Dear Bury Times readers,
I want to speak to you about an issue that's emerging on our Facebook comments section that needs to be addressed directly.
Over the past week, the Bury Times shared two stories affecting the Jewish community here in Bury.
The first, about a female-only Jewish bathhouse being approved in the borough, was a good news story for the countless female Jews who use Mikvas as part of the ritual process and currently have to travel a significant distance to access the facilities.
The second, just days later, centred around a survivor-led Holocaust education programme arriving in borough schools in the lead up to Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.
Roughly 1,900 and 3,000 Facebook comments were posted respectively across each of these posts, and unfortunately, at least 60 to 70 per cent of those comments were anti-semitic. Possibly even more.
Readers posted comments and images featuring outdated religious tropes, denied the existence of the Holocaust, and made a large proportion of our community here in Bury feel marginalised at a time of significant international tension.
Simply, this is not acceptable, and it is not something we, here at the Bury Times, are willing to tolerate.
We have already banned a handful of users who posted content which violates our and Facebook's standards, and we will not hesitate to take further action against those who persist in abusing our comment section to peddle hatred.
We have also been forced to delete both posts from our Facebook page due to the sheer scale of commenting on each post, and the thousands of comments to moderate, remove and take action on.
This shouldn't need to be the case.
We believe in freedom of speech, and we do not want to turn commenting off on our stories. The only occasion we routinely do this is when it relates to an active criminal proceeding, and we want to prevent the risk of prejudice to those proceedings.
We like to encourage healthy debate and allow people the opportunity to discuss the biggest issues occurring in Bury.
Removing these posts from Facebook was a last resort.
However, we may now be forced to turn commenting off on certain stories in the community because we simply do not have the time or resources to monitor and moderate thousands of discriminatory comments.
What we have witnessed in our comment section this week is a real shame, and we will not stop reporting on these important issues simply because people choose to react with hatred.
The Mikva approval is a great news story for local female Jews, and Bury has one of the largest populations of Jewish people in the UK.
They should not be prevented from celebrating good news in their community out of fear about anti-semitism in the comments section, and should be able to freely comment on Facebook without fear of persecution.
The survivor-led Holocaust education programme is also a vital project to continue educating the next generations about one of the most horrific, systematic, and inhumane acts of genocide in human history.
Holocaust denial is illegal in many countries across Europe, including in Germany, the country whose Nazi Government was responsible for the murder and deaths of approximately six million Jews between 1941 and 1945.
Just three months ago, we saw horror on our streets after a terror attack at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue took the lives of two Jewish men.
We also recently heard of a foiled terror plot - believed to be the largest potential terror attack in UK history - being planned for Jewish buildings across Manchester, including here in Prestwich.
We simply ask people to be better and kinder, and consider how your words may impact the more than 10,000 Jews who call Bury their home.
The world is in an exceptionally fraught and fragile place, and unity, not division, is the only way for society to prevail over such tension and intolerance.
Andrew Topping, Bury Times News Editor.
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