Israel’s Genocidal, Human Rights Violating and War Criminal Answer to the Palestinian Question, Part 5
Abstract: In Western mainstream media, Israel is regularly portrayed as a victim or at best as an about equally responsible party in the allegedly ‘complicated’ and ‘both-sidesy’ Israel-Palestine conflict. In this article series and following the May 2021 ‘clashes,’ I would like to show that and why Israel is instead very clearly the main responsible party and perpetrator in this conflict. The article series also serves the purposes of documenting Jewish-Israeli crimes against Palestinians and of deconstructing the usual pro-Israel propaganda.
Part 5 takes a look at global popular support for Palestinians and examines how big tech and social media giants — Facebook and daughter companies Instagram and WhatsApp; Google and daughter company Youtube; Twitter and TikTok — censor and exert epistemic injustice/oppression/violence against pro-Palestinian voices in collaboration with the Israeli colonizers and oppressors. The article concludes with the US censorship of Iranian PressTV and the censorship of independent journalist Richard Medhurst.
(Warning: The following article series contains material that might be disturbing for some viewers and that is usually not shown in mainstream media. I sometimes also use an ironic, satirical or cynical tone which is mainly directed against relativising, rationalizing, veiling, looking away from, playing stupid or remaining silent about Jewish-Israeli-Zionist crimes against Palestinians)
(links to: the older, significantly shorter and all-in-one German version; the more recent and in-depth English article series, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, part 7, part 8)
Global popular support for the Palestinian cause
Throughout the last weeks, there were sometimes massive pro-Palestinian protests and solidarity marches in European cities such as Barcelona, Berlin or London…
…as well as in many US cities such as Chicago, Miami, Detroit or Washington DC:
UK university students could also be seen protesting for Palestine and against Israeli apartheid and oppression:
Needless to say, there were also many protests in the occupied Palestinian Territories themselves:
But while the world was busy protesting and organizing, big tech and social media giants were busy censoring these pro-Palestinian voices and the Palestinians themselves.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp censorship
Facebook, for instance, took down Professor Noura Erakat’s story of how her cousin was killed by Israeli soldiers:
Much more grievously, Facebook shut down the #SaveSheikhJarrah group in which more than 130.000 users were organizing themselves against Israeli theft of land in the West Bank and Palestine:
The official and vague explanation for that massive act of censorship was that the group’s “content goes against community standards”:
But as with most official explanations, it turns out that the above ‘explanation’ is likewise a bullshit excuse. The actual reason for that anti-Palestinian censorship can instead be found in the collaboration of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook with the criminal Israeli colonizers:
So instead of the content going against community standards, it turns out that the Israeli Cyber Unit — i.e. the “Cyber Unit at the Office of the State Attorney” (2015-), not to be confused with Unit 8200 (1952-) which is Israel’s SIGINT equivalent of the USA’s National Security Agency or NSA — abusively mass reported content that went against official Israeli propaganda:
And it gets even better, because that newer Israeli Cyber Unit has their inside man Emi Palmor sitting within Facebook’s oversight board since 2016 — something which in turn helps to explain how Facebook/the Israeli apartheid regime manages to rubberstamp censorship requests of Palestinian content that goes against its propaganda narrative or that threaten the advancement of its completely illegal settler-colonizer project:
This Israel-guided censorship of pro-Palestinian voices is also happening on Instagram which is owned by Facebook:
To quote from the earlier articles from Mondoweiss and MintPressNews as well as from a report by 7amleh, the Arab Center for Social Media:
Contrary to the earlier number of 81%, the Israeli Minister of (In)Justice even reports a censorship or deletion rate of “up to 95%”:
And in case you have never heard of the (In)Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — it’s the fascist and genocidal one:
Can you already feel the sexy allure of Israeli fascism?
What Shaked does here is so-called “dog-whistling,” something that Donald Trump was also known for — in her case it’s openly promoting Israeli fascism (who else would envelop themselves in that stench) while pretending to do something else:
In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named for ultrasonic dog whistles used in shepherding. Accusations of dog whistling are, by their nature, hard to prove and may be false.
As for why we can be very certain that the above fascism ad was a dog whistle to her extreme right-wing followers: That’s because (In)Justice Minister Shaked is on the record for regarding all Palestinians as “enemy combatants,” their children as “little snakes” and for proposing genocide and complete extermination of them all in 2014 (for comparison, see this list of ‘Indian’ massacres in North America that were committed by the settler-colonialists, because that’s the kind of thing that Netanyahu, Shaked and other Zionist extremist settler-colonialists keep re-enacting in Palestine and against Palestinians):
So to put things into perspective: Facebook (Zionazibook?) is actively collaborating with Jewish-Israeli-Zionist genocidal maniacs such as Ayelet Shaked in the censoring of pro-Palestinian voices and the colonized Palestinians who understandably resist the formers’ attempts to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, ethnic cleansing, etc. against them.
The world-famous independent journalist Glenn Greenwald already reported on that in 2017:
As a consequence, sane people, including non-Palestinians, sometimes have to go to extreme lengths to avoid being censored by insane Facebook:
Facebook’s censorship also included the recently vindicated Wuhan lab leak theory:
As a consequence and since the reprehensible collaboration between Facebook and Zionazis is becoming more and more well-known, online ratings of Facebook recently took a deep dive from 4/5 to 2.3/5:
The overall situation with Facebook is so grave that Morgan Kahman, one of Facebook’s now suspended data technicians who understands the bigger picture of censorship, recently turned into a whistleblower in order to warn us about Facebook:
WhatsApp is not doing much better than its parent company Facebook. It may be commendable that it blocked the accounts of Jewish-Israeli-Zionist extremists who were agitating for hate and violence against Palestinians. This also included the account of the wife of the Knesset (i.e. Israeli Parliament) member Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Kahanist, Kach predecessor and Jewish supremacist party Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”):
To better understand what kind of Jewish-Israeli-Zionist far right nutjob Itamar Ben-Gvir is:
Unfortunately, WhatsApp/Facebook also blocked the accounts of Gaza-based journalists, thereby hindering them at their work and once again engaging in anti-Palestinian censorship. After WhatsApp restored some of the journalists’ accounts in the wake of protests, at least one journalist reported that some of their data had been deleted — something which is in line with “Israel’s requests to delete content” that goes against its official goody-goody innocent victim and defender propaganda:
Google and Youtube censorship
Not to be outdone by Facebook and its daughter companies, Youtube and its parent company Google also engaged in patent anti-Palestinian and pro-Israeli censorship:
Even 250 Jewish Google employees already protested against Google’s anti-Palestinian und pro-Israel algorithms:
Ha’aretz reported:
Google/Youtube even went as far as censoring UN content:
Google was also caught blurring the images of the Palestinian territories on Google Earth in what may very be an attempt to help Israel hide its war crimes (destruction of civilian structures; see part 4) from researchers:
I am assuming that Israel requested Google to do that and that their excuse was along the lines of “something something, national security, something something.” Google’s transparent bullshit excuse for its aiding and abetting the insane Israeli apartheid regime was that their censorship somehow and magically amounts to “combatting disinformation”:
Twitter and TikTok censorship
Israel-coordinated censorship is also happening on Twitter and TikTok, by the way, and all of that is being done in increasingly desperate attempts to control the narrative and to manufacture consent:
Citing a more useful NYT article, Tlaib also deserves praise for pointing out “disturbing double-standards” in how big tech and social media giants treat the genocidal Israeli oppressors and the oppressed Palestinians:
7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, reported on the censorship of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices in its weekly reports:
Jimmy Dore also hightlighted that organisation’s important reporting which found that both the Israeli Ministers of ‘Justice’ and ‘Defense’ had conspired with social media giants in their censorship of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli voices:
“This unauthorized and unchecked power wielded by the Israeli state allows it to govern online speech and censor people who do not align with the political views of the state”
Mariam Barghouti’s account is also worth reading:
US censorship of Iranian PressTV
More commonly though, the Israeli imperialists go and cry to US state imperialists about what a poor bunch of ‘victims’ they are. A recent result of that was the following:
This is representative of what is being done to journalists who try to get the truth out. Independent progressive journalist Richard Medhurst gives a summary of what the results of trying to hold the power elites accountable can look like:
Repliers explain why CNN/BBC/mainstream reporters do not experience this:
Perhaps there was also something in it for the USA themselves:
So as usual, what the USA say and do is completely at odds also in this case:
[continue to part 6]
