Chinese netizens post hateful comments on Israeli embassy website

2023-10-20 21:48:09, Kosova & Bota CNA

After the Hamas attack on Israel, the Israeli embassy in Beijing started posting on China's social media platform, Weibo.

The attempt to gain popular support in China appears to have backfired, with comments containing insults to the Jewish state, support for Hamas and praise of Adolf Hitler.

The Israeli embassy in Beijing, which has 24 million followers on the social network, has made about 100 posts since the October 7 attack. Some posts are disturbing, such as an image of a baby's corpse burned during a Hamas attack. Others claim Israeli resistance, such as the story of a person who was injured at the Nova Festival, but saved several others, after the attack.

The comment space is filled with hate speech like "Heroic Hamas!" and "Hitler was wise" referring to the German leader who ordered the death of 6 million Jews before and during World War II.

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Every now and then, someone expresses support for Israel and accuses Hamas of being a terrorist group.

This causes strong reactions from other netizens, such as "Only dead Israelis are good Israelis" and "The United States supports Israel and the friend of the enemy is the enemy."

Similar comments have been made on other sites as the internet is heavily censored in China.

VOA's Chinese-language service could not determine how many of the Weibo accounts posting to the Israeli embassy account belong to people working for the Chinese government.

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The Israeli embassy in China did not respond to requests for an interview from the VOA Chinese language service.

Eric Liu, a former Weibo discussion forum moderator who is now an editor at the China Digital Times website, told VOA's Chinese-language service that the Israeli embassy's website "has seen a lot of comments recently. , with hateful and anti-Semitic content."

Mr Liu believes that because anti-Semitic comments remain online, it shows that the Chinese government accepts them. China has long supported the Palestinian cause, but has recently also increased ties with Israel as it seeks a greater role in trade, technology and diplomacy.

"It's more of a voice influenced by public opinion," he said. "Relatively, it is an extreme voice. Moderate voices cannot be heard. Most of the participants are ordinary critics who hate others", he says.

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Gu Guoping, a retired teacher from Shanghai, told VOA's Chinese-language service that platforms like Weibo, WeChat or QQ are anti-human, indoctrination platforms controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

"Due to the ruling party's long-term indoctrination of ordinary people as well as online censorship, many users of the Weibo platform ... [confuse] right with wrong."

"They don't know Israel at all. The Israeli nation is an amazing, great, humane and civilized nation," said Mr. Gu, who points out that Hamas killed innocent people in Israel and Israel's counterattack was legitimate self-defense.

The spokesman of the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said that "China is closely following the current tensions between Palestine and Israel. We believe that the urgent priority is to reduce tensions, facilitate a ceasefire and cease violence, protect civilians and avoid a humanitarian disaster".

While calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza conflict, Chinese officials have not condemned Hamas by name. Some observers say that Beijing is using the Israel-Hamas war to reduce the influence of the United States./ VOA