Israel Meets With Google and YouTube To Discuss Censoring Videos (middleeastmonitor.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Various sources report Israel's Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely meeting with representatives of Google and YouTube to discuss censoring Palestinian videos believed to incite violence. Original aricle (in Hebrew) from Maariv The open question is how Google and Youtube will define "inciting violence." Currently, all foreign journalists in the Palestinian territories are required to register with the Israeli military, and all footage must be approved through the Israeli Military Censor's office before being released. However, according to the article in alternet individual Palestinians have been uploading videos showing violence by Israeli soldiers, including execution-style killings, and highlighting the living conditions in the territories, which Israeli authorities consider inflammatory.

Comments

Bad stuff happens in war

[sideslash]

The moral picture is still asymmetrical -- Israel is fighting an existential war of self defense, whereas the Palestinians are fighting to murder and drive out the Jews, and institute a stone age theocracy in place of the Middle East's only democracy. If a few IDF soldiers went unhinged and committed murder (for which I'd expect them to be prosecuted by Israel), that's still both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the acts of murder by Palestinians against Jewish civilians. Palestinian suicide bombers who kill civilians achieve a sort of sainthood in Palestinian society, whereas Israeli soldiers (and orthodox zealots) who go off the reservation make (most) everybody in Israeli society angry, because in their personal acts of revenge they bring dishonor on their country's war effort.

Bracing myself for onslaught of angry leftists, and reflecting on how lucky we are in a society where free speech has been the rule for centuries to be able to blow steam out our ears and argue with each other seven ways to Sunday, without it really occurring to us to shoot and stab one another, at least for the most part (yeah yeah, Slashdot is USA centric).