In case you missed it, a cabal of anti-Semitic knuckledraggers has adopted a seemingly innocent symbol to engage in vicious online and offline harassment of Jews–the “echo.” Whenever one of these bottom-feeders sends out a tweet with multiple parentheses around the name of someone whose last name “looks” Jewish, it’s taken as a signal to attack the targeted person with anything from ugly anti-Semitic images to death threats.
Well, the knuckledraggers just lost one of their tools. On Thursday, Mic discovered that some of these thugs created a nasty little app called “Coincidence Detector,” a Google Chrome extension that automatically flagged Jewish-sounding names, as well as people and organizations considered “anti-white,” with an “echo.” Sometime around midnight Friday morning–mere hours after Mic discovered the app–Google deleted it on the grounds that it was hate speech.
The creators of Coincidence Detector are the same people behind one of the most noxious blogs of the alt-right movement, The Right Stuff. They made no bones about what this app was intended to do–“help you detect total coincidences about who has been involved in certain political movements and media empires.” In other words, a new twist on the old shibboleth of a massive Jewish conspiracy to take over society. While most people only got an echo around their last name, higher-profile Jews–like Michael Bloomberg and Amy Schumer–got an echo around their full name.
What made this app particularly dangerous is that it operated via crowdsourcing. A user who believed that a Jew or someone promoting an “anti-white agenda” could click on the app’s “Support” tab and submit the name to the app’s database. The app could easily be refreshed with one click to ensure that the database was up to date. In other words, this meant that private persons could easily be targeted for harassment.
The app had been online for five months–long enough to be downloaded by almost 2,500 users before Google pulled the plug. One of them, who hosts archives of The Right Stuff’s main podcast, “The Daily Shoah,” posted a maudlin tribute to the app on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HtIWK6fHec
These bottom-feeders better pray that no one–especially a private person–was harmed as a result of their handiwork. If they were, the only questions would be the size of the damage bill–and the length of the jail sentence.
When Yair Rosenberg of the Jewish online magazine Tablet got wind of this, he decided to troll the trolls. Rosenberg, who has a long history of baiting the alt-right, offered this suggestion–take back the echo.
Want to raise awareness about anti-Semitism, show solidarity with harassed Jews & mess with the Twitter Nazis? Put ((( ))) around your name.
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) June 3, 2016
A number of other Jews followed suit, including Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/status/738727426763718657
Their game plan is simple–turn the hot lights on this crude and vicious harassment and thumb their noses at the bottom-feeders. Rosenberg says that while he and others are mocking these knuckledraggers, “at the same time you’re making people aware this is out there.”
In case you’re wondering–you can join in even if you aren’t Jewish.
https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/738728222922153984
Several non-Jews have added parentheses around their display names on Twitter as a show of solidarity–including yours truly.
We may not have seen the last of this monstrous app, though. A few hours after Google deleted it, this popped up on The Right Stuff’s official Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/ThaRightStuff/status/738566934296420353
Hopefully it won’t take five months to remove this garbage next time.
