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Legislators Call On Twitter To Ban Hamas
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Hill:
"The past week's violence in Gaza has rekindled calls for Twitter to shutter the accounts of U.S.-labeled terror groups such as Hamas. Seven House Republicans asked the FBI in September to demand that Twitter take down the accounts of U.S.-designated terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Somalia's al Shabaab. The letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller was spearheaded by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), who said Wednesday that the recent events vindicated the request. 'Allowing foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,' [Poe said] 'Failure to block access arms them with the ability to freely spread their violent propaganda and mobilize in their War on Israel.'"
What bullshit...
I'm an Israeli citizen and I oppose Hamas in every possible way (they frickin' shot rockets at me and my family just a week ago!)
But terminating their officials' Twitter accounts will do nothing to help the cause.
The only effect will be that they'll start communicating in other channels - which will make it more difficult to spy on their future intentions.
If you really want to do something against Hamas in Twitter - don't follow them!
(BTW, the captcha "i" looks like an 8)
Is free-speech the last i heard.
Twitter can of course take it down on their own as they dont have to adhere to the US Constitution in this matter, but our government should NOT be involved in requesting that a individuals ( or group ) speech to be curtailed.
Yes, i realize they are not Americans and may not have that right in their home country, but an American governmental agency asking bothers me greatly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought that that freedom [of speech] extended to those you might not necessarily agree with as well, right?
I'm sure there are those who'd label the USA as a country of terror...not that I agree with them, but how about that basic freedom of speech?
Definition of the word being, "A person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims."
And the definition of terrorism. "Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes."
The FBI should consider updating their list of "designated terrorist groups".
So should Twitter also ban groups labeled as terrorists by other groups ? Eg: should we ban the Israeli government because Hamas thinks that they are terrorising them ? I think not. Twitter would be uniwse to accede to to this and put itself at the center of someone else's fight.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
I know the Israelian lobby is very powerful in the states and there goes a lot of money round, but it baffles me that there are not that many critical voices within the US.
For the most part, the only people who care about foreign affairs are those with a vested interest. There just aren't enough people with enough money who give a shit about the other side of that conflict to make any real noise about it. Occasionally an american girl gets run over with a bulldozer or something like that and then we get a ltitle more coverage, because she's american not because of the injustices she was protesting. But that's about it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
why the USA blindly jumps to the defense of Israel for everything all the time? I mean... Israel comes across as Tommy DeVito as played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Crazy little guy on a hair trigger who keeps fucking everything up for everyone. And the USA without fail jumps in with WE STAND WITH THE CRAZY LITTLE NATION ON A HAIR TRIGGER.
I don't get it.
Now once you go down that slippery slope of censorship, then you become no better than the leaders of those countries you named. The 'enemy' then becomes 'us'.
I have quite a few Israeli friends; most are concerned with civil and social issues, not with military issues, and I am told that is basically what politics in Israel are like. There were major protests in Israel last year; they were over the price of food, the rent, etc. Israel is not terribly different from other countries: the people are mostly concerned with things that immediately affect them like the cost of living.
Of course, most able-bodied Israelis serve in the army. Here, for example, is an Israeli soldier's view of what it was like in West Bank:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php
For what it's worth, I met many Israelis at an academic conference this past summer. I also met Egyptians, and my Iranian coworker was there with me. We all had dinner together, and there was no tension, no arguing about politics, none of that -- most of these people thought the situation was absurd and that the violence was unnecessary (the Iranian recently finished her immigration paperwork and will soon be a US citizen; the Egyptians were glad to have not been in Egypt during the revolution).
Palm trees and 8
The ignorance of what happened less than a decade ago is astounding.
Actually, it's a really great lesson on groupthink. If you listen to even the most *educated* people from both sides of the conflict--the ones who know every detail since the '47 war and before--it is AMAZING how different their story is based on which side they're on. And it's (usually) not that they're wrong, it's just that their vision is so incredibly polarized.
I once listened to a lecture by the director of the Israeli counter-terror institute and then a lecture by a Palestinian Professor from either NYU or Columbia. They talked about the same peace treaties and the same events, but the stories they told and the perspectives they had on those events were *radically* different. Obi Wan Kenobi was right--a great many of the truths we cling to depend a great deal on our own point of view.
Both sides do things that are really uncool, and both sides have things done to them that are really terrible. It makes it easy for both sides to perpetuate their narratives of hate. As long as that happens--as long as there is no real incentive and genuine effort on *both* sides to see the conflict from the other's point of view and to *stop* it--the conflict will continue.
It has continued for fifty years so far.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_8773TUmA ... ..."
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200111--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200401--.htm
"There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence.
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame.
By that standard, there are a lot more twitter feeds the US government should be shutting down if it wants to shut down any feed that can remotely be construed as supporting "terrorism". That could begin with, if one accepts Chomsky's argument (and he is a professional linguist), some of the feeds put put by the US government. Where does it end? Freedom of speech is an ideal for a reason. How about a parallel twitter feed run by the US State Department that rebuts the Hamas feed point-by-point and tweet-by-tweet?
See also:
http://warprayer.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
and so, its all the jooos fault. always the jooos fault.
the rocket rallies STARTED on the hamas side. but that does not become part of your post, does it? its the jooos that are wrong.
the hatred of jews in the modern US is sickening. I'm not sure why its so in vogue to blame all the problems in the area on the jews, but nothing seems to have changed with that great Last Lesson that the world had some 60+ yrs ago.
Israel != Jews. Yes, Israel is a Jewish state, but to have concerns over what Israel does in no way makes one anti-semitic. Indeed, there are Jews who have concern over the actions of Israel. Unfortunately, it is very convenient for some (on all sides) to blur the distinction between 'The State of Israel' and 'Jew'.
Also, to have concerns over Israeli actions in no way means support for the actions of Hamas. Another distinction it seems convenient for some to blur.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
They've been getting pretty uppity... and they do speak French (if you can call it that)... I mean, what the hell? If we're going to delve into the absurd, let's go all the way.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here's my perspective as an Israeli (and not a particularly nationalistic or right wing one):
Hamas and their affiliates specifically target civilians.
They shoot rockets at random into civilian population, they bomb buses.
Last year there was a case where an anti-tank missile was shot at a school bus specifically marked as such.
In another case last year two Palestinian men infiltrated a settlement and killed an entire family, they literally slit the throats of and eleven year old, four year old and three months old children.
And when an event like this happens there is dancing and giving out of candy in the streets of Gaza.
These actions have no military purpose, as far as I understand it they are motivated by hate, religious indoctrination and the need of groups like Hamas to gain prestige to perpetuate their rule.
Now, on the Israeli side, rockets are shot into our civilian population and buses explode and the duty of the government is to protect its population, if a rocket launcher in operating from inside a civilian population that's unfortunate but to the government the safety of our population has priority over the safety of theirs, and if it's deemed that a high-level planner of attacks must be killed then an assassination will be planned to minimize collateral damage but you can't wait indefinitely.
I won't deny that on the individual level you won't find soldiers who get off on the power trip of humiliating someone going through their checkpoint or maybe steal in iPod while going through a person's stuff but that does not express the values of the IDF and if they are caught they will be jailed and they will be expelled from the army.
On the Palestinian side, if you perform a suicide bombing, if you're sitting in the Israeli jail for an attack, your family will receive a stipend, you will be considered a hero, there will be pictures of you on billboards and you will get streets and schools named after you.
As for the Settlers, I think they're assholes, my friends who serve in the army and come in contact with them generally express the sentiment of 'Why do I have to come here and protect these assholes for their fucked up ideology?'.
But except for very few cases their actions amount to vandalism at most.
And these actions are considered criminal, there's even a special department in the secret service dedicated to infiltrating them, arresting them, expelling them from the territories an generally thwarting them.
Now if you look at the numbers you'll see more the death ratio in every conflict heavily weighted towards the Palestinian side (due to their methods of attack being less accurate, our side having early warning systems, bomb shelters for every person) but I do believe that one side specifically targeting civilians with the other side trying to avoid civilian casualties doesn't make both sides morally equal.
There's this quote that goes "if the Arabs lay down their arms there will be no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons there would be no more Israel." .
And while this is a pretty simplistic cliche that ignores historical, geopolitical and what have you claims in the region, I do believe that it is in essence true.