Shaming the shaming

Outrage roils the press Monday morning following a long weekend during which a bureaucrat committed suicide after someone called him racist on Facebook, an accusation that was then picked up in the mainstream media.

“Insulted to death,” reads the headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, reporting that a post on Facebook accusing an Interior Ministry department director of racist discrimination ended in tragedy. It also uses the deafeningly bad headline “Post trauma” for its main coverage of the suicide.

Ariel Ronis, an administrator at an Interior Ministry office in Tel Aviv and former Shin Bet operative, wrote, “All of my work over the course of my entire life was swept away instantly, ended in a moment by someone who was asked to stand in line like everyone else.”

In case you don’t have the Internet, the tabloids printed out the Facebook posts for you, both the one in which an African-American Israeli accuses Ariel Ronis of racism for not helping her, and Ronis’s response prior to shooting himself. “A keyboard can also kill,” Israel Hayom sermonizes with its headline, punctuating its assignment of guilt in the matter.

Haaretz takes stock of the “phenomenon of shaming” — employing a transliteration of the English word into Hebrew — and says that social media networks have become powerful tools for both good and evil. While it acknowledges the positive side of online shaming, such as documenting police abuse or boorish behavior on an airplane by unruly passengers demanding chocolate, it calls in an expert on the Internet who says that it can also be a bad thing. Orna Heilinger of the Safe Internet Center says that “it’s not black and white.” “I want to avoid saying that the net kills,” she adds, “but it definitely can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. That’s why we say, ‘don’t share don’t participate.'”

Yedioth Ahronoth also runs a similar article warning the 2.8 million Israelis who use Facebook regularly against the “lynchternet,” another nonsensical term invented in Hebrew to describe online abuse.

“Internet users must understand the power a post like this can have and to think twice before they share it,” it says.

Dan Margalit from Israel Hayom takes to the defense of Ronis and says that a civilian who overheard the conversation between the bureaucrat and the woman who later accused him of racism on Facebook told him “that there wasn’t a hint of racism about him.” Margalit says that “in certain respects this death was inevitable, when it comes to people for whom it’s impossible to predetermine the level of vulnerability and exposure to this desperate step.” In a world where everyone’s a newspaper editor, he says, “we can ask for those who express their opinions to act with restraint.”

Top story in Haaretz is the Irish approval by referendum of same-sex marriage, even though it’s stale news, but the paper also reports on Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah speaking out against both the Jewish state and the Islamic State at the same time. He is quoted saying that there’s still no need for a general call-up, but that the Shiite group is in a “war of existence” against the Sunni group charged with killing hundreds in Palmyra over the weekend. The paper reports that over the weekend a Lebanese paper with close ties to Hezbollah said that the Shiite militia’s forces are on high alert on the border with Israel, and detailed their preparedness for combat, including tunnels, bunkers, outposts and tens of thousands of missiles and rockets.

Israel Hayom gears up for the sentencing of former prime minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday morning in the Talansky bribery case, quoting his lawyer saying that the ex-Jerusalem mayor “has been punished enough.” (Olmert was given eight months and a fine of NIS 100,000 on top of his six-year sentence in the Holyland corruption trial.)

Farther back in the tabloids, Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom report on the string of arrests made by the Israel Police of alleged mob bosses. Rico Shirzi was arrested on suspicion of ordering the attempted assassination of rival crime boss Assi Abutbul, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The arrest came after the arrests of crime bosses Yitzhak Abergil and Avi Rohan, and the paper calls the development “a dramatic development in the chapter which shook the criminal world in Israel.”

Israel Hayom doesn’t publish the names of the individuals implicated in the sting, but reports that the suspect arrested was on his way to Greece and was arrested by police detectives moments before getting on the plane at Ben-Gurion International Airport.