Censorship at the Independent, Guardian
and Huffington Post (to name but three) is working overtime at the
moment predominately it seems on the subject of the Israeli air
strikes and naval bombardment of Gaza and the killing of civilians.
Any article, comment or observation even remotely critical of the
Israeli government in Tel Aviv, is removed swiftly and without any
reason or explanation to the author. The posts just disappear, rather
like Palestinians in Hebron or Nablus or Ramalah or a hundred other
towns in the occupied territories.
This morning I have had personal
experience of the Independent, Guardian and Huffington Post censors.
I posted the text of, “The "collective guilty conscience"
of the governments in the western world.” (
http://new-agenda2012.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/european.html
), in the comments section of an item published on their pages. In
the case of the Independent, the item was in response to an article
by their Yasmin Alibhai Brown. The paper accepted the comment and
then, within a few minutes it had been removed. A few more tries and
then blocked from even commenting. I did however manage to place a
link to the Blog, but on checking now, the whole commenting facility
has been removed from the article.
The Guardian was a bit slow in removing
my post from their article. A number of readers had already managed
to “recommend” my post (8 in fact and with 5 replies) over a
period of some 10 minutes, but by then the censors had been alerted
and the comment, together with the recommendations and replies simply
vanished.
Huffington Post took the text, held it
for some 5 minutes before deciding that it was too critical of Israel
and the western leaders to be allowed onto their pages.
This experience demonstrate a point
raised in the text. Israel can do no wrong and any criticism of its
government or its actions will not be acceptable. As I state in the
text, “Any criticism of Israeli expansion, the collective
punishment of populations, the continuing occupation of Arab lands,
the flagrant disregard of United Nations resolutions, even those that
manage to get past the American veto, is essentially ignored by the
west and treated as more anti Semitic outpourings by the "Jew
haters".
If I had used obscene language, or
misrepresented fact, or had libelled some individual, or had
committed some other cardinal sin, I could understand a post being
deleted. However, to have a post removed without explanation or
reason by some Israeli, or Israeli sympathising censor on these
online papers is really unacceptable.
I will continue to criticise Israeli
aggression in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, in spite
of the Israeli sympathisers in the offices of online newspaper or
anywhere else.
However, it is a great shame that this
account of censorship will only be seen by a relatively small
readership.
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