haGalil

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haGalil onLine is a German-language website and according to its own information the “largest Jewish online magazine in German” with around 200,000 hits daily (March 2010). The name is Hebrew for " Galilee " (הגליל).

Emergence

The project was founded in 1995 by David Gall (born 1956, died on July 29, 2014), who together with his wife Eva Ehrlich was the editor of the pages. The website is operated from Munich . In an interview in 2001, Gall stated that when he was looking for terms from Judaism such as Talmud , Schabath , kosher, as well as words such as “ Auschwitz ” or “ Hitler ”, he came across Nazi websites almost exclusively, and this gave rise to HaGalil onLine was founded. The first websites were then created under the shock of the murder of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in November 1995, and HaGalil then gradually grew:

“Ultimately, we decided to run the service professionally. With this we also reacted to the further increase in Nazi sites on the Internet and the fact that anti-Semitism is the central feature of neo-Nazi propaganda. We resolved that we would counter each of these hate speech and propaganda sites with a hundred of our sites with real information. "

In 2014 David Gall's daughter, the journalist and PhD historian Andrea Livnat , took over the management of the editorial team.

Content

haGalil is a collection of articles and an educational and information offer on diverse aspects of current Jewish life, history, culture and religion. The main topics are Judaism and Israel as well as the Middle East conflict , especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , anti-Semitism , anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism , especially in the Federal Republic of Germany. The editorial team provides information on all directions in Judaism, from orthodox as well as liberal currents, about Zionism and political groups in Israel. A large part of the offer consists of thematically relevant articles from other media, book reviews, current news and background information.

Operator and authors

The organization haGalil e. V. based in Munich. The purpose of the association is to promote science and research as well as international understanding . This is done by publishing findings from scientific research in print and IT media as well as holding colloquia, discussion forums, and educational and awareness-raising events. In addition, information events, city tours, exhibitions, film evenings, etc. are offered for teachers and students, journalists and other interested parties.

The haGalil onLine pages are regularly looked after by ten to twelve people on a voluntary basis. In addition, there are occasional employees who a. Maintain chat rooms for young people on the Internet.

aims

haGalil sees itself as a counterweight to anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi sites on the World Wide Web. In addition to reporting on Jewish life and culture in the past and present in Germany and Europe, the emergence and development of the State of Israel and its involvement in the Middle East , a second focus of work is to counter anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist propaganda on the Internet. haGalil is best known for three projects to contain them. The motto “100 pages of truth for every page of lies and hate” stands for the goal of displacing websites with anti-Semitic or historical revisionist content from the higher search engines .

Combating right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism on the Internet

Since 1997 there has been a separate “Form for reporting right-wing extremist sites” to report right-wing extremist, racist and anti-Semitic Internet offers. The editorial team receives over two hundred reports every month. Each report is checked for the criminal law relevance of the specified website and, if necessary, a report is made. The lawyers of the HaGalil e. V. were able to obtain a judicial conviction in several cases.

The primary goal, however, is to identify the direct authors of right-wing extremist sites and to inform the police and the constitution protection authorities accordingly. Only in second place is it a matter of persuading the provider to remove the Internet presence. In the event of massive misuse of certain Internet offers, measures can be taken against the provider in accordance with the State Media Treaty. According to the editors, up to 50 percent of all judgments against neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda crimes on the Internet were based on advertisements from haGalil. The agency's lawyers often had to explain their options to public prosecutors and the police:

It is often said that criminal prosecution is not possible if inflammatory websites are "hosted", ie managed, by foreign servers. But if the publisher of such Nazi sites can be proven to be located in the Federal Republic of Germany, the public prosecutor can take action. We then find ourselves in the strange role of explaining to public prosecutors that they have a duty to prosecute - not because we want it, but because it is so in German law.

In October 2003, the Internet service published a critical article about a speech given by the CDU member of the Bundestag, Martin Hohmann, which was often classified as anti-Semitic . The Hohmann affair triggered by the publication led to his exclusion from the CDU.

On the other hand, Gall is skeptical of state initiatives to combat right-wing extremism on the Internet using filter software , appeals to providers to take responsibility for themselves , or an ethical “world consensus”, as the former Federal Minister of Justice Herta Däubler-Gmelin was striving for. He describes these initiatives as counterproductive and considers it unlikely that Arab countries will join a world consensus that dictates what they can publish about Israel and the Middle East conflict, for example. He continues:

I think the authorities in charge have never understood the explosiveness of the problem, including with regard to Islamist agitation, and the willingness to deal with successful solutions is correspondingly low. Sometimes I thought that we had to switch off because we couldn't do this job on our own. But then I know that thousands of students who read our pages, who send us e-mails, participate in Internet forums or call us, end up on Nazi pages again. So it would be irresponsible to give up HaGalil.

financing

haGalil is financed through advertising income and donations. Between 2002 and 2004 it was partly funded by entimon , part of the federal government's action program “ Youth for Tolerance and Democracy - Against Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism” with up to 100,000 euros. Further funding was rejected by the responsible Federal Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in January 2005 for various reasons, including a change in the provider. With around 3.4 million page views from around 320,000 readers per month, the site is one of the largest online services in Germany.

Hacker attack

On February 2nd, 2006 around 6:00 am, the website was hacked and all data was deleted from the haGalil server. In addition to haGalil.com, around 60 other sites were affected by the hacker attack. A day before that, HaGalil had published the Mohammed cartoons by Jyllands-Posten and contrasted them with anti-Semitic and anti-American cartoons. In addition, David Gall mentioned death threats such as "Kill the Danes!" And announced that the IP address from which a corresponding file was inserted leads [...] to Qatar . Much of the data was available as a backup copy, so that HaGalil was able to go online again about two weeks after the attack.

publication

  • David Gall, Andrea Livnat: HaGalil OnLine. Strategies Against Right . In: Stephan Braun, Daniel Hörsch (ed.): Right networks - a danger , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 978-3-8100-4153-1 , pp. 243-250

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source: user statistics on haGalil, accessed September 30, 2013.
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ a b Gudrun Giese: “Using the Net”. In: bnr, look to the right . 25, February 13, 2001 (interview with David Gall, fee required).
  4. ↑ Thomas Klatt: Jewish online service haGalil. An important source of information for 20 years , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, February 5, 2016
  5. ↑ Peter Nowak : Hagalil radio SOS. The Jewish Internet magazine is threatened with extinction because of the deletion of funds. In: Telepolis . February 21, 2005.
  6. ↑ Not to be crushed. hagalil is back on the net ( Memento from December 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: Jewish newspaper . March 2006.

Web links