Anti-Semitism & Open Publishing
Anarchogeek | 18.09.2002 00:49
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.
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
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
Anarchogeek
Homepage:
http:// anarchogeek.protest.net/archives/cat_indymedia.html
Comments
Hide the following 14 comments
anarchogrek
18.09.2002 06:08
'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.'
Only from your point of view. Anti-arab feeling is also very strong, but much of this is due to covert terrorist activities that get blamed on arabs. The locus classicus for this is the Lavon affair, but there have been many others. This antisemitism as its roots in jewish israel.
The way to remove the new anti-semitism is for the jews in israel to support justice for the palestine in a one state solution, get rid of the murderous 'settlers', get rid of sharon.
brian
right Brian
18.09.2002 09:35
But defining the difference between right and left is not easy these days.just as it is not easy to tell the difference between jews(mossad) and nazis, victims and oppressors.
Your long winded excuse for an explanation does nothing to clarify the situation.
Facts are facts and just because a fact has been published on a right wing web site it don't change shit.
The only way things will change in Israel is if the international jewish community stops blindly supporting Israel. rather than starting a witch hunt looking nazis on indymedia, perhaps it would be better to check out the pro israel lobby on IMC, your article included.
OOOK
Two facts
18.09.2002 10:25
The so called forgeries of the protocols of the learned elders of zion' ... in actual fact this should read 'SION', and are in no way a forgery - documentation that go back at least as far as the early 18th century (see Maurice Joly - 'dialogue aux enfers entre', translated as 'dialogues in hell between machiavelli and montesquies', which preceeds the first zionest congress [1897] by several decades, or Herman Goedsche; 'biarritz')
The trick here is that these documents have been slightly altered (by including what are, really, damning phrases from the jewish 'holy' book and by the change of sion to zion). The authors of this later adaptation were and are widley thought to be the russian czarist police at the turn of the 19th century, but are more likely to have there origins in the round table groups of Rhodes and others such as Balfour, Cecil, Rothschild, Oppenhiemmer, Milner and Jan Smuts (the original S.A. racist)[note NOT all jewish!].
This alteration has allowed them to continue their agenda hidden behind their [6 million] jewish victims.
So yes there is a conspiracy [groups of MEN meeting in smoky rooms deciding the fate of nations DOES qualify as a conspiracy right?)
Second fact; israeli authorities made some pretty wild claims about israeli victims after 911, and while the assertion that 4000 didn't show up for work IS false (probably originating in Jordan), the fact remains that not one israeli victim can be accounted for within the wtc, and probably only one aboard the aircraft (we won't know until the proper passenger lists are released and analysed).
Whilst speculation on the notion that 911 was a 'false flag' operation IS just speculation, both israel and the US have been caught out before using this type of cover (as well as almost evry other nation).
Jewish conspiracy it is not, jewish people as part of the conspiracy - well that just depends if you accept that it is enough to CALL oneself jewish to be jewish. At the end of the day the victims are ALL victims and the purpetrators are ALL conspirators.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
If it looks like a Nazi...
18.09.2002 10:49
It is a Zionist
this line of reasoning has been exposed
18.09.2002 12:47
there is also a commonplace blunder in that it assumes Israelis are not prone to fascistic politics, even though the rest of the world is in the wrong circumstances... the historical record shows that when building his movement, Herzl took many features from the romantic Germanstudent nationalist movement , so perhaps that may explain something...
D R Esder
racial hatred
18.09.2002 13:17
Dan
more of the same
18.09.2002 13:33
as if (most of you above)'s comments'll help the problems out there....
sad one
it's not easy to tell ..
18.09.2002 14:44
It's true , Left and Right is not easy to sus these days.
It's just two different ways of shafting the people.
Jews and nazis is just s confusing .
Israel is the jewish homeland Right ?
Apart from trying to exterminate the palestinians israel is also a NUKE power top notch army ect ect.
Mossad is one of the vilest organisations on the planet, and has been involved in ... well let's not get onto 9:11 ..
Israel might as well be the fourth reich, as far as I am concerned they are evil .
israel is supported by the international jewish community
the recent demo in london, 40.000 announced by the BBC the day before and 40.000 confirmed the day after, with members of the UK government on board .. all showing their support for an evil Nuke toting regime of Nazis !!!
it might come as a shock to you but these views are shared by a lot of people who are certainly not racists or from the so called right. people are getting wise to your propaganda and
to what israel stands for ... and where it stands , namely right next to the USA in it's war against everyone of us !!!
ooooK
Question for Dan?
18.09.2002 21:58
The founder of the SWP was a Palestinian Jew, many leading members of the SWP are Anti-ZIonist Jews: What the hell are you talking about.
ANTONIUS CLIFFUS JNR.
ADENDUM
18.09.2002 22:02
The view expressed that all Jews are Nazi's is not only ridiculous, but also racist.
ANTONIUS CLIFFUS JNR.
re; Adendum by Antonius Cliffus Jnr (Sic)
19.09.2002 14:25
D R Esder
re; Adendum by Antonius Cliffus Jnr (Sic)
19.09.2002 14:25
D R Esder
D R Esder
19.09.2002 14:33
Dan
Dan, Im sorry if you couldnt understand
19.09.2002 14:48
D R Esder