Artificial Outrage

A few days ago my social media feeds were full of an AI-generated video of famous Jewish celebrities giving the finger, sort of, to Kanye West. You probably saw it: Steven Spielberg, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest, all standing up for Jewish pride. Except they weren’t, because it was fake.

The reason for this is that Kanye West - Ye as he is now known - had bought an advertising spot at half time in the Superbowl that directed people to his online shop, and when people followed the link to that website the next day they found it was only selling one item: a swastika t-shirt.

There are a few things to say about this. Apparently when Ye bought the advert, his website didn’t sell swastika t-shirts: that was a switch he made after the advert broadcast. This means that the companies and broadcasters involved didn’t know that they were helping him to promote Hitler, the Nazis, and an ideology predicated on the extermination of the Jews.

On the other hand, Ye had spent the previous couple of weeks declaring on X that he loves Hitler and the Nazis, so it shouldn’t have come as a complete shock. He’s a seriously disturbed man who should be kept as far away from social media as possible, but Elon Musk - who I am regularly told is a great friend of the Jews - gave Ye his Twitter/X account back despite his previous record of strident antisemitic incitement, so here we are.

More significant, though, is the reaction to Ye’s promotion of Nazism - or rather, the lack of it. He has been dropped by his talent agency, and Fox TV belatedly announced that they “regret” the advert - but beyond that, it’s been hard to find much condemnation at all. I may have missed it, but I don’t think the NFL or the two teams who contested the Superbowl have commented on it, never mind the wider ecosphere of celebrity and sport. The Hollywood Reporter called Ye’s advert “puzzling”, as if a swastika is some mysterious symbol never seen before in Western political culture.

Pretty much every Jew I am connected to online posted or commented on this fake AI video. Jews LOVED it. It spoke of Jewish pride, strength and an F-you attitude that has been in short supply these past 16 months. It answered a craving amongst Jews worldwide for someone, somewhere, to stand up to the hatred we have all experienced. Except - and this is the whole point - the outrage was fake. It had to be generated by an Israeli AI geek because there was little real outrage to answer that craving.

Just to be clear, this is not a criticism of the Jewish celebrities in that video. Many of them have spoken out against antisemitism on more than one occasion. But what about everyone else? I don’t like the whole “this would never happen to another minority” line of argument, because every minority struggles for support and recognition, but in this specific case I’m going to wager that, had this been an advert by some white supremacist celebrity selling Ku Klux Klan hoods, we would have heard much more about it from the worlds of sports, celebrity and broadcasting. Some did speak out, to their credit, but they were the exceptions rather than the rule.

There is a danger in this. Scarlett Johansson quite understandably denounced the use of her image in a fake video while also condemning Ye’s antisemitism, and the growth of AI deepfakes threatens not just celebrity reputations, but democratic politics too. As much as so many Jews loved this AI video for it’s bold response to antisemitism, that same technology is also used extensively by Jew haters and Holocaust deniers to create incredibly powerful and engaging anti-Jewish content, and if we all go down that path the truth will mean nothing at all.

A couple of days after Yee’s antisemitic advert, there was another video, this time of two nurses at a hospital in Sydney, telling an Israeli on TikTok that they hate Israelis so much they would kill any Israeli patient who came to their hospital. That’s right: not only that they would refuse to treat Israelis - which would be bad enough - but that they would kill them. Whether these nurses actually meant it or were just bragging because they were speaking to an Israeli is beside the point. They were in their medical uniforms and seemingly at work in their hospital when they made the comments. They said this at a time when the Australian Jewish community is on the receiving end of a shocking wave of anti-Jewish arson, hate crimes, and even would-be terrorism. And this video wasn’t fake. It was completely, chillingly real.

This video also went viral in the Jewish social media world. Every Jew who sees it, I think, asks themselves the same question: are these two nurses a completely extreme anomaly, or were they saying what a lot of people think, but were just unlucky enough (or stupid enough) to be filmed saying it? From my seat here in the UK, you can add this question: do the healthcare workers who wear their medical uniforms on pro-Palestine marches in London feel the same way as these two would-be Jew murderers, or are they more able to separate their political and professional views?

Two videos, one fake, the other real, and between them you get a sense of what is going on in the heads of a lot of Jewish people right now. There is too much antisemitism and not enough outrage about it, so we feed on scraps, even AI-generated scraps, for our morale. It shouldn’t be this way. I still believe - and there is plenty of evidence, including from dear non-Jewish friends of mine - that most people find antisemitism abhorrent, an affront to their own values and way of life. I just wish we would hear it more often, without having to create fake versions of it for ourselves.