Subtle hate speech and the recontextualisation of antisemitism online

Abstract

This chapter presents the online debate on two highly ambiguous political cartoons that were published by the Greek left-wing newspaper I Efimerída ton Syntaktón (EfSyn ) and aimed to criticise a series of public policies proposed by the conservative New Democracy party. The employment of the Holocaust in these cartoons was discursively constructed as a (re)production of antisemitism by members of Facebook groups and pages of the Jewish community, who are actively engaged in countering this form of discrimination. Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the examination of Facebook posts and comments against what has been perceived as antisemitic hatred. Principles and tools from the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and the argumentum model of topics (AMT) are employed, aiming to provide insights on the socio-historical context in which commonly accepted contextual premises (endoxa) may be established, before being challenged via the relevant argumentative schemes (topoi) in dialectical syllogisms. In doing so, the chapter intends to sharpen the analytical armoury of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) by offering an in-depth investigation of the following interrelated levels: the socio-historical vertical (macro-)level as this is encoded or opposed in the (micro-)level of communicative content.

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