© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Individuals collect to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s go to to California as he’s scheduled to fulfill with entrepreneur Elon Musk, at union sq. in San Francisco, California, U.S. September 18, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File
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JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur accused by civil rights teams of amplifying anti-Jewish hatred on his X social media platform, will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in Israel on Monday, Channel 12 TV mentioned on Sunday.
An Israeli supply confirmed the go to by Musk, a billionaire who additionally runs Tesla (NASDAQ:) and SpaceX. Spokespeople for Tesla and X, previously often known as Twitter, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Musk’s go to coincides with a four-day truce in an Israeli struggle with Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza.
Netanyahu met Musk in California on Sept. 18 and urged him to strike a steadiness between defending free expression and preventing hate speech after weeks of controversy over antisemitic content material on X.
Musk responded by saying he was towards antisemitism and towards something that “promotes hate and battle,” repeating his earlier statements that X wouldn’t promote hate speech.
Throughout that go to, earlier than the struggle, about 200 individuals protested efforts by Netanyahu’s right-wing authorities to curb the powers of Israeli courts. They gathered outdoors Tesla’s California manufacturing facility, the place the assembly occurred.
Then on Nov. 15 Musk agreed with a submit on X that falsely claimed Jewish individuals had been stoking hatred towards white individuals, saying the consumer who referenced the “Nice Substitute” conspiracy principle was talking “the precise fact.”
The White Home condemned what it known as an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate” that “runs towards our core values as People.”
Main U.S. corporations together with Walt Disney (NYSE:), Warner Bros Discovery (NASDAQ:) and NBCUniversal guardian Comcast (NASDAQ:) paused their commercials on his social media web site.
The “Nice Substitute” conspiracy principle holds that Jewish individuals and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural substitute of white populations with non-white immigrants that can result in a “white genocide.”
Antisemitism and Islamophobia have risen in the US and worldwide, together with in the course of the now seven-week-old struggle between Israel and Hamas.
Following the outbreak of struggle, antisemitic incidents in the US rose by practically 400% from the year-earlier interval, in line with the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit group that fights antisemitism.
Musk has mentioned X must be a platform for individuals to submit various viewpoints, however the firm will restrict the distribution of sure posts that will violate its insurance policies, calling the strategy “freedom of speech, not attain.”
Musk is growing a synthetic intelligence startup xAI, and Israel is taken into account a world chief within the discipline, due to burgeoning computing and robotics industries.
Israel’s virtually $500 billion financial system, beforehand on monitor for progress to high 3% this yr with low unemployment, is now estimated at round 2% with sluggish progress anticipated in 2024 so long as the struggle continues. After an preliminary 6% tumble the outset of the struggle, the has gained 8% towards the greenback and is now at pre-war ranges. Helped primarily by native traders, inventory costs have additionally recovered from a steep drop final month.
