting on our page. Needless to say we banned them from the page, and now share the content we found while investigating this Western Australia based Facebook user.
The comment on our page
The comment is voiced as a genuine concern. It urges an investigation by police into the victims of the attack in order to “clear up” any doubt that it might be a “false flag” (their quotes). They justify this suggestion with a personal sounding narrative explaining the phrase “Jewish lightning” as a term they heard in London to describe fires being deliberately started in order to profit from the insurance money. As both The Forward and The AJC explain, the phrase is an antisemitic slur based on stereotypes of Jews as greedy. They end by saying, “This event certainly proved convenient politically”. This again carried a suggestion of a nefariousness inside-job undertaken to create pressure on the government. What’s most striking about this post is the conversation tone, and these antisemitic allegations phrased as just reasonable questions to ask.
The reality is that at 4am on December 6th, the Adass Synagogue in Melbourne was set alight by arsonists who broke in whilst people inside were worshipping. One witness described hearing a loud bang on the door, followed by an attack on a window, they fled and called police. Another witness told police they saw two men in masks who “appeared to be spreading an accelerant”. 17 trucks and around 60 firefighters tackled the blaze. Fortunately, there were no casualties, but Victoria Police have since announced that they are treating the event as a terrorist attack. The Federal Police have established a dedicated special task force in response to the attack, as well as a number of other recent attacks on the Jewish community.
The claim that this attack was a “false flag” operation amounts to the claim that it was carried out by the Jewish community to cast aspersions on another group. Right now we usually see this presented as a more general claim that Zionist’s are either making up antisemitic incidents, or carrying them out themselves, in order to cry antisemitism and silence criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza.To be clear, these claims are baseless and an effort to dismissed concerns over the very real rise in antisemitism in Australia over the past year.
This post, considered at face value, is problematic. The suggestion that Jewish people are more likely to engage in insurance fraud speaks to classic antisemitic tropes about Jews being greedy and money hungry. The comment about the attack being “politically convenient” implies that Jews are behind the attack for political reasons, which re-positions the Jewish community as perpetrators of the attack rather than as victims, and therefore undermines the suffering of the Jewish community.
But there is a deeper problem with this post, which is only revealed by looking at the Facebook account responsible for the comment. When looking at this user’s previous posts, it becomes clear that the poster is not just a quasi-neutral observer with genuine concerns about the possibility of a false flag operation. Instead, they are a Neo-Nazi who praises Nazi leaders, denies the Holocaust, believes that Jews are responsible for 9/11 and advocates for an ethno-state. This case study raises important points about the motivation behind, and the possibility of productively engaging with relatively innocuous sounding posts on social media.
The poster’s Facebook history
Looking through the content posted by the commenter on their own page we seen:
Praise of Nazi and defence of their war crimes
They consistently make posts designed to praise Nazi’s and argue that mainstream narratives of World War II are unfair to the Nazis.
The following post refers to the Nuremberg trials, formally the International Military Tribunal which was held in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945-6 to try Nazi leaders for their crimes in World War II. 19 former Nazi leaders were found guilty as a result of the trials, with 12 of them being sentenced to death.
The post refers to Nuremberg as a “kangaroo court farce” claims that the Nazi leader convicted of war crimes were “good leaders” and implies the Nuremberg trials were in some way illegitimate. It is an attempt to glorify and justify the Nazi behaviour in WWII.
Holocaust Denial
The next post suggests that “whatever the true extent of the holocaust”, it does not “seem like” Auschwitz was a “death camp”. The truth is that 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, the vast majority (about a million) being Jews. Most were murdered in gas chambers. Those seeking to deny or minimizing the Holocaust, one of the most well documented events in human history, often aim to cast doubt on the atrocities committed by the Nazis to make it easier to rehabilitate Nazi ideology.
In another post our commenter shared a post (by someone else) that says “Nobody was burned in the so-called extermination camps, and there is no evidence of gas chambers, ovens, or any other kind of cremation or disposal facilities for the six million bodies. The entire concept is absurd, nonsensical, and without basis.”
That post included a historic document from the Red Cross dated November 22, 1944, asserting that the Red Cross representative “had not been able to discover any trace of installations for exterminating civilian prisoners”. This letter, while real, is misrepresented as discussed by AAP Fact Check. For a start, it was not an official Red Cross visit, nor did the person who wrote the letter visit Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the death camp) but rather Auschwitz I (the main camp) which was a concentration camp, and they were not permitted to even inspect that.
Our person comments “check the date on the letter” to suggest the letter is correct and there were no gas chambers November 1944, and could not have been after, implying the Holocaust did not happen (even as they share the other person’s comment saying this explicitly).
Here is the rest of the comment from the original poster:
Promoting Jewish power conspiracy theories
The following post includes an image with a quote from holocaust denier David Irving. The quote claims that, during WWII, Churchill was financially indebted to and “effectively owned” by Zionists. This is an antisemitic “Jewish power” conspiracy theory, as well as a promotion of a Holocaust denier.
More antisemitic conspiracy theories
A number of other posts engage in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews somehow run the world, or have an undue influence in western society. The following posts shows an image listing Jewish heads of state, along with the sentence “even if they were saints, such over-representation should be of concern to everybody”.
Another example is a YouTube video they shared with a comment that the video maker “is not as specific as he should be about who controls America probably because he does not want to be shut down for anti-Semitism”.
This next one is them commenting on a post by someone else who claims the UK Prime Minister is a “Jewish Zionist”. Our person’s comment is to assert “It is not broadly anti-Semitic to be concerned by the over-representation of a small minority”, wrongly arguing that the very clear antisemitism they shared should not be regarded as antisemitic. They are of course wrong and this is obvious antisemitism.
Antisemitic 9/11 Conspiracies
A number of the posts claim Jews were responsible for 9/11. In this example a picture with text telling us that Larry Silverstein is a Jewish businessman “who bought the lease for the twin towers on July 24th, 2001 […] showed up every day to his office EXCEPT on 9/11” and “received $4.55 billion in insurance payouts”. The clear implication is that this Jewish businessman somehow knew in advance about 9/11 and was involved to profit from the insurance money. This mirrors the comment about the recent Synagogue attack in Melbourne, where he makes a similar claim that the Jewish community may have carried out the attacks motivated by the financial reward. Snopes debunks this conspiracy theory.
This next example also refers to Larry Silverstein and our commenter in hsaring this post adds his own comments asserting that 9/11 was plot by Larry and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu! This builds on the conspiracy theories aroudn the collapse of Tower 7 which was not hit by a plane, but which a three year investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found collapsed because of intense and uncontrolled fires.

Promoting Racial Superiority
The next example includes an image with text from a book discussing Aristotle’s concept of “Philia”, which is loosely translated to mean friendship or affection. The book claims that, for Aristotle, political friendship was only possible between people of the same ethnicity, and that a multicultural society is therefore inevitably fractured. Commenting on the image the poster saud “This is why a society has to be of the same ethnic makeup and culture – it is not that it has to be racist or bigoted to put others down but to be able to be cooperative and functional”. This is the sort of racist reasoning was behind the White Australia policy, and was of course also a key part of Nazi ideology.
This idea also appears in another of his posts where he quotes Léon Degrelle, a Walloon Belgian nationalist, a foreign volunteer in the Waffen-SS, and after the war an active Holocaust denier (publishing books on the topic) and member of CEDADE a Spanish nationalist organisation with Nazi sympathies. In this quote Degrelle’s Holocaust denial argument is that the Nazis were not trying to wipe out any one race (the Jews) and were not racial supremacists who regarded other races as inferior, but that “It was a search for excellence, a novel idea. National Socialist racialism was not against the other races, it was for its own race. It aimed at defending and improving its race, and whished that all other races did the same for themselves.”

Conclusion:
These were only a few over 50 antisemitic comments we recorded from this account. With this information at hand, consider again the comment on our recent post discussing the Synagogue attack:
We can now see that this is not an impartial commentator raising a genuine concern. Instead, it is someone with an extreme worldview that gives them a vested interest in downplaying attacks on the Jewish community and in portraying Jews as a threat to society.
We can learn two things from this example. Firstly, it is important to be weary of the motivations behind even relatively innocuous looking comments online. Don’t assume comments that appear a little “off” are just poorly worded and made in good faith. Instead be aware of the possibility that these comments might be made with the specific intention of concealing and supporting a much darker world-view.
Secondly, page owners should think twice before engaging with commentators that disagree with their posts. Not all are opportunities or rational discussion. A commenter can be putting on a façade to cloak a much more extreme viewpoint that we have little chance of changing with reasoned debate. Keep this in mind when tempted to engage with someone online. Check the profile, if it has almost no friends, is entirely locked down, or openly promotes extreme content, just ban them and don’t engage.
Editor’s comment: Unless you work for the Online Hate Prevention Institute, in which case you need to take screen captures and write an article about it. We do this to shine a light on the ways extremists misuse social media to spread their hate.