Showing that there is no limit to the ability of political gunslingers to trivialize the serious charge of anti-Semitism, MoveOn.org has suddenly become public enemy #1 starting here with this oped in the Washington Times.
Hmmm, silly us, it must be a total coincidence that the campaign started right before the elections. What is even odder is the fact that they are being attacked for anti-Semitic forum comments Moveon.org staff and members didn’t make and which they took down immediately. At least it’s good to know that the conservative commentariat suddenly cares deeply about the Jewish people.
MoveOn’s Noah Winer sets the record straight in this Jewschool interview on the source of the comments posted on a MoveOn forum.
We discovered and removed the posts before the scandal broke. Almost all the comments were posted and rated highly by non-MoveOn members who joined the forum with multiple accounts to create trouble.
In other words, most of the comments aren’t the real views of anyone, just an effort to smear MoveOn and its members for political gain.
And frankly, even if they were posted by bonafide MoveOn supporters, has anyone read comments on Haaretz lately? Of course, one wonders why Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League wrote a public letter to MoveOn after the comments had already been removed. To his credit, he backed off.
Fortunately, MoveOn has a lot of friends. Jewish Funds for Justice posted this petition, and former representative
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November 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
“Who set up MoveOn.org?”
MoveOn.org set itself up by knowingly and willfully serving as a platform for hate speech directed not only at Jews but also Christians and Black people.
Noah Winer and Eli Pariser are proven liars, as I have documented extensively at IsraPundit. The documentation includes MoveOn.org’s own FAQ page that says, contrary to Pariser’s and Winer’s contention that MoveOn discovered the hate speech only in mid-August, the moderators track the forum regularly and even read each comment twice.
“…one wonders why Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League wrote a public letter to MoveOn after the comments had already been removed.”
Except for a few examples like “Jew Lieberman” and “media-owning Zionist pigs” (or “Jewish pigs,” I forget which), the hate speech was never removed. This was proven by my ability to harvest dozens of examples more than two weeks after Pariser said the hate speech had been removed.
What muzzlewatch.com says actually makes a lot of sense, in a way. If MoveOn.org hadn’t “muzzled” pro-Israel commentary, criticisms of MoveOn.org, and criticisms of the hate speech, my friends and I would have been unable to attack it. We could have no more claimed that the Action Forum was a hate organization than an unmoderated newsgroup is a hate organization. The instant MoveOn.org exercised editorial control through censorship, however, it became the “owner” of every single piece of hate speech it failed to censor. (Google on “exercise of editorial control” and see the Cyberlaw site with regard to a legal case.)
This is not the first time, by the way, that I have used this kind of strategy to demolish an organization’s credibility. I know that Indybay.org routinely hides pro-Israel commentary, contrary to its own forum rules. I therefore posted some items on the Palestinian Authority’s abuse of gay people and honor killings of women in militant “Islamic” countries. Indybay.org took the bait and hid the items, whereupon I reposted them at IsraPundit and elsewhere to show that Indybay’s support for gay rights and women’s rights, including the basic right to live, ends where the militant “Islamic” world begins.
As for MoveOn.org having a lot of friends, the National Jewish Democratic Council and Jewschool seem to have backed away, and Jewish Funds for Justice is the only one still behind it. That may change as well as I reply to JFJ’s petition all over the Internet. I’m not muzzling them, but my free speech backed by evidence is sure as heck going to beat their free speech!
November 22nd, 2006 at 11:43 pm
Jewish Funds for Justice recently withdrew its petition in support of MoveOn.org (regarding this issue), apparently because it realized that the accusations were true and it did not want to soil its own reputation in MoveOn.org’s filth.
http://ga6.org/campaign/MoveOn_Petition
What does A Jewish Voice for Peace want to do at this point?