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A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies
eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."
That is true, but it strikes me as pretty anti-semitic to suggest that Jewish people are that easily manipulated by bigots as to automatically buy what a Pro-Israeli organization is saying without considering the organization's reputation.
Jewish people really run the spectrum, for example one of my college roommates got the shit kicked out of him in Israel by border guards while protesting the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians, and yes he's Jewish.
Some of those organizations differ very little from the Klan both in terms of bigotry as well as in terms of extremism. I'm guessing that this individual was either horribly informed or belongs to the bigoted type of outfit.
Not unlike similar groups in the US that sometimes use patriotism to write off far less savory values.
And at any rate, it would be largely a moot point to include the Palestinians anyways, because there are far more Palestinians with money in Israel than in the Palestinian authority. It would be a lot less obvious to just exclude both. Right now, they don't even have the cash to buy their own food in most cases.