Antisemitic Libel: The Fake ‘Registered Sex Offenders’ Map

In 2014, an app was created to complement the existing Israeli warning system used to alert the population about incoming rocket attacks from Gaza. Quicker and more informative than siren warnings, users could accurately see which areas were under threat by the location of a red pin on a map and react accordingly, knowing what sort of attack to expect.

In 2022, in response to a post by the official X account of the State of Israel, a screenshot from this life-saving app was used to create a fake ‘Map of Registered Sex Offenders in Israel’ by an account named White Assad (@RacismFactory). (This account is currently private; a digitally archived copy of that post can be found here.)

The map was designed to portray Jews as immoral and perverse, an age-old antisemitic trope. Even though it was quickly confirmed by the app’s developer to be a manipulated copy of their Red Alert system and unrelated to sex offenders, it was shared across social media and went viral.

The fabricated map’s crooked and misshapen pins, each allegedly representing an individual sex offender, were disproportionately large compared to the map’s scale, making the area appear densely populated with offenders. This was a deliberate attempt to imply that Israel has an excessive number of sex offenders living in the country. However, a map of any country using a similar scale would look the same. Additionally, many markers were located in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Today, other fake maps utilizing genuine screenshots from various Red Alert apps continue to make the same vexatious claims, but there is one very important fact that proves them all to be forgeries: Israel, like all other countries in the world except for the U.S., does not allow public access to the sex offenders registry, making it impossible to create such a map from official statistics and data.

The claim that Israel has an exceptionally high number of known sex offenders in the world is also untrue. Like all countries, Israeli citizens suffer from sexual assaults, but Israel does not appear anywhere near the top of any study conducted worldwide on any type of sexual offense.

To keep citizens as safe as possible from sexual predators, Israel set up a specialist team, the Israel Prison Service’s Tzur unit, in 2006. This unit’s sole responsibility is to monitor sexual offenders who have served their sentences and been released from prison, acting promptly on any breaches of bail or perceived threats to the public.

Official statistics also show that 92% of sexual offenders serving sentences in Israeli prisons agree to undergo treatment while incarcerated. This treatment can include intensive daily sessions to help them understand the consequences of their actions on victims, enabling them to return to society without posing a threat to the public—a treatment that has proven to be very successful.