Anti-Semitism Rife on Yahoo Message Boards
By JOHN THOMPSON, Special to the Sun
June 26, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/business/anti-semitism-rife-on-yahoo-message-boards/80709/
While the subprime mortgage crisis roils the market, a profusion of anti-Semitic rhetoric has exploded against companies like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers Holdings on online message boards maintained by Yahoo.
"The Jews at Goldman are responsible for high oil prices," one user on a Yahoo message board for Goldman Sachs wrote recently. "Yeah, not one word from the media about how the greedy Jews have brought this whole financial mess on the world. Wonder why that is?" said another poster on a message board for Lehman Brothers Holdings.
These comments and others like them have drawn the attention of the Anti-Defamation League and public relations officers from firms named on the message boards, who are approaching Yahoo about cleaning up the sites.
"We don't have any affiliation with the site," a spokeswoman at Goldman Sachs, Andrea Raphael, said, adding that the firm has contacted Yahoo and asked that it remove the offensive comments from the boards.
The Anti-Defamation League is also jumping into the fray, and has contacted Yahoo to look into the matter. "We are hopeful that when we get in touch with them, they will address the problem," the associate director of civil rights, Steven Freeman, said.
On the site, banks that are attacked also include Washington Mutual, with comments like, "No wonder the Germans hate Jews so much. Just for making a dime, they are willing to destroy and ruin the country which gives them shelter," according to someone called sunfy8.
A commenter calling himself hochithul said on a site for Goldman Sachs, "Jew banks will get destroyed by shorts," referring to short sellers. "Jews stick together like mud and love to pat themselves on the back," prudentman007 wrote on the same site. Lehman Brothers is also under attack, with someone named dontputsaltonmypepper noting, "Them Jews are sneaky bastards."Sound familiar?
Yahoo "takes abusive language on its message boards very seriously," the company said in a statement. The terms of service for using its message board disallows any comments that are "defamatory, vulgar, obscene" or "hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable," but it also has a liability clause that releases Yahoo from any responsibility for these third-party comments.
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