Facebook and Instagram have sparked outrage for allowing ads with the antisemitic slogan ‘From the river to the sea’. The Telegraph has the story.
The social networks have run multiple adverts in the U.K. and Europe, some seen by hundreds of thousands of people, containing the phrase since the October 7th attacks.
The adverts range from political statements to promotions for art, clothing and jewellery seeking to capitalise on the phrase.
Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, said it did not ban the phrase outright but blocked adverts when the phrase was used in a way that violated its policies.
The extended phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been criticised by Israel’s supporters as an antisemitic phrase calling for the destruction of the Jewish people. …
The language has been banned by online marketplace Etsy, while Elon Musk has said using it will lead to suspension from Twitter.
As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension. https://t.co/1fCFo5Lezb
One advert that ran on Meta’s platforms and was taken out by the Dutch political party Denk was seen more than 100,000 times, according to Meta’s online ad library.
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By all means attack the undoubted hypocrisy of these platforms and demand consistency, but let’s try not to encourage micro policing of language
As I’ve said I am naturally sort of pro Israel by instinct but let’s allow both sides to say exactly what they think and allow us to judge for ourselves
Jon, I am one of your downtickers. You deserve them. Are your views supported by your having ever been to Israel or Gaza or the West Bank. Or is your ill-expressed negativity about Israel through your unquestionably having swallowed the counter-narrative ?
I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent. I learnt in my 20s that the real situation is always orders of magnitude more complex that the press would have you believe and cannot be meaningfully reduced to concepts like Israel = Zionism in the style of football teams.
I don’t claim profound wisdom; I merely cite some level of world experience from an everyday work perspective that I feel has informed me.
There is nothing new in what you say about a lack of balance in every single media outlet regarding the current middle eastern situation. I completely agree with you. It has been thus since my observations from, in my case, working for a year’s project engineering in Belfast working with people on both side of the sectarian divide in ‘the 70’s troubles’. All great people if you detach the baggage-laden layer of historical cultural difference. Concerning more recent emergences such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit Covid, Ukraine Gaza/S Israel, the already tenuous link between media and some version of the truth was completely severed some decades ago. In which case your ire might be better directed against the state controlled propagandists. But I do caution against regressing to a simple binary. I recognise that Israel as a nation and culture exists and has done for many decades and origins go back millenia. As do the Palestinians. I have contacts who I regard as friends in both camps. We agree on the complexity of the problem if not the detail and that as always, emotion and idealism inhibit our natural human desire to make the best future opportunities for our families which means co-operation and resolving ideological differences. War and hatred and conflict are so much simpler, so much easier that no one needs to think and do as we are told by those captured by the evil in all of us who will despicable things and then, monstrously seek to justify them.
My point was that I think both sides of the argument should be heard – I mentioned which side of the argument I am half-heartedly on merely because it emphasises that I am not making a partisan point, but one in favour of free expression. My reasons, whatever they may be, for my “instinct”, are not relevant to the point I was making.
I’m pro Israel. In general I support Jews.
Draw a Venn diagram, 3 circles, Israeli/Jewish beliefs, interests. Palestinian/Moslem beliefs, interests. My/Christian beliefs, interests.
Far more overlap between me/Christian & Israeli/Jewish than with Palestinian/Moslem.
I’m not sure you are really in a position to tell me what I am aware of, especially as I’ve just written that I’m aware of the things to which you refer. I may even agree with some of your sentiments but not necessarily all of your conclusions
You are tarring all Jews with a brush when like anything it’s a handful of rotten apples. I take ppl as I find them and I think you are the one falling for what you accuse others of.
Interesting DS covers this but never mentioned Facebook (along with twitter, Google etc) and the FBI censoring the hunter biden laptop 2 weeks before an election, claiming it was “Russian disinformation”. Every one of these chancers at the time knew the laptop was real because the FBI had already interviewed the repair guy Hunter had left it with (and not paid).
Perhaps they see this as a moral issue and the other as political. There’s been no coverage to speak of regarding US politics here. I think there’s a resistance among UK intellectuals regarding Trump – Hitchens is always snide about him.
Ok, let’s attribute blame for the current situation. You’ve got 100% blame to be spread between Israel & Hamas.
Hamas provoked the Israeli reaction. Hamas could release hostages. Hamas could turn in their murderers.
Israel could now be a bit more careful with their tactics.
I’m laying nearly all the blame Hamas way.
That statement’s not mine.
As ABBA Eban said “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Regardless of what went before, (though what went before, included 1m Jews being expelled from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon in the late 40s, as 250,000 Palestinian Arabs left Israel) Oct 7th was a war crime not an ‘act of war’.
The perpetrators deserve punishment. The kidnapped deserve release. The dead deserve justice.
Hamas indulges in Munchausen by proxy towards the Palestinians who voted them in.
I’m disappointed in you exchange with NickR and you misattribution of my “I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent”.. Ps you’ve just blown that self congratulary statement of yours out of the water…”
Your arguments will have more credibility if you do some work on their coherence. As I said ” I have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent… ”
You have some way to go to fit my criteria. And I suggest you post only when sober
RichardTechnik
1 year ago
Ok maybe you will read what I have written, digest it and reply in a considered and probably more sober frame of mind. I stated I had downticked one of your posts; the one your posted “1 hr ago” that I replied to. It might be convenient to you to laugh off dissent with your worldview as “ Some inconvenient historical context fucked (my) head ” but that avoids the real issues why people disagree with your simplistic and binary stance and engage in discussion several levels more nuanced than yours. I leave it with you….
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty. —Likud Party Platform, 1977
Yes the inconvenient fact that phrase is originally a Zionist call to imagine a Land for the Jewish people only. A Jewish ethnostate in Judea and Samara.
So was it anti Arab then and anti Semitic now or is it a phrase used by both sides to describe a single unified polity?
Binyamin Netanyahu <a href=”https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics”>has said</a>, concerning Gaza, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”.
To Netanyahu’s religious allies, the commandment to blot out the tribe of Amalek is a mitzvah, a divine obligation, one of the 613 commandments of the Torah (Deuteronomy 25) and held to be in force to the present day.
Outside politics, the only profession Netanyahu has practised is pro-Israeli public relations and lobbying. He is a cheap, shallow man who believes nothing much and practises nothing much, and he supposes that he can use words like these for his own ends. But to insinuate that Palestinians are Amalekites comes at least as close to a call for genocide as anything the leadership of Hamas have said.
Who here is unaware of Israel ever doing anything wrong?
We’re not stupid.
In many ways it may have been better for everyone had the modern state of Israel not been created as it hasn’t turned out great for anyone, but it was created and here we are. I hope that one day the two sides will reach a way to coexist peacefully, though that sadly seems unlikely.
Never going to happen. Not with this hateful, fanatical attitude towards the Jews. Jihadis and Islamist extremists don’t do tolerance and now we see how the results have been amplified and spread worldwide. The propaganda campaign has been a great success. There will never be peace, as we know it here in Europe, for Israel. Just sporadic ceasefires interspersed between the next inevitable attacks from ‘The Neighbours From Hell’;
”Hamas Leader calls for a genocide against Jewish people worldwide.
“We must attack every Jew on the face of the planet…How much is a Jews throat worth? 5 sheckles? Or even less, God Willing. All of our people are ready to blow up.”
Speaking of the very successful propaganda campaign, the evidence is all around us, but it always seems to start and gain momentum in a certain demographic. These ‘useful idiot’ terrorist supporters are everywhere and their attitude is hugely toxic and concerning;
”A majority of young Americans said they believe Israel should “be ended and given to Hamas,” according to a shocking poll.
The survey, conducted THIS WEEK by Harvard-Harris polling, found 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”
Only 32% said they believed in a two-state solution, and just 17% said other Arab states should be asked to absorb Palestinian populations.
The figure was in stark contrast to other age groups, which all dramatically preferred a two-state solution. Just 4% of Americans 65 and over said they felt Israel should be ended.
“These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) told The Post. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America,”
100% correct.
It amazes me how virtually all on here realise the covid/mRNA/climate truth wheres most just can’t see the genocide happening in Palestine.
Moral/mental gymnastics at its finest
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Doesn’t DS believe in freedom of speech?
By all means attack the undoubted hypocrisy of these platforms and demand consistency, but let’s try not to encourage micro policing of language
As I’ve said I am naturally sort of pro Israel by instinct but let’s allow both sides to say exactly what they think and allow us to judge for ourselves
Many would disagree with you.
Jon, I am one of your downtickers. You deserve them. Are your views supported by your having ever been to Israel or Gaza or the West Bank. Or is your ill-expressed negativity about Israel through your unquestionably having swallowed the counter-narrative ?
I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent. I learnt in my 20s that the real situation is always orders of magnitude more complex that the press would have you believe and cannot be meaningfully reduced to concepts like Israel = Zionism in the style of football teams.
I don’t claim profound wisdom; I merely cite some level of world experience from an everyday work perspective that I feel has informed me.
There is nothing new in what you say about a lack of balance in every single media outlet regarding the current middle eastern situation. I completely agree with you. It has been thus since my observations from, in my case, working for a year’s project engineering in Belfast working with people on both side of the sectarian divide in ‘the 70’s troubles’. All great people if you detach the baggage-laden layer of historical cultural difference. Concerning more recent emergences such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit Covid, Ukraine Gaza/S Israel, the already tenuous link between media and some version of the truth was completely severed some decades ago. In which case your ire might be better directed against the state controlled propagandists. But I do caution against regressing to a simple binary. I recognise that Israel as a nation and culture exists and has done for many decades and origins go back millenia. As do the Palestinians. I have contacts who I regard as friends in both camps. We agree on the complexity of the problem if not the detail and that as always, emotion and idealism inhibit our natural human desire to make the best future opportunities for our families which means co-operation and resolving ideological differences. War and hatred and conflict are so much simpler, so much easier that no one needs to think and do as we are told by those captured by the evil in all of us who will despicable things and then, monstrously seek to justify them.
Cop out?
Maybe – though my opinion hardly matters. I just seem to see merit in both sides of the debate and think it’s not simple
My point was that I think both sides of the argument should be heard – I mentioned which side of the argument I am half-heartedly on merely because it emphasises that I am not making a partisan point, but one in favour of free expression. My reasons, whatever they may be, for my “instinct”, are not relevant to the point I was making.
The reasons are not relevant to the point I was making. The article is about speech. I think we’ve done the Israel thing to exhaustion for now.
I’m pro Israel. In general I support Jews.
Draw a Venn diagram, 3 circles, Israeli/Jewish beliefs, interests. Palestinian/Moslem beliefs, interests. My/Christian beliefs, interests.
Far more overlap between me/Christian & Israeli/Jewish than with Palestinian/Moslem.
I think most people here are aware of the things you are referring to
I’m not sure you are really in a position to tell me what I am aware of, especially as I’ve just written that I’m aware of the things to which you refer. I may even agree with some of your sentiments but not necessarily all of your conclusions
Yes.
You are tarring all Jews with a brush when like anything it’s a handful of rotten apples. I take ppl as I find them and I think you are the one falling for what you accuse others of.
Interesting DS covers this but never mentioned Facebook (along with twitter, Google etc) and the FBI censoring the hunter biden laptop 2 weeks before an election, claiming it was “Russian disinformation”. Every one of these chancers at the time knew the laptop was real because the FBI had already interviewed the repair guy Hunter had left it with (and not paid).
Perhaps they see this as a moral issue and the other as political. There’s been no coverage to speak of regarding US politics here. I think there’s a resistance among UK intellectuals regarding Trump – Hitchens is always snide about him.
I see a good variety of views on this subject expressed BTL here
Ok, let’s attribute blame for the current situation. You’ve got 100% blame to be spread between Israel & Hamas.
Hamas provoked the Israeli reaction. Hamas could release hostages. Hamas could turn in their murderers.
Israel could now be a bit more careful with their tactics.
I’m laying nearly all the blame Hamas way.
That statement’s not mine.
As ABBA Eban said “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Regardless of what went before, (though what went before, included 1m Jews being expelled from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon in the late 40s, as 250,000 Palestinian Arabs left Israel) Oct 7th was a war crime not an ‘act of war’.
The perpetrators deserve punishment. The kidnapped deserve release. The dead deserve justice.
Hamas indulges in Munchausen by proxy towards the Palestinians who voted them in.
Jon
I’m disappointed in you exchange with NickR and you misattribution of my “I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent”..
Ps you’ve just blown that self congratulary statement of yours out of the water…”
Your arguments will have more credibility if you do some work on their coherence. As I said ” I have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent… ”
You have some way to go to fit my criteria. And I suggest you post only when sober
Ok maybe you will read what I have written, digest it and reply in a considered and probably more sober frame of mind. I stated I had downticked one of your posts; the one your posted “1 hr ago” that I replied to. It might be convenient to you to laugh off dissent with your worldview as “ Some inconvenient historical context fucked (my) head ” but that avoids the real issues why people disagree with your simplistic and binary stance and engage in discussion several levels more nuanced than yours. I leave it with you….
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty. —Likud Party Platform, 1977
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/its-time-to-confront-israels-version-of-from-the-river-to-the-sea/
Yes the inconvenient fact that phrase is originally a Zionist call to imagine a Land for the Jewish people only. A Jewish ethnostate in Judea and Samara.
So was it anti Arab then and anti Semitic now or is it a phrase used by both sides to describe a single unified polity?
Binyamin Netanyahu <a href=”https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics”>has said</a>, concerning Gaza, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”.
To Netanyahu’s religious allies, the commandment to blot out the tribe of Amalek is a mitzvah, a divine obligation, one of the 613 commandments of the Torah (Deuteronomy 25) and held to be in force to the present day.
Outside politics, the only profession Netanyahu has practised is pro-Israeli public relations and lobbying. He is a cheap, shallow man who believes nothing much and practises nothing much, and he supposes that he can use words like these for his own ends. But to insinuate that Palestinians are Amalekites comes at least as close to a call for genocide as anything the leadership of Hamas have said.
Who is happy about systematic murder?
Who here considers Israel “beloved”?
Who here is unaware of Israel ever doing anything wrong?
We’re not stupid.
In many ways it may have been better for everyone had the modern state of Israel not been created as it hasn’t turned out great for anyone, but it was created and here we are. I hope that one day the two sides will reach a way to coexist peacefully, though that sadly seems unlikely.
Never going to happen. Not with this hateful, fanatical attitude towards the Jews. Jihadis and Islamist extremists don’t do tolerance and now we see how the results have been amplified and spread worldwide. The propaganda campaign has been a great success. There will never be peace, as we know it here in Europe, for Israel. Just sporadic ceasefires interspersed between the next inevitable attacks from ‘The Neighbours From Hell’;
”Hamas Leader calls for a genocide against Jewish people worldwide.
“We must attack every Jew on the face of the planet…How much is a Jews throat worth? 5 sheckles? Or even less, God Willing. All of our people are ready to blow up.”
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1734375624679039456
Speaking of the very successful propaganda campaign, the evidence is all around us, but it always seems to start and gain momentum in a certain demographic. These ‘useful idiot’ terrorist supporters are everywhere and their attitude is hugely toxic and concerning;
”A majority of young Americans said they believe Israel should “be ended and given to Hamas,” according to a shocking poll.
The survey, conducted THIS WEEK by Harvard-Harris polling, found 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”
Only 32% said they believed in a two-state solution, and just 17% said other Arab states should be asked to absorb Palestinian populations.
The figure was in stark contrast to other age groups, which all dramatically preferred a two-state solution. Just 4% of Americans 65 and over said they felt Israel should be ended.
“These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) told The Post. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America,”
https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/
Isn’t Zuckerberg Jewish?
100% correct.
It amazes me how virtually all on here realise the covid/mRNA/climate truth wheres most just can’t see the genocide happening in Palestine.
Moral/mental gymnastics at its finest