Tag Archives: Censorship

AP Shamelessly edits Palestinian suffering from Obama’s speech

Important qualifier: Though they didn’t mention it, the transcript was clearly abridged. I guess the person who did the abridging wasn’t interested in Obama’s historic recognition of Palestinian suffering.

“An alert KABOBfest reader noted that an AP transcript of Obama’s speech “as provided by CQ Transcriptions” left out the President’s comments on the suffering of the Palestinians.

The AP’s version has him jump from his moving description of Nazi crimes against the Jews to a warning against the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran:

Six million Jews were killed, more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless. It is ignorant, and it is hateful.

It’s about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.

In the transcripts posted on the White House’s website, the President’s words on the Palestinian experience are posted:

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own. (Applause.)

Given the accolades for that being the greatest presidential summary of Palestinian victimization under Israeli rule ever, it is shocking it was selectively excised from the transcripts.

Looking at the AP’s version, which is hosted on Yahoo, it is clear the transcripts are abridged. First, they do not acknowledge that. Second, why remove such an important point? I cannot help but think it was motivated by pro-Israel bias.” (Read more from kabobfest.com)

“Mises was right”

“Ludwig von Mises was never able to get a paid academic post in the U. S. He was shut out of American economic journals, and boycotted and ridiculed by the establishment – all because he told the truth, without fear or compromise, when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.

[Robert] Heilbroner, however, has never been anything but fashionable. A professor at the New School for Social Research, his lecture fees are high and his books sell well, especially his history of thought, The Worldly Philosophers, which glorifies Marx and Keynes and never mentions the Austrians.

Like John Kenneth Galbraith, Heilbroner has gotten rich by attacking capitalism. And also like Galbraith, every time he writes a book, the reviews in the top media read like sales copy.” (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

“A brief obituary appears in the New York Times, courtesy of The Associated Press: ‘Robert Heilbroner, 85, Economist and Writer, Dies.’

Absent from this brief death notice is, perhaps, one of Heilbroner’s most famous formulations. Upon the collapse of 20th century socialism, he said: ‘Mises was right.'” (from mises.org)

Billboards criticizing US aid to Israel taken down under pressure


Taking down the board 1

Press release from The Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel: “On April 8th, the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel erected the billboards throughout the Albuquerque area in order to inform the public about the misuse of their tax dollars, denominated in human lives. The group was motivated by concern for the Palestinian people who had recently been subjected to a massive invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military. Over 1,400 Palestinians – mostly civilian, including three hundred children – were killed and over 5,000 were injured. In 2007 the Bush administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Israel over a ten year period beginning in 2008. The majority of these dollars will be used to purchase American-made weapons.

The design of the billboard had been approved by Lamar and the billboards’ wording and final image were suggested by Lamar’s graphics designer.

According to information from Lamar, it appears groups claiming to be pro-Israel have conducted a campaign to pressure Lamar to remove the billboards. The Coalition believes this is a deliberate attempt to silence its right to free speech because the humanitarian message of the billboards supports equal rights for the Palestinian people, thereby necessitating criticism of Israel.”

Goldman Sachs hires law firm to shut goldmansachs666.com

“The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled ‘Facts about Goldman Sachs’ – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.” (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

Hollywood’s New Censors

by John Pilger

“When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favorable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, ‘politics,’ included comments such as: ‘This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.’

By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, ‘articulates the new patriotism.’ The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (‘liberal by instinct’) and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or ‘gooks.’ The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. ‘I have this insane feeling that I was there,’ he said. “Somehow… the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.’

The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. ‘The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!’ said the Daily Mail. . . .

My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the ‘war on terror’ in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. ‘You will need to make structural and political changes,’ said a major New York distributor. ‘Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it – he likes liberal causes – and tame those anti-Bush sequences.’ . . .

These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove.” (Read more from antiwar.com)

How Village Voice Media Uses Digg to Game Their Traffic Numbers

“This is the story about a girl that’s actually a dude who’s brought in 3.8 – 19.4 million visitors* to Village Voice Media websites by gaming Digg.

Village Voice Media appears to be running an organized reciprocal Digg campaign using staff at their network of alt-weekly newspapers across the United States. Two Digg users, Ivanb and Philostrato, are responsible for the vast majority of that traffic” (Read more from thedeets.com)

Google cranks up the Consensus Engine

“Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

” (Read more from andreworlowski.com)

See Also:
Google ready to pursue its agenda in Washington Its employees supported Obama, and four Googlers served on his transition team. Now the Internet giant hopes to win support for network neutrality and expanding high-speed Internet access. (Read more from latimes.com)

Information Wars – Greasemonkey Downvote Bots

“Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating “downvote bots” or scripts to bury stories which question the government.

. . . .

One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called “Greasemonkey”, which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.

. . . .

Propaganda agents obviously aren’t going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.

As one example of a publicly-available downvote bot, this script automatically downvotes any stories on 9/11, Gaza, torture, Guantanamo and a host of other topics, downvotes certain posters, and engages in other forms of cyber warfare.” (Read more from George Washington’s blog)

Bill Moyers criticizes Gaza offensive, gets called anti-semitic by ADL

It’s ridiculous to accuse Bill Moyers, a class-act journalist who’d been involved in the civil rights movement, of racism. This isn’t about him being racist. This is about intimidation. A message to him an other journalists: There will be no criticism of Israel in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

***

Mr. Moyers,

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary: (1) moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world; (2) historical revisionism, asserting that Canaanites were Arabs; (3) anti-Semitism, declaring that Jews are “genetically coded” for violence; (4) ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of humiliation rather than counter-terrorism; and (5) promotion of an individual, the Norwegian doctor in Gaza, who has publicly expressed support for the September 11 attacks.

I have seen and read serious critiques of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and I have disagreed with many of them. Your commentary, however, is different, consisting mostly of intellectually and morally faulty claims that do a great disservice to the PBS audience. It invites not disagreement, but rebuke.

On one point you are correct – “America has officially chosen sides.” And rightly so. Fortunately for our nation, very few of our citizens engage in the same moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism as you. If the reverse held, it would not be a country that any decent person would want to live in.

Sincerely,

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League

***

Dear Mr. Foxman:

You made several errors in your letter to me of January 13 and I am writing to correct them.

First, to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

When American troops committed a similar atrocity in Vietnam, it was called My Lai and Lt. Calley went to prison for it. As the publisher of a large newspaper at the time, I instructed our editorial staff to cover the atrocity fully because Americans should know what our military was doing in our name and with our funding. To say “my country right or wrong” is like saying “my mother drunk or sober.” Patriots owe their country more than that, whether their government and their taxes are supporting atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, or, in this case, Gaza. . . .

(Read more at PBS.org)

Anti-Defamation League joins YouTube

The widely popular video sharing website YouTube has reached out to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its expertise in dealing with hate on the Internet. As a result of this partnership, the League is now a contributor to YouTube’s newly launched Abuse & Safety Center, where users are empowered to identify and confront hate, and to report abuses.

The YouTube Abuse & Safety Center features information and links to resources developed by ADL to help Internet users respond to and report offensive material and extremist content that violates YouTube?s Community Guidelines on hate speech. . . .

“We commend YouTube for their efforts to provide users with access to important information from those with expertise, such as ADL and others, on how to effectively respond to hate on the Internet and to report abuses,” Foxman said. (Read more from haaretz.com)

There is concern this well-meaning effort will result in further censorship of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

Global War on Political Dissent Progressing in India

“Following the late November terror attacks in Mumbai, India has passed two tough laws being seen by rights activists as potentially eroding the country’s federal structure and limiting fundamental liberties. . . .

‘The UAPA Act is particularly vile, and will have the effect of turning India into a virtual police state,’ says Colin Gonsalves, executive director of the Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network. ‘It basically brings back a discredited law, the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA), except for admitting confessions made to a police officer as legal evidence.’

POTA was an extremely unpopular law, which the UPA government abrogated upon coming to power in 2004 in response to innumerable complaints of its selective and discriminatory use against India’s Muslim minority, and its cavalier and irresponsible application to offenses not even remotely connected with terrorism.” (Read more from antiwar.com)