Free Speech's Jewish Problem

Facebook’s Holocaust-Denial Hate-Speech Problem, Lloyd Grove, The Daily Beast, 18 Aug 2011 (my emphasis):

Is Facebook in denial about Holocaust denial?

For years, international organizations opposing anti-Semitism have been urging the planet’s preeminent social-networking platform to delete any content that asserts the Nazi-orchestrated extermination of 6 million Jews never took place.

And for years, officials of Facebook, boasting more than 750 million active users, have refused, insisting that mere denial of the Holocaust, however “repugnant and ignorant,” doesn’t constitute “hate speech” as defined by Facebook’s Terms of Service policy prohibiting “content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” (Which gave a huge opening to TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who noted that while Facebook was meticulously removing photos of breast-feeding women, it was allowing the proliferation of Holocaust-denial pages. His mordant headline: “Jew Haters Welcome At Facebook, As Long As They Aren’t Lactating.”)

Facebook’s critics—including such groups as the Anti-Defamation League and the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, which describes itself as an Israeli-led “alliance of statesmen, parliamentarians, diplomats, journalists, legal experts, NGOs and scholars”—argue that Holocaust denial is, by definition, an expression of hatred for the Jewish people.

“Holocaust denial is basically a form of classic anti-Semitism,” said Deborah Lauter, ADL’s director of civil rights and its cyber-hate response team. “It’s anti-Semitism per se because it serves as a powerful conspiracy theory that basically says the Jews have manipulated history to advance their own worldview, whether to create sympathy or world domination. In other words, we have fabricated this monstrous event in history in order to further our own hidden agenda.”

Facebook spokesman Simon Axten doesn’t see it that way.

“We find Holocaust denial to be repugnant and ignorant, just as we object to many of the other ideas expressed on Facebook,” Axten told me via email this week. “We’ve come to the conclusion that the mere statement of denying the Holocaust is not a violation of our policies. We recognize people’s right to be factually wrong about historical events.”

The controversy surrounding Facebook’s free-speech position isn’t especially new. It has been a matter of anxiety among Jewish groups at least since November 2008, when blogger and attorney Brian Cuban—the less-famous brother of Dallas Mavericks owner and Dancing With the Stars contestant Mark Cuban—sounded the alarm and prompted a spate of media attention.

But the issue bubbled up anew last month when a group of survivors of the Nazi death camps wrote to Facebook asking that the company’s broad-minded policy be reversed. It came up again on Tuesday, when Australian computer scientist Andre Oboler and Canadian lawyer David Matas, co-chairmen of the Global Forum’s Online Anti-Semitism Working Group, released a letter they sent to Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg after they attended what Oboler calls a “frustrating” video conference with an executive of Facebook’s European operations. The Facebook exec politely listened to the group’s concerns, Oboler told me from Melbourne, then reiterated the company line.

“We call on Facebook to abandon its insistence on treating Holocaust denial in a context-free manner, in which it is considered nothing more than the rejection of a historical event,” Oboler and Matas wrote to Zuckerberg. “The context makes it clear that there is no meaningful distinction between Holocaust denial and incitement to hatred against Jews … We ask that Facebook recognize Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, issue a statement to this effect, and do its utmost to remove Holocaust denial from the Facebook platform.”

In his email, Facebook’s Axten stated that “in practice, we end up removing the vast majority of Holocaust denial content that’s reported to us because it’s explicitly hateful or threatening. Most instances of Holocaust denial on Facebook (or anywhere else) are accompanied by threats or clearly anti-Jewish statements, which run afoul of our policies. We remove these as quickly as possible when they’re reported to us, and the result is that there is actually very little of this kind of content on Facebook.”

ADL’s Lauter gives Facebook, and especially Axten, credit for “seriously engaging” on the issue, and supports his claim that the company has been responsive to reports of hate speech. She notes that she has led several workshops in Palo Alto, Calif., with key Facebook employees to alert them to the nuances of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and related concerns. But she disputes Axten’s assertion that there is "very little of this kind of content on Facebook.”

“We’re talking probably hundreds of thousands [of Facebook-hosted pages and postings] as a general problem,” she told me. “The metrics are hard to do. We would love it if, as part of their internal operations, Facebook would help with a system for coming up with those metrics, so we could see benchmarks—is it getting worse or better? How do you quantify the incidence of anti-Semitism? The whole flood of the Internet shows that, and you can’t even document the number of people expressing their hate thoughts.”

Oboler pointed out that Holocaust denial is codified as hate speech and thus against the law in 13 European countries, including Germany and Austria, and that Facebook manages not to violate local ordinances by blocking the various denial pages in the relevant jurisdictions. He said his colleagues, “who have been approaching Facebook with an open mind and in a spirit of cooperation to solve this problem, are becoming increasingly frustrated with Facebook’s irrational stubbornness on this issue and their attempts to blur the issue.”

The irony, of course, is that Zuckerberg and many of his employees are Jewish, and Oboler speculated that “maybe, as a result, they are bending too far in the other direction to let everybody know that they support free speech.”

Facebook’s Axten acknowledged in his email: “Many of us at Facebook have direct personal connection to the Holocaust, through parents or grandparents who were forced to flee Europe or relatives who could not escape. We believe in Facebook’s mission that giving people tools to make the world more open is the best way to combat ignorance and deception, though we recognize that others may disagree.”

The irony here is not in the good-jew/bad-jew theatrics. Despite their phony concerns about free speech the article makes clear that the "vast majority" of the content any self-righteous jew regards as repugnant, ignorant, or hateful is removed as quickly as possible. The hyperventilating and special pleading here is about removing what remains. Their jew-centric debate is about just how special the special protection for jewish sensibilities should be.

If there's any irony here it's in so many hyper-sensitive, hyper-critical jews portraying themselves as a group as the victims while they argue amongst themselves about just how far to push the victimization of those who vex them.

(Examples of the consequences of jewish hostility and the kind of criticism they don't want to hear can be found in UK Thought Criminals Sheppard and Whittle Jailed in LA.)

In a World Brimming with Non-White Hostility and Violence, Obama is Especially Concerned About White Resistance to the Anti-White Regime

Obama: 'Lone wolf' terror attack biggest concern, CBS News, 16 Aug 2011:

"The risk that we're especially concerned over right now is the lone wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently," he said. "You know, when you've got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it's a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators."

The term "lone wolf terrorist" is a codeword for disaffected Whites. The meaning is sometimes broadened to include non-Whites, but that's not who President Don't Jump to Conclusions is talking about. He's focused on Whites, like Breivik, "driven by a hateful ideology" - by which he means those of us who oppose the anti-White regime.

How many more Whites will be killed as a result of the regime's hostile, hateful anti-White ideology?

Enoch Powell Was Right, Multicultists Enraged

David Starkey On Newsnight (Whites Have Become Blacks)

Perhaps Starkey thought he was safe in finding fault with Enoch Powell and sneering at Whites. Everyone else realized right away was that what Starkey said reflected even worse on blacks, black culture, and the multicult in general.

Starkey's matter-of-factly delivered turd in the punchbowl elicited an immediate, hostile reaction from the multicult's defenders with him in the studio. It only got worse as they began to realize what his line of reasoning implied.

Here's how one multicultist spelled out the thoughtcrime. David Starkey’s Career Ending Rant Was Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Show, Tom Ayling, Sabotage Times:

After barely searching into this issue, I found a clip on the BBC News website. I was stunned. I was sure it was the alcohol teasing out these words from his mouth, but no, he actually found it in his dark labyrinth of a human heart to say the words that he said. It was so discriminatory that it was not even laughable; it was an outrage and a disgrace, and for all of it to happen on our beloved Beeb – a tragedy.

If you haven’t already heard, the line that’ll be quoted in all the papers is “The whites have become black”, said as if they had contracted some incurable disease, as if something apocalyptic had happened, as if it was wrong. I had thought that with the civil rights campaigns that occurred even before I was born, such lunacy wouldn’t even be pondered, let alone spewed out on our TV screens.

But the heinous claims didn’t stop. The withered, backward, lonely, cruel and twisted old man had more to say, as he went on to describe all black people as “destructive” and “nihilistic”, just like those black Nobel Peace Prize winners, say Bunche, or Luthuli, or Dr King, or El Sadat, or Archbishop Tutu, or Mandela, or Annan, or Maathai, or Obama – how destructive they all were. And he still sits there, singing the praises of the prophetic racist Enoch Powell, please, I mean is he even for real.

"Slay the heretic!", Ayling sputters, acting as if something apocalyptic has happened. As if it is wrong that Whites prefer not to become blacks.

The BBC News version of the video is at England riots: 'The whites have become black' says David Starkey.

UPDATE 13 Aug 2011: Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968:

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

Some Parts of London Aren't Burning

Vigilante groups aim to combat riots - Crime, UK - The Independent, 9 August 2011:

Pictures beamed around the world throughout Monday night's rioting more often than not showed police and locals conceding the streets to baying mobs who trashed shops and set fire to cars or buildings with near impunity.

Yet there were instances where locals physically resisted the looters. In Dalston, a corner of north east London with a large Turkish community, men hit the streets armed with baseball bats and sticks, fighting running battles with masked youths. In Whitechapel youths chased away rioters and in one restaurant in Notting Hill kitchen staff armed themselves with knives to protect diners from rampaging muggers.

They also have a secret weapon.

"What the Turkish community did was brilliant, they made the area a safer place," said Tonya Cavanagh, a 39-year-old shopkeeper who runs a neighbourhood watch system in the area. "Everybody is really thankful. I think more people will go and help out the Turkish people too now. It makes you want to stick together."

In Whitechapel, home to Britain's largest Bangladeshi community, locals described how a gang of 70 masked rioters were chased out of the neighbourhood by Bengali youths who had gathered for evening prayers outside East London Mosque.

"There's a real sense of community here, especially during Ramadan when people are supposed to look out for each other," said Abdul Jalil, the manager of the Deshi Fish grocery store opposite the mosque. "The shutters will come down this evening but I'm definitely going to stick around in case the rioters come into the area again."

In other words, minimizing diversity is a good way to defend yourself and your community from the depredations of marauding "diversity".

Of course, don't expect to hear that from anyone in the anti-White regime. What they'll say instead is, "YOU SEE, YOU SEE, WHAT WE NEED IS MORE TURK AND BANGLADESHI DIVERSITY!"

Tea Party Upgraded

At first they ignored the Tea Party. Then they mocked it. Now they characterize it as an existential threat.

Democrats seek to pin credit downgrade on tea party, Washington Times, 7 August 2011.

It is a measure of the arrogance and desperation of this bankrupt system's defenders that they think they can pin the blame for unsustainable debt on the one political group that's actually opposed to it.

(Cartoon via US News and World Report.)

Genocide Excused, Opposition Blamed, Fjordman Out

A series of three articles from Views and News from Norway concerning Breivik, Fjordman, and the larger, longer-running, lopsided debate they're on the politically incorrect side of.

‘Fear of foreigners’ breeds extremists, 3 August 2011:

Anders Behring Breivik is by no means Norway’s first home-grown right-wing extremist. Concerns are rising that the country, with its relatively small population, has produced what some experts call a disproportionate amount of internationally known extremists, and some link it to a history of fremmedfrykt (fear of foreigners).

While Norwegian society generally has grown more tolerant and internationally oriented in recent decades, there’s long been a tradition of wariness among Norwegians regarding people they don’t know. While Norway has produced record numbers of its own emigrants, many haven’t been particularly welcoming towards immigrants who’ve arrived in Norway during the past few decades.

That’s given rise to criticism of asylum and immigration laws that some view as too liberal, and in turn a rise in some hateful rhetoric against foreigners in online debates. Fear of being branded a racist for criticizing immigration policies, however, has shut some out of the debate, leading to frustration when they can’t have their say.

Rational debaters withdraw

Author and journalist Øyvind Strømmen has followed the types of websites where Breivik, who has confessed to terrorist attacks that left 77 persons dead, was active in online debate. The extreme and hateful rhetoric found on many of the sites, Strømmen told newspaper Aftenposten this week, “is so uncomfortable that those wanting a factual and rational debate pull out. That leaves the debate to more and more extremists on the left and the right.”

Never mind the completely rational fear of social and even criminal sanction. Ironically, Fjordman has used the same disingenuous argument as Strømmen - anyone whose opinion he doesn't like is irrational, or just plain stupid. The fact remains that it's only one side that has to find the courage, or foolhardiness, to debate. There is no lack of fearless, rational people on the other side, arguing in favor of genocidal immigration and multiculturalism. They're just intelligent enough to pretend it isn't genocide. Instead of saying directly that they think indigenous Whites have a duty to abide and even accomodate their legal and demographic subordination, most characterize their position instead as favoring "tolerance" and "diversity". Instead of saying directly that they favor repression of indigenous White resistance to subordination, most simply pathologize and demonize it, painting it as something bad or even evil.

The debate is so lopsided that all the pro-genocide side has to do is sprinkle a few special words into their argument - "nazi", "racist", "xenophobe", "extremist" - to end any debate. Arguing against such rhetoric is taken as an affirmation that you are what they say you are.

Strømmen stressed to Aftenposten that he has no theory as to what’s really created the right-wing extremists in Norway like Vikernes, Breivik and Fjordman, while Anders Jupskås at the University of Oslo thinks the issue should be researched. Strømmen does think Fjordman spreads a dangerous ideology, though, because he indirectly inspires violence by indicating that armed resistance is the only alternative against Islam, and that western leaders have betrayed their people.

These intellects don't have a theory because the most rational theory - that foreigners are what breeds fear of foreigners, that genocide is what inspires anti-genocidal rhetoric and even violence - is unthinkable to them. At least where Whites are the victims, rather than the perpetrators. These are not the high-minded, neutral researchers they pretend to be, but partisans that either firmly believe that there is no such thing as Whites, never mind indigenous Whites, or that Whites have no legitimate cause to resist a regime - their government, media and academia - deliberately inflicting conditions that are bringing about their physical destruction.

Breivik police question ‘Fjordman’, 4 August 2011:

The anonymous blogger “Fjordman,” who is repeatedly referenced in the manifesto of Oslo and Utøya terrorist attacks suspect Anders Behring Breivik, was being questioned by Norwegian police on Thursday afternoon after authorities found out his real identity. The international links between Breivik and other far right groups have also continued to be revealed, as well as the suspect’s financial details and a number of other new facts about the case.

Spokesperson Pål-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) that “Fjordman” was seen as an “especially central” witness for the case given the influence he appears to have had on the suspect.

“Fjordman” had finished his own blog in 2005 but made a public statement on the Gates of Vienna website after the Oslo and Utøya attacks to reject claims that he was Breivik. The blogger said that he “extremely disliked” being mentioned in Breivik’s writings, claiming that he has “never” met the terror suspect. He had continued to contribute to such foreign far right websites after ending his own blog.

Fjordman's statement on Breivik is here: Thoughts on the Recent Atrocities.

‘Fjordman’ reveals identity, 5 August 2011:

36 year-old Peder Jensen has given an interview to Norwegian newspaper VG where he reveals that he is the man behind the “Fjordman” blog referenced repeatedly in the online manifesto of Oslo and Utøya attacks suspect Anders Behring Breivik.

After being identified by the police and subsequently questioned on Thursday afternoon, Jensen met reporters from VG at an Oslo café. He chose to use his real name after receiving advice from a lawyer, and has asked the media to leave him and his family alone. He also confirmed that he would never again use the pseudonym “Fjordman” because he does not “wish to be associated with Breivik and his horrible actions.”

Exchanged emails with Breivik

Jensen told VG that he had “warned” his family in advance about shedding his anonymity, adding that “because of my own safety, I’m now going into hiding.” He had felt it was his “duty” to cooperate with the police investigation and decided to be interviewed under his real name because it “eventually would have emerged anyway, resulting in a media frenzy.” Jensen commented, “it is also a way for me to clear my name.”

The blogger disclosed that he had exchanged a number of emails with Breivik in 2009 and 2010. Breivik told Jensen that he was writing a book and asked if they could meet. Jensen turned down the offer “not because of his extreme views, but because he didn’t seem very interesting – like a vacuum cleaner salesman.” “‘Pie in the sky,’ I thought to myself when I re-read the emails,” Jensen added. He confirmed investigators had confiscated his computer, stressing that “they won’t find anything on my computer regarding any criminal matters or Breivik.” VG suggests that Jensen “feels that the police are looking to implicate him.”

In further excerpts of the interview reported by news agency NTB, Jensen said, “I recognize that people need a scapegoat, and now that Breivik is behind bars, I can become a handy scapegoat, especially because I am the only Norwegian he referenced.” He added that he understood that he could be regarded as “a hate object.”

In terms of Jensen’s background, VG reports that he originally comes from the town of Ålesund on the west coast of Norway. He claims that while he has long voted for the Labour Party and voted for the Progress Party more recently, he has never been a part of a Norwegian political party, and has only handled a gun during military service, where he describes himself as “no good soldier.” He holds a masters degree in culture and technology from the University of Oslo, where he completed a dissertation on “censorship and blogging in Iran.” He also studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo and the University of Bergen.

Despite the significance of the issue, these articles make no mention of Breivik or Fjordman's professed love of jews and hatred of nazis. As Jensen himself has found it convenient to scapegoat "nazis", he speaks with authority on that subject.

At any rate, the sanction the media heaps upon simple writers like Fjordman, to which the government may eventually add, illustrates the point I made above. The idea that the responsibility for the crimes and violence committed by alien interlopers lies with them never comes up for debate, much less the indirect responsibility that belongs to their enablers and apologists. What gets the media spotlight instead is even more indirect - those bad, evil people who supposedly cause anti-immigrant crimes and violence with their "extremist" ideas and rhetoric against crime, violence and the supporters of genocidal immigration and multiculturalism who enable and defend it.

(Views and News from Norway link via a comment by Rollory on Kay on Breivik on "The Jew".)