Stop posting about Gaza, police tell woman with Jewish family

From The Telegraph

A woman subjected to anti-Semitic abuse on social media says she was advised by police to stop posting on controversial subjects such as Gaza.

Ms Bachram has been prominent in raising the plight of hostages still held by Hamas. On Oct 7, Tsachi, the cousin of Ms Bachram’s husband, and his wife and two children were held at gunpoint on the floor of their home on Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

Mayan, Tsachi’s 18-year-old daughter, was murdered and Tsachi taken hostage. His family received confirmation in February that he had been killed in captivity.

An account operated under the name NJimmytree is accused of bombarding Ms Bachram with abuse, calling her a “scumbag”, “ugly Zionist” and “ugly faced pig”.

One message stated: “You have a face only a genocidal Zionist pig could like. Your brother-in-law should thank Hamas, because of them he never has to see your monstrosity of a face again.”

Another of NJimmytree’s posts showed a photograph of Mia Chem, a young woman kidnapped by Hamas at the Nova festival, with the jibe “check out the beak on this one”.

One particularly offensive post in November last year showed two images of a young woman’s profile and the comment: “Imagine getting a nose job because your captors made you feel ugly because they didn’t want to rape her.”

Ms Bachram says police were reluctant to investigate the abuse. Instead, she says, she was told by a sergeant that what she tweets is “politically sensitive” and asked: “Why don’t you stop posting about it?”

She added: “He said I was making myself a target. I feel like I’ve been victimised twice. Once by this cruel troll and secondly by the police. It was classic ‘blame the victim’ stuff.”

Ms Bachram said the Sussex force’s attitude to anti-Semitic posts appeared inconsistent.

Just two weeks before she reported the NJimmytree posts, an officer contacted her in order to alert her to an anti-Semitic message posted by a far-Right troll.

In response to a photograph shared by Ms Bachram of a memorial to Gaza hostages erected in Brighton which had been smeared with faeces, a user called NoticeBanned wrote on X on June 23: “None of these people died in Brighton. F— off Jew.”

Sussex Police invited Ms Bachram to make a complaint about this abusive post, which she did, and officers are understood to have asked X to provide the ID of the NoticeBanned account, which has a history of anti-Semitic and racist abuse.

Alex Hearn, of Labour Against Antisemitism, said: “The inconsistency in policing these cases beggars belief. How can they be so proactive in one case and dismissive of another?”