[WCUSP] Facebook censors Palestinian human rights activists
KATHARLOW at aol.com
KATHARLOW at aol.com
Sat Nov 17 14:30:46 CST 2007
_http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2007/11/16/9481/5056_
(http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2007/11/16/9481/5056)
_Facebook censors Palestinian human rights activist UPDATES_
(http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/11/16/9481/5056)
by _shergald_ (http://www.boomantribune.com/user/shergald)
Fri Nov 16th, 2007 at 09:48:00 AM EST
(http://photobucket.com/)
The kind of censorship I am about to describe can only occur in America,
sadly to say, in the freedom of speech capital of the world. When Daily Kos, the
largest left wing Democratic site on the internet, made a decision earlier
this year to ban advocates of Palestinian freedom and self-determination, it
did so at the behest of a cabal of right wing Zionists that monitor the site.
Administration even worked with this cabal to eventually purge over twenty
bloggers, including Palestinian and Palestinian-Americans, Israeli and Jewish
American peace activists, and a host of advocates for the Palestinian human
rights (see _Is Daily Kos a "Zionist Occupied Zone?",_
(http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/5/21/65837/3515) _Two Peace Activists Banned From Daily Kos,
_ (http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/5/13/105331/251) _Daily Kos Bans
Two Palestinian Peace Activists,_
(http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/5/15/17224/5166) and _Jewish American peace activist banned from Daily Kos_
(http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/5/16/175714/793) ).
A portion of the 20 or more bloggers banned from Daily Kos were also featured
in this British cartoon:
(http://photobucket.com/)
It was already the case that censorship of Israeli-Palestinian advocacy was
on other "liberal" or left wing blogs like MyDD and Democratic Underground,
where banning per se did not occur, but administrator restriction of writings
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict produced censorship anyway. Fark,
another large blog, also uses essay editorship to exclude proPalestinian writings
from its political pages.
The liberal blogosphere has definitely been invaded by right wing Zionists
and Zionist propagandists to keep the American public ignorant of the harsh
reality in the Palestinian territories, in particular, Israel's daily killings
of Palestinians (457 just in the past year alone; over 6,000 since 2000; and
holds over 10,000 political prisoners in jails) for the sole purpose of
annexing most of these lands and nullifying any possibility for a Palestinian
nation.
Zionist inspired censorship on "liberal" blogs is now following an old
pattern of verbal attack, charges of anti-Semitism and hate, and false accusations
to instill silence about Israel's deadly military occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza and colonization of Palestinian lands. As such, liberal blogs are
now following the mainstream media in enforcing silence about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Many prominent left wing political blogs have therefore relinquished liberal
Democratic values for the sake of expediency, or fear, of being attacked by
right wing Zionist cabals, just as Daily Kos did.
The latest expression of Zionist censorship was seen recently on Facebook,
where some few right wing Zionists merely informed the site's administrators,
falsely, that Sabbah's Blog, a leading proPalestinian human rights site, was
an anti-Semitic and Jew-hating site. And here it is not the case that some of
Sabbah's best friends are Jews, but rather that many Israeli and Jewish peace
activists subscribe to his stance concerning Israel's human rights
violations in the Palestinian territories.
(http://photobucket.com/)
This information about Facebook is from Wikipedia:
(http://photobucket.com/)
Facebook calls itself a social networking website that allows people to
communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4,
2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard
class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the
membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently
expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard,
Northeastern University, Tufts University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU,
Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual
universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people
with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions
across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high
schools and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, it has been made
available to users with any email address[2], if they are within a certain age
range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a
high school, place of employment, or geographic region.
As of November 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users
among college-focused sites with over 50 million active members worldwide and
expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year (also from
non-collegiate networks). From September 2006 to September 2007, it increased its
ranking from 60th to 7th most visited web site, and was the number one site for
photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over
8.5 million photos uploaded daily.
The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the
campus community that some U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to
incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on
campus.
It is on this site that we are seeing a further attempt to advance
censorship of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on America's college and university
campuses and elsewhere. What is going on here?
Sabbah issued this report on his censorship a few days ago.
Desperate to Censorship Facebook!
(http://photobucket.com/)
"You know you are doing well when Zionists and their alike are desperately
trying to silence you."
This is exactly what is happening to me on Facebook for two consecutive days
now.
As you know, beside Sabbah's Blog, I also run the aggregator, Palestine
Blogs - The Gazette.
Yesterday I received an email from Facebook Team complaining about Palestine
Blogs application which I created there few days ago. Following is a copy of
Facebook email to me, which is self explanatory:
From: Facebook [developers - _help+mmymw2yr at facebookmail.com_
(mailto:help+mmymw2yr at facebookmail.com) ]
Date: Nov 13, 2007 12:19 PM
Subject: User TOS report against Palestine Blogs - The Gazette
To: _haitham.sabbah at gmail.com_ (mailto:haitham.sabbah at gmail.com)
Hi,
A Facebook user reported that your application Palestine Blogs - The Gazette
violates our Terms of Use. The user reporting it selected Attacks individual
or group as the violation. This person also said:
"blatantly Anti-Semitic. Attacks Jews and Israelis as Nazis, war criminals,
legitimate suicide bombing targets, etc."
Please investigate this issue.
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
I replied back to Facebook Team explaining to them that the above is not
true and gave them a brief description of the aggregator - Palestine Blogs, but
the email bounced back because the sender email (Facebook's) is configured to
bounce emails sent to it. I looked around Facebook site to find a way to
contact the 'Team' but could not find a way to do that, so I gave up... At least
I tried!
The story did not end there. Today I got a second email from Facebook again,
and it was another complain, but this time regarding my blog application
(Sabbah's). The email below is self explanatory:
From: Facebook [developers - _help+mmymw2yr at facebookmail.com_
(mailto:help+mmymw2yr at facebookmail.com) ]
Date: Nov 14, 2007 7:37 PM
Subject: User TOS report against Sabbah's
To: _haitham.sabbah at gmail.com_ (mailto:haitham.sabbah at gmail.com)
Hi,
A Facebook user reported that your application Sabbah's violates our Terms
of Use. The user reporting it selected Attacks individual or group as the
violation. This person also said:
"Following my recent encounters with Sabbah on his blog, it is pure
propaganda blog that silences everybody who disagree with the writer (I was silenced
after posting very polite comments questioning a few posts). It is basically
a one-man hosted hate group and i don't think it has a place on platform such
as Facebook. Thank you!"
Please investigate this issue.
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
Pathetic! They did not leave anything for chance and grouped all the sins in
this world together. A "one-man hosted hate group, anti-Semitic, anti-Jews,
anti-Israelis as Nazis, citing war criminals and legitimate suicide bombing
targets."
It looks like a systematic-desperate force trying to influence/scare
Facebook to censorship what is published there. Of course this is not new around the
web (check Steve's post about the resent attempt to silence Google), and I'm
sure it will never stop as long as we have Zionists spitting poison every
way they go.
Anyway, if I disappear from Facebook, you know why!
Any advice?
So has Facebook now become another avenue of censorship of news about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Wait until the college and university students
who blog on this site find out about its restriction of Palestinians from the
site. This is certainly deserving of a boycott, as the first amendment, which
we hold dear, is being violated by Facebook on the basis of right wing
Zionist operatives who seek to censor all criticism of Israel, using the old canard
that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic and lies concerning advocates of
Palestinian freedom and human rights.
Let's wait and see if the college/university community responds.
UPDATES:
1) From Amal, who runs the blog, Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive
Voice
In Solidarity with Sabbah
Anti-Palestinian trolls are hard at work and one of their recent casualties
is Sabbah, who is being banned from Facebook because of complaints about his
political views. If they think Sabbah will be easily silenced, they have one
or two or three things to learn.
_http://arabwomanprogressivevoice.blogspot.com/_
(http://arabwomanprogressivevoice.blogspot.com/)
Thank you Amal
2) In the name of the Baqaa Palestinian Refugee Camp outside of Amman,
Jordan, and its site, this acknowledgement forwarded:
_http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m38289&s1=h1_
(http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m38289&s1=h1)
3) Report from Sabbah:
OTOH, I don't know if I can call it censor because so far my account is
still running, so is my applications which the complaints were about. I would
prefer to call it a 'warning' until I see real censorship on what I publish
there, or worse get banned.
We shall see. A warning that your site has been falsely deemed an
anti-semitic hate site gives food for thought here, and whether Sabbah will be
guillotined by the right wing Zionists, who have stalked his site, remains to be
seen. The Daily Kos and liberal blog experiences described above are otherwise
true and harbingers of things to come. Sabbah can expect the same.
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 48588 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0004.jpe
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 48919 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0005.jpe
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/unknown
Size: 18338 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0001.bin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 6256 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0006.jpe
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 17495 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://wilpf.org/pipermail/wcusp_wilpf.org/attachments/20071117/e89ac386/attachment-0007.jpe
More information about the Wcusp
mailing list