November 27, 2017 By Mark Pitcavage, Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Extremism Many subjects are difficult to report on, but extremist and fringe movements are particularly difficult landscapes for journalists to navigate, strewn with rough terrain and the occasional landmine. As someone who has monitored right-wing extremism for more than two decades, I’ve had the pleasure of reading many fine works of journalism on extremist-related subjects, but I’ve also seen…

November 07, 2017 November 2, 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a letter signed in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressing his country's support for the establishment of a national Jewish home in Palestine. While the UK and Israel celebrated the anniversary of this Declaration, which has become a symbol of international recognition of the Jewish right to self-determination, Palestinians and others have used the occasion to protest, and demand an…

October 20, 2017 Recently, a video game designer was working on a multiplayer first-person shooter game at a small studio. Others in the company were building battle maps, weapons, and different avatars — but she was the only person to raise her hand and say, "What are we doing to make sure that folks who are playing this game online aren't being totally awful to each other?" She decided to create community guidelines, looking at lists of hateful words to determine which words could…

July 19, 2017 In recent months Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest and most influential Jewish pro-BDS group in the United States, has taken increasingly radical positions and has employed questionable tactics in pursuit of its mission to diminish support for Israel. The following are some of ADL’s main concerns with the group’s ideology and tactics. Harassing LGBT Groups: One of JVP’s longtime tactics has been to allege that Israel’s proud record of support for…

June 28, 2017 In early June, several Arab countries - notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain - announced that they were abruptly severing ties with Qatar over what they described as the latter’s support for terrorism. And even though what’s involved is mainly an internal Arab affair, some Qatari news sites published conspiratorial cartoons suggesting Israel was behind the diplomatic crisis. Some depicted Israel as a wolf in sheep’s clothing or as a…

May 01, 2017  Updated: 9/5/18 Has the simple thumb-and-forefinger “OK” hand gesture become a common white supremacist hand sign?  Not quite, but it has become a popular gesture used by people across several segments of the right and far right—including some actual white supremacists—who generally use it to trigger reactions, or what they would describe as “trolling the libs.” This is thanks to a 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the…

April 10, 2017 An online campaign of anti-Semitism has been directed at Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor over the past week. It comes in the context of Trump’s removal of chief strategist Stephen Bannon from the National Security Council and reports about a feud between Bannon and Kushner as well as airstrikes in Syria in response to the chemical attack last week. This campaign of anti-Semitism has been driven by white supremacists and anti-Semites…