Using Twitter to Confront an Anti‐​Semitic Attack in Chile’s Paper of Record

After a morning workout and attending Mass this Sunday, I read El Mercurio (Chile’s paper of record) online. Although I seldom read Chilean newspapers blogs (too many attacks and too much dirt), I did so that morning because I was impressed by the indignation expressed by my friend Luis Larraín in his Sunday blog (titled “Canallas” – Shameless). I had named Larraín Superintendent of Social Security when he was 25 years old. At that time I was 30 and Secretary of Labor and Social Security.

With astonishment I discovered that a certain “Mr. Murillo”, in the comment number 10 on the blog (which I copied immediately, and backed up electronically), explicitly attacked another commenter, Mr. José Fregoso Edelstein, by saying that his previous comment was due to the fact that he is from a “bad race” because he is Jewish.

I immediately logged in to Twitter and posted a ‘tweet’ demanding El Mercurio delete the blog comment, because it is a terrible insult directed at a group of people that have suffered indescribable horrors, not only in the 20th Century, but throughout history. I would have done the same thing if the insult was directed at Palestinians, Lebanese, Croatians, or any other racial/religious/national group.

However, I found an unexpected surprise. Instead of receiving immediate support for an action I thought just and reasonable, several people on Twitter attacked Jews, and me for defending them (one wrote, “You have used your enormous prestige in Chile to become “a shield for the Jews”). They also accused me of “encouraging censorship”, suggesting a “media dictatorship”, etc. . . . I replied inmediately in Twitter to the least offensive ones. Fifteen minutes later I received a ‘tweet’ from an editor at El Mercurio, saying that they had seen my complaint in Twitter and that they were studying the situation. With another tweet I insisted on immediate deletion of the comment. Twenty minutes later the newspaper editors deleted the offensive comment number 10. I want to emphasize that the editorial mistake, even this grievous one, does not compromise the newspaper El Mercurio as a whole, and its fast action in regard to the issue speaks to the newspaper’s chief editor's integrity. It was an extraordinary triumph of the fast boat Twitter over the “media carrier” in Chile, another demonstration of the liberating potential of the wonderful new technologies being developed in the land of the free and the brave.

What left me very worried, and the reason I wrote this, is having detected a worrisome anti-Semitic sentiment among my fellow countrymen. Is this unjust anti-Semitic sentiment widespread, though hidden, in Chile, or was this only a “black swan?” I declare myself in a state of alert. We are building a free and good country. There should be no place whatsoever for the language of hate and the discrimination of minorities. As the great Albert Einstein said: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”