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We don’t have to — we’re Google!

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) plays an essential role in debunking Hamas’ and Fatah’s claims to moderation or even legitimacy.

By monitoring, translating and giving exposure to the vicious antisemitic rantings that appear in Palestinian Arab media, especially TV, PMW makes it impossible for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to hide who and what they are.

Now, in an Orwellian fashion, Google’s YouTube has removed PMW’s main video channel — Palwatch — because it allegedly violates terms of service with respect to hate speech!

This is what you will see if you try to access Palwatch videos like “PA cleric: Kill Jews, Allah will make Muslims masters over Jews” formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjuDTO8fgqM, or “Hamas suicide terrorist farewell video: Palestinians drink the blood of Jews” formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSftYIGH6-w:

Sorry indeed! As a former teacher of logic, let me point out that YouTube is committing the classic fallacy of confusing the use of a linguistic entity with its mention. In other words, Palwatch is not engaging in hate speech — rather it is describing it and in fact advocating against it.

If YouTube or its parent Google really wanted to help reduce the incidence of hate speech in the world, they would promote Palwatch’s exposure and shaming of those who use this kind of hateful propaganda to attack others.

The inversion of ethical guidelines to punish the victim rather than the perpetrator is apparently popular today. This case is remarkably similar to the recent IRS ruling that a pro-Israel group seeking tax-exempt status must be vetted by special criteria because “Israel is one of many Middle Eastern countries that have a ‘higher risk of  terrorism.'”

There is another problem, and this is the self-service model adopted by YouTube and Google. These media — I don’t know if ‘medium’ is the right description for Google, but it’s the only word I can think of — are hugely powerful. They can make or break a commercial enterprise, a nonprofit, or perhaps even a country. Yet their terms of service state that users have no rights of any kind, especially the right to contact a human being when they feel that they have been treated improperly.

As of today, Itamar Marcus of Palwatch has been unable to find an email address to complain to YouTube.

Not that an email address is likely to help. This blog has an unresolved problem that Google’s Blog Search stopped indexing it in August 2009, although posts appear in the normal web search. I’ve re-submitted it, requested ‘reconsideration’ (although from what I don’t know), read pages of ‘help’ and forums, and sent emails to every address I could find.  I have never received an answer, and short of showing up at their headquarters driving a tank, I’ve run out of ideas.

It’s reminiscent of the famous Laugh-in skit featuring Lily Tomlin:

We don't have to -- we're Google!

We don't have to -- we're Google!

Update [1933 PST]: Some or all of the videos — including the ones I’ve linked to above are available again! This issue was mentioned in many blogs and other media — perhaps someone noticed?  Let’s hope they all come back, permanently.

Update [2041 PST]: Lily Tomlin played telephone operator Ernestine on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in (1969), not Saturday Night Live. Memory is s broken reed.

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Posted in Antisemitism, Media | Comments Closed

Armenian activist bashes Israel

Monday, December 6th, 2010

This weekend Armenian activist Marshall Moushigian wrote an op-ed in our local newspaper, the Fresno Bee, which the paper thoughtfully headlined “Israel’s role in Armenian genocide.”

It contained numerous gratuitous attacks on Israel, quoted with approval the vicious remark of former State Department official Arma Jane Karaer that Jews “don’t particularly want to share the genocide label with other groups,” accused Israel and her supporters of “active participation in the final stage of genocide,” and compared Israel with “neo-Nazis.”

Nothing special these days, but his main point was a story that Israel shot down a Congressional resolution to recognize the genocide. He wrote,

The most blatant example of Israel’s meddling occurred in 2000 when the Armenian Genocide Resolution was set for a House vote. Armenians had been anxiously awaiting this vote, 85 years after the killings began, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert had promised to bring it to a vote. Passage, and the beginning stages of justice, was certain.

But in a surprise, last-minute move, Hastert withdrew the resolution from the docket, and many suspected Israel’s involvement. The Washington Post confirmed that suspicion in June 2010 when it reported a sequence of panicked events that flowed from Ankara directly to AIPAC in Washington, which immediately contacted President Clinton, who personally requested Hastert remove the resolution.

I believe the story was this one, in the Washington Times (not Post), which explains that

The Turks called up Keith Weissman, a senior researcher from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and asked him to intervene.

Mr. Weissman said in an interview this week that AIPAC lit up the phones and managed at the last minute — with the help of the State Department — to persuade President Clinton himself to write a letter to Mr. Hastert saying a vote on the resolution would cause strategic damage to U.S. interests.

The last-minute push worked. Mr. Hastert removed the resolution from the floor, and the full Congress has yet to take up the matter to this day.

Hmm, “with the help of the State Department.”

Could it be that the fact that State — and Defense — seriously wanted the resolution squashed had more than a little to do with the outcome?

Could it be that the notoriously Arabist State Department would be quite happy to put the blame for an unpopular decision on Israel? A twofer: help out the Turks and screw Israel in one blow!

Could it be that the notoriously self-important Weissman and AIPAC would be happy to take the ‘credit’?

As an aside, AIPAC has done a lot for the ‘Israel Lobby’ theorists by bragging about its supposed ability to ‘get things done’ in Washington. In fact, compared to the Saudi lobby, it is not all that effective.

Most American Jews want to see the Armenian genocide recognized, especially in Fresno where they have many Armenian friends, and where, in years past, it was common to hear eyewitness testimony.

In 1989 the rabbi of Fresno’s Temple Beth Israel pushed through a resolution at the national body of the Reform movement to support official US recognition of the genocide.

I’ve written numerous posts over the years arguing that the only moral position, given historical evidence, is to demand recognition of the genocide.

Moushigian’s ugly screed will not make him friends in the Jewish community, and will not advance his goal of getting a resolution passed in Congress. Jewish congressman Adam Schiff (D., Burbank CA) will be reintroducing his genocide recognition bill, which failed in 2008, in the next Congress.

Possibly the State Department will be sufficiently alarmed by Turkey’s new alignment with the Iranian bloc to support it this time.

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contains numerous gratuitous attacks on Israel, mostly unsupported by facts. He quotes with approval the vicious remark of a former State Department official that Jews “don’t want to share the genocide label with other groups,” he accuses Israel and her supporters of “active participation in the final stage of genocide,” and makes a comparison with neo-Nazis.

Posted in Jews and Armenian Genocide, Local interest, Media | Comments Closed

NY Times comes out against democracy

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

The NY Times doesn’t even pretend to hide its bias any more:

JERUSALEM — Israel’s right-leaning Parliament approved legislation late Monday that could hamper the leadership’s ability to seal future peace deals with the Palestinians or Syria.

The measure requires that any peace deal involving the ceding of territory annexed by Israel — namely East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — must be put to a national referendum.

The West Bank, which Israel never annexed, does not fall within the scope of the legislation, but it would include other pieces of sovereign Israeli territory that might be ceded in the context of land swaps in a peace agreement.

East Jerusalem became part of Israel in 1980, with the passage of the Basic Law — Jerusalem. Although the Golan Heights was not actually annexed, Israeli law and administration was extended to it in 1981.

The new law says that if the Knesset approves such a deal by a simple majority but by less than a 2/3 vote, there must be a popular referendum before it can be implemented.

Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat is opposed because,

Ending the occupation of our land is not and cannot be dependent on any sort of referendum.

Translation: “It’s mine, give it to me.” We’ve seen this argument before.

Opposition politicians are opposed because, in the words of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni,

It is about decisions that should be taken by the leadership that understands the scale of the problems and is privy to all their aspects… The people are not a substitute for such leadership.

Translation: “We know what’s good for you.” But the history of the ‘peace process’ and the wars that followed showed that they don’t. In the famous words of Barack Obama, “elections have consequences,” and the Israeli electorate expressed their clear belief that the left-wing parties did not have their confidence after the débacles of Oslo and Gaza.

The NY times dislikes the idea, because it might “hamper” the God-given right of the Obama Administration to squeeze Israeli politicians until the blood flows.

You see, the administration’s bullies can threaten the Prime Minister and others in private, with actions that the American people — and Congress — would find repulsive. We’ve seen hints of this already in suggestions that the US might not veto a Security Council resolution establishing a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1949 lines, something that could lead to economic sanctions or even military force against Israel.

A referendum would wreck this strategy. Any threats would have to be public ones.

The Times faithfully reflects administration thinking on this issue, and the attitude toward democracy is telling.

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Posted in Media | 3 Comments »

The Community Alliance

Monday, November 15th, 2010

A free copy of a 24-page local newspaper called the “Community Alliance” landed on my porch today.  Fresno has had more than one alternative newspaper competing with its one commercial paper, the Fresno Bee, over the years. Forty years ago it was the staunchly conservative Fresno Guide. Members of the counterculture hated the Guide, so they never picked up the free copies that were thrown onto their lawns, driveways and porches. Little by little, they weathered. By now they’re all gone.

I picked up my copy of the Community Alliance. Unlike the Guide, this is a ‘progressive’ newspaper. It mostly contained locally written articles about people, events and issues in the area, but there were a few pieces about international subjects by diverse writers from outside the community. There is no distinction drawn between news and opinion, something that the right-wing Guide was careful about, I might add.

I’d been warned that almost every issue contains at least one letter or story attacking Israel, and it’s not surprising. Our ‘progressive’ community brings us between one and four films, speakers, panels, or other events devoted to bashing Israel every month. There are dedicated anti-Israel activists in many local organizations — the Center for Nonviolence, Peace Fresno, California State University Fresno, WILPF, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Islamic Cultural Center, KNXT (the TV station of the Catholic Diocese), etc. — and all of these and others have been sponsors or co-sponsors of such happenings. So how could they miss this opportunity?

This issue has a full-page article calling for us to end Israel’s “apartheid and occupation” by boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). I won’t bother much with the content, except to say that it accuses Israel of fascism, apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing,  calls the Turkish Mavi Marmara terrorists “human rights activists,” and more.

Human rights activist on board the Mavi Marmara

Human rights activist on board the Mavi Marmara

The ‘occupation’ that the BDS movement opposes is not the occupation of Judea and Samaria that began in 1967. It is the ‘occupation’ that consists of the continued existence of a Jewish state. BDS will not end until the ‘return’ of the Arab ‘refugees’:

An overwhelming majority of organizations have endorsed Palestinian civil society’s two calls for boycott, divestment and sactions against Israel and for academic and cultural boycott of Israel — until it ceases to deny Palestinian history, ends the Occupation, ceases discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and permits displaced Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.  — Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada

There are stronger statements in Arabic, which make clear that the goal of BDS is not coexistence, but rather to further what they call the “de-Zionization” of Israel.

What is distressing is that the local Left does not appear to see anything exceptional about this article, or any of the other articles and letters published in the Community Alliance vilifying Israel, or any of the daily diet of lies and slander they are fed from the local alternative radio station KFCF and the Pacifica network.

Many of the people that support these institutions are my friends — the beaming face of one of them shines from an advertisement for his business in the Community Alliance — and many of them really do care about fixing the social problems like homelessness and hunger which are prevalent in our economically strapped region.

I’ll go further and say that some of them know that what they read and hear about Israel in the ‘progressive’ media and in the steady stream of anti-Israel films and speakers is viciously false. Some of them have family members that live in Israel and have been there more than once.

Yet they don’t object to the steady stream of distortions, lies, blood libels and propaganda supporting the most murderous of Israel’s enemies — people who really do want to commit genocide, like Hamas — that emanate from the media and organizations that they support.

I’ll grant that these organizations do good in the local community. I’ll grant that the left-wing perspective on local, national and international issues should be heard, no less than the conservative one. But what has happened (for historical reasons that I won’t discuss now) is that with respect to Israel, the progressive ideals of self-determination, justice and peace have been warped and changed into their polar opposites.

So what I want to know is why people who know better don’t complain about the films and speakers? Why do they allow the anti-Israel activists free rein in local organizations? Why do they continue to buy ads in the Community Alliance and contribute funds to KFCF and Pacifica Radio without protesting their outrageous bias?

Why is that?

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Posted in Local interest, Media | 4 Comments »

NPR: cowardice or treason?

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
Bin Talal and Soros earn their official Car Talk coffee mugs

Bin Talal and Soros earn their official Car Talk coffee mugs

The flap over NPR’s outrageous firing of news analyst Juan Williams won’t go away. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller dug herself even deeper into the manure pit when she said that Williams should discuss his feeling “with his psychiatrist or his publicist — take your pick,” a quip for which she later apologized.

It may be true that Williams didn’t follow instructions about not mentioning his position at NPR when he appeared on Fox. It may be true that NPR management was really uncomfortable about his gig with its sworn enemy. I haven’t seen his contract and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not prepared to argue about whether they had a right to fire him.

The usual pinwheels are madly spinning that it’s all a right-wing plot, pointing to Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Jim DeMint. It’s not a surprise that conservative politicians would take an opportunity to attack NPR, which clearly does have a liberal bias. But raising this point only distracts attention from the main issue.

All of the above is irrelevant except this:

Monday: Williams makes a remark which violates the unwritten commandment that Thou Shalt Not Piss Off Muslims No Matter How Touchy They May Be.

Wednesday: CAIR (and who knows who else) complains. Shortly thereafter, NPR fires Williams, issuing a statement which specifically refers to the remark in question.

Schiller claimed that she hadn’t seen CAIR’s complaint. Of course that doesn’t imply that she didn’t know about it, or that she hadn’t received any calls about it.

She also said that NPR had concerns about Williams for some time. Again, so what? This was what they chose to fire him for.

Barry Rubin argues that the real significance of this event is that the victim was a liberal, showing that the establishment — in this case NPR — actually has a far left, not liberal, orientation. He may be right.

But here is what I think we should take away from this:

Today the West is struggling with radical Islam, which wants to supplant it as the dominant world culture and impose its own mores and legal system. If you think that the principles of the Enlightenment — which, by the way, guided Madison and Jefferson when they wrote our Constitution — represent an advance over those of seventh-century Arabia, then it must be possible to have a public discussion in which you can say that.

When news media allow themselves to be castrated and censor discourse about Islam — and when the arbiters of what is acceptable or not are groups like CAIR, which are associated with radical Islamists — then it isn’t possible to depend on these media to report reliably on the conflict we find ourselves in today.

The problem is not “liberal bias.” There is nothing liberal about shutting down free speech and punishing dissidents. The problem is either that NPR is afraid to allow its commentators to speak freely, or it supports the triumph of radical Islam over the West.

In other words: cowardice or treason.

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Posted in Media, NPR | 3 Comments »

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