Rant

YouTube Shrink Wraps Pro Israel Videos

Posted 17 months ago|3 comments|1,441 views

TAGS

Israel , Palestine , Middle East , YouTube , Free Speech

Written by

Rudi Stettner

Moderator

You Tube Quarantines Pro Israel Video
December 19, 2010

i_am_israel

YouTube provides a forum to millions of people from around the world for everything from opinion to instruction, from entertainment to family videos. Understandably, they need a mechanism in place to remove material that is offensive, indecent or infringes upon copyright law. A lot of people vent their anger at each other. Serbs and Croats, Greeks and Turks as well as Democrats and Republicans diss and disagree with each other regularly. Sometimes it gets over the top, and YouTube removes the offending video. Other times, the video is deemed offensive enough that one has to log in as an adult and promise to absolve YouTube of any culpability for being offended. This is a needed protective mechanism, but one that can be misused.

Sometimes, it is not violence or sexual impropriety that gets a video quarantined, but the political sensitivities of a lobbying group. I have found two videos that were stirring in their presentation of the State of Israel as a law abiding and decent nation, faced with murderous opponents. There is one user on YouTube named puttingitmildly, who abides by any reasonable code of internet conduct in refraining from incitement, bigotry or obscenity.

Despite this, his video "I Am Israel" has been quarantined with TouTube's "offensive content" designation, which has been misused with regularity by Israel's opponents on YouTube. I viewed the entire video and found no racism, profanity or graphic depictions of violence. The video defended Israel and described the actions of its opponents in a manner that was well within any reasonable person's definition of reasonably conducted political debate.

In the interests of free speech, and because I support the message of both videos, I have uploaded both "I am Israel and "I am Palestine" to my web site "RudiStettner.com. I do not support racism, profanity or obscenity at all on my own web sites, and I find the videos well within the parameters I have established for reasonable political discourse. At some later date I may well focus on racist and bigoted videos that have yet to be flagged on YouTube. My hunch is that a lot of the censorship and moderating that is done on YouTube is done by tabulating the number of caomplaints rather than judging their actual merit. I do not believe that YouTube has an anti Israel bias..

Here is a link to Globe Tribune.Info

http://globetribune.info/2010/12/19/you-...

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iszevel

17 months ago: Just today, Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli NGO that studies Palestinian society sent out a bulletin saying that YouTube has closed down PMW's main video account - PALWATCH - for "violating YouTube terms of use", by supposedly propagating hate speech. Of course PMW does not promote hate speech, but exposes the hate speech of the PA and the Hamas, in order to bring about its elimination. http://palwatch.org/

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BadCyborg
San Antonio, TX

17 months ago: The left hates Israel, pure plain and simple. I have no problem believing that YouTube would be biased against Israel and would pretty much give Islamists carte blanch. It's simple survival. The incidence of Jews flying airliners into skyscrapers or blowing up places of worship or blowing themselves up along with dozens of innocent bystanders approaches zero. One cannot say the same for Islamists.

But the left isn't in any wise interested in objective facts. All it cares about is the dialectic - and change!

The real mystery is why, in the face of such overwhelming hatred by the left, so many Jews are leftists. It boggles the mind.

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Stan Five

17 months ago: We are good and worthy.

What we do is God's will. We only kill by God's will.

Our opponents are malicious and unreasonable - murderers.

Against God's will, they try to hold on to land WE should have.

How can you reason with such mad people?

The restraint and benevolence of our armed occupation forces is super-human. Still, the occupied people are not grateful and oppose us with relatively pathetic force.

The so-called native "Palestians" aren't even a proper historical people like the Jews of Europe etc. They are not even chosen by God. Gott mit uns.

Offensively to God, they ridiculously oppose our forceful usurpation of their so-called homes. They should go back to where they came from.

We are law abiding. Forget that international legal consesus is that our settlements on their lands are illegal. There is an international legal conspiracy against us by the Elders of Palestine and Leftists who control the world's institutions.

Our children are beautiful lovely beings, chosen by God. The less said about theirs, the better. They use them for propaganda and human shields, pretending that they get killed or injured when we attack their terrorists.

It might, in some misguided people's view, be abysmal parenting to drag your children into an occupied land in order to claim free land and forefully assert the divine armed occupation of "Palestinian" territory. However, to them I say, pooh pooh. God's right behind it.

Though we deride the existence of the "Palestinians" and claim our actions against them are dictated by God, nothing in these views could remotely promote any hatred or delusion or racism.

There is nothing in these views to which any reasonably minded person could object. In fact, these views promote a framework for resolving things peacefully. Don't they?

How anyone can say that our attitude is racist, backward, bigotted, or provocative is beyond me. Please, someone, explain.

Rudi?

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