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In the last week the Facebook group for the Third Intifada made headlines around the world. First in the Arabic language press, advertising and supporting it, then in the Jewish and Israeli press condemning it, and finally in the mainstream media always thirsty for more stories of ‘cycles of violence’ in the Middle East and perhaps sensing a bloodletting was in the pipeline. Real world events, in the form of unrelated Palestinian terror attacks, provided a backdrop.
The Third Intifada page has now been taken down, yet others are rapidly springing up in its place. A leading member of Fatah, Demetri Deliani, told the official Palestinian news agency Wafa that “Minister Yuli Edelstein needs lessons in human rights and freedom of expression as he is not aware of the world’s respect for individual opinion”. Edelstein is of course not only Israel’s Minister for Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, he is also a human rights hero. Born in the Soviet Union, in what is today Ukraine, Edelstein spent his twenties illegally teaching Hebrew and promoting aliyah. The authorities eventually caught up with him and he spent three years in a soviet labor camp.
It is his personal experience that gives Edelstein an insight into the balance between the human right of freedom of expression, and the responsibility to protect other human rights, like life and physical safety. Yuli holds not only a mandate to tackle antisemitism as part of his ministerial portfolio, he was also made chair of the Working Group on online hate of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism, a group of Parliamentarians and experts from over 40 countries. It was Yuli, in his personal capacity, and not in his official capacity as Minister Edelstein, who wrote to Facebook.
Perhaps Facebook initially failed to appreciate the significance of that.
Demetri Deliani is assuming people everywhere will value freedom of expression so highly they that they will allow its use for any purpose. Perhaps he is right, and this is how people at Facebook, in their naivety, would like to see it. After all, it suits their business purpose, they more content they can publish, without having to implement safe guards, or take any responsibility for the deaths, violence, suicides and mental harm that can result, the higher their profit margins. Imagine the cost to Facebook if they had liability in the same way the owner of a hall has when they rented it out for a gathering they know may be unsafe and might turn to violence. Perhaps it is self-interest and not naivety that drives Facebook to keep the standards low and the intervention slow.
The official explanation from Facebook has been that the group became a problem only very recently. As Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public policy communications manager, tells it, “after the publicity of the page, more comments deteriorated to direct calls for violence”, he added that the page admin then made calls for violence too. This is nothing but spin. The calls for violence were there from the start. The administrators actions were consistent throughout. Those of us who were watching it for weeks and months can testify to this. What changed for Facebook was the public outcry. This is the same pattern we saw in 2008 with the group declaring Israel was not a country, the first documented case of antisemitism 2.0. Facebook cares not for values, but for business interests, and enough public outcry and negative press becomes a business liability.
A system where companies, like Facebook, can facilitate human rights violations when it is in their business interest is a system that needs fixing. Companies must be accountable. Human rights do not only apply when they are popular and can garner public outrage and media attention. Facebook’s responsibility to close a group advocating violence arose when the first complaint was made. The number of complaints should not matter, only the fact that the clock has started and Facebook should respond in reasonable time. I still believe we need legislation to make this the law.
In the mean time, there are new pages and groups carrying forward the third intifada message. Some of these are new replacement groups and pages, others are older groups and pages that have adopted this popular call for violence as a way of increasing their membership. One page I saw had over a million members. It’s up to Facebook to set the standard and remove all these groups the minute their administrators turn to advocating violence, or fail to properly administer the flow of comments.
A cynic might draw comparison between the battle to remove the pages of hate, as more continually spring up, and the myth of Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods to spend all eternity pushing a rock up a hill, watching it roll down, and then starting again. The first lesson is from the myth itself, some say Sisyphus beat the gods by taking joy from ownership of the rock. We too can take joy, or at least pride, for standing up against hate in all its forms. A more practical lesson is one I adapt from lecture Dr Boaz Ganor gave. He was speaking on counter terrorism strategies and said there were only two: either you decrease the desire for terrorism, or you decrease the capacity to deliver. In our context, each time a group or page is removed, that community must rebuild from scratch. It’s a setback, it disrupts communication, and it stops the growth of hate. Ultimately they may get tired of it and take their hate to another platform, but even if they don’t, the response it helpful. It outlines what is right and what is wrong, and it inhibits those seeking to use the power of social media for ill.
Ultimately the causes of hate need to be addressed, but that does not mean removing hate groups and pages is a futile task. Meantime, at least down here in Australia at the Community Internet Engagement Project, we continue to work on more long-term solutions.
The limiting factor is not the need for change, or the lack of a plan, its dollars. I’m told once you reduce the problem to that, solutions are possible. As the number of hate groups grow, I can only hope that prediction holds true, if it does a year from now our plans will have been implemented and we will all be living in a very different reality.
This is cross posted from Backspin, the blog of Honest Reporting (See original CiF Watch post on the issue, here.)
Despite previous statements saying they would monitor but not remove the controversial Facebook group calling for a Third Intifada, Facebook administrators shut down the group early Tuesday morning in response to enormous pressure from pro-Israel activists. All links to the group now go to users personal Facebook profile.
The group had been calling for a march on Israel to “liberate” Palestine beginning on May 15. It remains to be seen how Facebook will respond if similar groups emerge with similar message of a Third Intifada.
New media expert Andre Oboler, one of the first to discover the group was down, told HonestReporting that Facebook made the correct decision shutting down the group. “It’s about time,” he said. “Facebook needs to learn to distinguish between the right to ‘attack’ conceptual ideas, and the ‘wrong’ of attacking people be it because of their race, religion, nationality or political view. When they start to understand that, perhaps they will stop making so many mistakes.”
See our previous post on the issue for background on the issue.
H/T Israel Matzav
A Facebook group - said to be supported by a yet unnamed Arabic TV Network – calling for a third violent intifada in Israel has garnered over 40,000 supporters.
Despite the above threat (to boycott Facebook if the page is closed), note that Facebook’s user agreement quite explicitly prohibits such incitement to violence:
“You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”
So, anyone interested in acting to prevent another deadly campaign of terror against Israelis should click on the link “Report Page” located just under the number of “Likes” on the left hand side of the page (graphic below), and submit the “anonymous” complaint under the appropriate category.
(UPDATE on March 10: The page still hasn’t been removed and has now garnered over 75,000 members.)
H/T Harry’s Place
Guardian contributor Rachel Shabi, frequent and vociferous critic of the Jewish state (See CW posts here, here and here) also just happens to be Facebook friends with notorious anti-Semite, Israel Shamir. (Shamir, its worth noting, is also FB friends with Norman Finkelstein, Lauren Booth, Philip Weiss, and Ken O’Keefe.)
Just to be clear about what a prolific anti-Semite Shamir is, here are a few highlights.
- He’s said: “It’s every Muslim and Christian’s duty to deny the Holocaust.”
- He’s described Jews as “virus in human form.”
- He’s endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
- He’s Stated: Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; The world is. Palestine is just the place for the world state headquarters.”
It kind of puts everything she’s written about Israel in perspective doesn’t it?
This is cross-posted at the blog, Adam Holland
What does it mean to “like” someone on Facebook? Salon Columnist Glenn Greenwald says that he is a fan of anti-Israel conspiracy theorist Alan Hart. I wonder why. (See screenshot from Hart’s website above. Hart’s Facebook widget featuring Greenwald’s image is located on the right side.)
Does Greenwald share Alan Hart’s belief that, on 9/11, Israeli agents controlled the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center via remote control devices hidden in cell phones? Does he agree with Hart that Israel has stolen nuclear weapons from a U.S. military base and intends to use them to destroy an American city? (Read my column documenting Hart’s conspiracy theories here.) In May, Hart not only made those bizarre assertions, he also claimed in radio/podcast interviews with conspiracy mongers Kevin Barrett and Alex Jones that he had proof that the World Trade towers were destroyed by controlled demolition, i.e. that explosives had been planted within the buildings and were detonated after the plane crashes to bring down the towers. (This implausible belief is an essential part of truther conspiracy theories.) Hart said in those interviews that his proof for this controlled demolition conspiracy, which he claimed came from a source within “one of the world’s leading engineering firms”, resided on a laptop to which he didn’t then have access because he was away from home on a U.S. speaking tour. That was more than four months ago, and Hart has still not come forward with the computer file that, if it actually existed, would undoubtedly provide him with the biggest scoop of his career as a journalist. Maybe Hart just hasn’t gotten around to looking for it.
I don’t believe that Greenwald shares Alan Hart’s belief in these bizarre theories, but his “liking” Hart does raise the question: how crazy does an anti-Zionist have to be to be too crazy for Glenn to like?






























Israeli Jews characterized as Nazis on the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ Facebook account
April 6, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Facebook, Flytilla, Hamas, Nazi Analogies, Pippa Bartolotti, Swansea Palestine Community Link, Syrian National Party, Terrorism, Welcome to Palestine | by Guest/Cross Post | 18 comments
A guest post by Hadar Sela
As mentioned in the recent CiF Watch report on the upcoming ‘Air Flotilla 2′ – otherwise known as ‘Welcome to Palestine’ – the initiative is supported by a plethora of groups from the United Kingdom, all of which are defined by their supposed ‘solidarity’ with the Palestinian cause as a raison d’etre. One of those groups is the ‘Swansea Palestine Community Link‘ from South Wales.
Members of that group are no strangers to the ‘flytilla’ concept, with several of them having taken part in the abortive 2011 provocation. As reported by CiF Watch at the time:
Joyce Giblin (left) and Pippa Bartolotti (right).
Also from Wales come the last two members of the British delegation to the ‘flytilla’: 46 year-old Swansea council worker Fiona Williams from Mumbles who is also involved in Swansea Action for Palestine and 56 year-old book-keeper Dee Murphy from Swansea who is a founder of the Swansea-Palestine Community Link.
Dee Murphy (left) and Fiona Williams (right)
Ms. Murphy seems to make quite a hobby out of getting herself arrested; she is half of what is apparently known as ‘the Tesco two’ and spent eight days in custody following a January 2009 incident in a local supermarket.
Here is Dee Murphy explaining her actions at the time, prior to being arrested:
Less than a month before that incident, Dee Murphy had super-glued herself to the entrance barriers at BBC Wales in Cardiff. Her fellow ‘flytilla’ memberFiona Williams told the press at the time that the reason for the action was that the BBC’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead was “pro-Israeli”.
Here is Dee Murphy once again.
There is, however, a less quaintly eccentric side to these women, as can be seen in the casual (and apparently unremarkable) use of Nazi analogies on the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ Facebook wall.
Whilst the majority of people might find it distinctly worrying that those who inhabit this echo-chamber can apparently see no fault in invoking antisemitic Nazi analogies as “legitimate criticism” and yet in the next breath declare themselves to be the victims of “spurious smear campaigns”, it is also worth remembering that they apparently have no criticism of their revered co-activist and local minor celeb who sees nothing wrong in posing with of an existing Nazi party or withwho clearly state their genocidal aspirations.
Pippa Bartolotti in Syria – posing with the flag of the SSNP
Pippa Bartolotti in Gaza – posing with Hamas’ Mahmoud al Zahar
Finally, a clue as to why Ms. Giblin sprang to the defense of Bartolotti in the above thread can be found on her list of friends displayed on her Facebook page:
(Note to Ms. Giblin: You may want to change your Facebook security settings!)
What the ladies of the Swansea Palestine Action Link obviously do not appreciate is that there is neither need nor intention to “smear” them. That, they are doing very effectively by themselves.
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