Businesses use “dashboards” as a convenient way to keep track of critical issues, with the top information they need from multiple sources placed on a single screen and with the ability to drill down into the details.
Given that the Left and the Right disagree strongly as to what constitutes a danger to Jews worldwide, I think it would be helpful to create a digital dashboard of threats, with at least an attempt to objectively compare threats based on various criteria.
To use a tiny example, the Left always says that the threat from white nationalists is much higher than any other threat in the US. I have been very concerned over Nation of Islam-inspired antisemitim in recent weeks. Which is a bigger danger?
White nationalists are truly fringe (although the Left wants to paint every Republican as a member.) As I tweeted last night, the combined Twitter following of the biggest names in white nationalism is dwarfed by the fans of Ice Cube, who has tweeted multiple antisemitic memes in recent weeks.
Last week Twitter removed 67 white nationalist accounts totaling 140,000 followers.
David Duke has 54,000 followers.
Richard Spencer has 81,000 followers.Ice Cube alone has 5.4 MILLION followers.
— Elder of Ziyon (@elderofziyon) July 17, 2020
White Nationalists have a history of extreme violence and direct incitement, NOI itself does not directly encourage violence but its philosophy has inspired murderous attacks and the increasing violence in major cities can become a specific threat to the Jewish community as we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere during the George Floyd riots.
We need to take all these factors for all the threats and quantify them so they can be compared and ranked. Potential countermeasures should be listed and their expenses calculated. Once all the data and data sources are compiled then we can use modern data mining techniques to dive deep into the information and see where it makes sense to use limited resources to fight these threats.
Here is a very ugly, quick and dirty mock up of some core information; a real dashboard would have interactive maps and links to be able to see the current state of both threats and countermeasures, by type and target country. (By “magnitude” I mean “number of threat actors, but the data isn’t the point, rather the concept.)
Everything on that screen would be clickable to drill down, all columns would be sortable, the level of detail could be set up to be as general or specific as possible.
A reasonably objective dashboard, with its underlying logic publicly available so one can change the assumptions, could be a great tool for funders and major Jewish organizations to get on the same page and prioritize accordingly.
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