Following the emergence in France of an online map of Jewish-owned entities, U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers on Sunday accused European officials of selectively using hate speech laws to target critics of mass migration while ignoring antisemitism.
Rogers, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, leveled the criticism on X following an uproar over the map, which unidentified programmers had uploaded to the France-based cartography website GoGoCarto.
The creators of the undated map, which included the offices of mainstream Jewish groups in Barcelona among the 150-odd addresses listed, wrote that it showed how Zionism “operates and in what forms it presents itself.” GoGoCarto removed the addresses following complaints last week by Spanish and French Jews, the Enfoque Judio website reported.
“A French platform hosting a map of Jewish businesses (or homes) offends neither” of the European Commission’s twin goals with its new Digital Services Act (DSA), Rogers said. The goals were to “extort and extract from American businesses; and suppress speech flagged by left-wing NGOs,” she alleged.
Therefore, she continued, “the censorship zealots who want to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter’ for hosting truthful speech about the consequences of mass migration likely shrug mildly at this content.” By contrast, the same people “would leap to censor the same content on an American platform—or if the map depicted ISIS-sympathetic mosques,” she added.
Laws against what is defined as hate speech “would be a bad idea even if they functioned as claimed. But they never do, and should be wholly rejected as a response to antisemitism or any other concern,” Rogers added.
The office of the European Commission Press Service spokesperson for DSA issues, Thomas Regnier, had not replied to a JNS request for comment at time of publication.
Rogers’ criticism referenced the legal fight between entrepreneur Elon Musk, who owns the X social network, and the European Commission. Last month, it fined X $140 million after it was found to be in breach of new E.U. digital laws known as DSA.
Unlike Rogers, mainstream European Jewish groups have called for stricter limitations of antisemitic and other hateful rhetoric online, including in connection with the GoGoCarto map.
“We urge GoGoCarto, the Government of Catalonia and the City Council of Barcelona to act with urgency, to remove content that enables discrimination and incitement and to ensure accountability under applicable law,” the European Jewish Congress wrote in a statement last week about the map.
Angel Mas, the president of the Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM) group, told JNS that he regards the map as a result of government-led incitement against Israel in Spain, and that he has limited hope of government action to prevent such lists and maps from being created and advertised.
The map is “yet another example of the deeply dangerous and increasingly alarming radicalization of violent groups that enjoy political protection and ideological cover from public authorities in Spain,” said Mas.
The national government, the regional government of Catalonia, and the municipal government of Barcelona “have crossed all red lines,” Mas added. “At this point, businesses and individuals are being explicitly targeted because of their Jewish identity, once again with the complicity—by action or by omission—of multiple levels of government.”
Jewish citizens “can no longer rely on municipal, regional, or national police forces for protection when those responsible for incitement and targeting operate within the political and social orbit of power,” he said, and warned it would lead to loss of life. “This is not just a failure of governance. It is a tragedy in the making,” he said.
Bijan Tavassoli, a prominent left-wing activist from Germany, called the map “a digital version of the Nazi boycott campaign against Jewish-owned businesses.”
