June 06, 2002

The issue of anti-Semitism on indymedia sites has come up a number of times. A friend just asked me what I thought about it and this kind of came out. It's definitely rant quality. Things have gotten to the point where indymedia is being used to advance anti-Jewish racism. I don't use the word Semite because both Arabs and Jews are Semitic people to say it's anti-Semitism would be a little non-sensesical.

After talking a little explaining the two groups of anti-Semitic posters on indymedia and a digression in to the general israel/palestine conflict I talk about how the future of open publishing can create a new space for political.

Regarding the racist posts on indymedia, I see them coming in two categories. One are the true racists who are probably right wing anyway. They are attempting to use indymedia and the oppression of Palestinians both as a way of attracting members of the white left in to joining and advance their insane conspiracy theories about Jewish control over the world and how the Holocaust never happened. These folks are the ones who talk about the elders of Zion or keep spreading around the baseless rumor that 4000 Jews didn't show up to work at the WTC on 9.11. In theory our editorial policy of removing racist and hate speech should be enough to have these posts removed. The problem is that there are way to many posts. A few sites like the Israel and Palestine indymedia sites put a lot of work in to removing them but most do not. People simply don't have the time to go through and filter things as it's currently setup. Beyond time there is a bigger problem. That of making political judgments as 'indymedia'. Getting in to fights over the quality of questionable posting is a draining process and eventually people shy away from it.

The second problem with anti-Jewish racism in indymedia is more difficult. These are from people who are genuine leftists who generally uphold egalitarian anti-racist views. They are reacting to the tremendous oppression which has come down on the Palestinians. When they look around for who is at fault they see the state of Israel. Israel does have populations Muslim and Christian citizens but it was founded as an explicitly Jewish state. The ethno-religious origins of the Jewish state make it really easy for people to confuse Jewish people with the state of Israel. When people are looking for a bad guy to explain what is happening in the occupied territories they see the state of Israel and by extension all Jews. This is not simply a vision created by the pro-Palestinian side. Sharon and the right wing Jews are actively blurring the line between the state of Israel and the Jewish diaspora. They do it to consolidate power. If you are a Jew and you don't support Israel then you are opposing the whole of the Jewish people as Hitler did. The Palestinians are an exploited minority make the obvious jump to equating the actions of the Israeli government with Nazism which so devastated the Jews 60 years ago. As soon as you say Israel = Nazism you get a huge reaction. It divides people and consolidates the power behind the groups which are unable to achieve peace because their power comes for the protected conflict.

Anyway I£¡ìm not saying anything new, dozens of more articulate and well read leftist intellectuals have been advancing this critique for years. The only hope I see is if people start looking at the struggle in South Africa as a model for how two communities can come to live together. Unlike in Israel/Palestine the ANC never dreamed of having an all black South Africa. I personally think the best way out is to try and take religion out of the equation and start treating this as a second appartide.

Ok, regarding the newswire. These second group of people who are leftists but who have fallen in to the good guy bad guy trap are the ones who are difficult to deal with. Just as during the Gulf and Kosovo Wars we had to say that both the US AND evil dictator of the moment were to be denounced. We need to try and encourage people to take a stand for a just and egalitarian peace. I personally think that both the Israelis and Palestinians would be much better off without a state at all. The history of post colonial states has proved they've been a dismal failure. Consolidating power under a post-colonial administration hasn't worked. What we need is open federated communitarian movements. In some ways despite it's hard line Muslim ideology and advocacy for the self-defeating tactic of suicide bombings Hamas is a model. Instead of becoming a new Palestinian Authority like the PLO, Hamas has build schools, clinics, and provided other vital social services. It would be interesting to see what they would achieve if they could continue this model of stateless community based governance of society. But I digress... Back to open publishing and indymedia. To address this problem of anti-Semitism within the left we need to be having a dialog real dialog. Many people who equate Zionism with Nazism think they are being more radical because of the reaction they get. To simply shut down the views of people in that mindset doesn't work. If people just started hiding those articles then everybody would become entrenched in their perspectives and fight about what should or shouldn't be on the sites.

What I hope to do achieve a solution to this is redefine space in which this conflict takes place. The current form of indymedia is to have this really narrow channel in which the content flows. Either an article is visible or hidden. Some new sites have categories which nicely add depth to the same channel. The problem is that all of these things still have a flat one way vision for what is or isn't included. Our medium is the web and we need to look at how we can use a discursive networked model for organizing the information. The examples are already out there it's just a matter of pulling them together. First we take the concept from eBay about reputation and credibility. With eBay you buy and sell stuff with random people over the internet. Trust is very important so they include easy measures to judge and rate other people. If you think somebody's articles are racist or brilliant then you need to be able to say so. Other people should be able to find out that kind of information. The second place where I hope to draw ideas is from the Amazon lists function. In Amazon people are able to create lists of books around a specific topic. When you see a book you also see that it is on five different lists people have put together. From those lists you can find more information. Obviously due to the volume of articles on indymedia we'd want to be able to create the ability for groups of people to collaborate on a list. The third innovation which we need to draw from in the evolution of indymedia in to being a truly powerful sustained open publishing political news medium is the blog. Weblogs (blogs for short), are a way of individuals to be empowered to be their own media by writing about issues and commenting on other websites. Blogs use links extensively and seem to be one of the more powerful new forms of journalism which has developed on the net. The fourth inspiration is that of kuro5hin.org, it's a web news community where the users vote on the articles and editorial decisions about the site. We need to get away from having the potentially cabal like powers of an elite and toward a model where we can actualize popular democratic participation in both news production and editorial decisions.

By combining those I hope that we'll be able to evolve indymedia in to something where you can get quality news of political issues which can address the long term problems like anti-Semitism in the movement from a bottom up perspective. Indymedia started out and is still best at covering breaking news such as major protests. For us to be effective in the long term in other environment we need to evolve. The process is slow but we are moving that direction. Part of the evolution is the switch so that on the global indymedia site the right hand column is no longer open publishing but has links to the featured stories from local imc's.

Posted by rabble at 07:45 AM