Kathy Shaidle
Blogger IsraelyCool and Brian of London call it an emergency:
Palestine Media Watch (PMW) translates and posts videos from the TV Channels of both the official Palestinian Authority (rulled by Fattah) and Hamas TV. They’ve brought to the world such gems as the genocidal bunny rabbit and Farfour the murderous mouse.
Well YouTube have shut them down for hate speech when all they are doing is reporting the hate speech of Islam.
These bloggers have a list of all the “objectionable” videos, and a running list of bloggers who are jumping on this story (like we are here at NewsReal).
My blogger/husband notes that PMW has quickly set up an alternative YouTube account, sans those “offending” videos. We can hope to shame and cajole YouTube into restoring the PMW account, obviously — although I wouldn’t be much of a libertarian conservative if I neglected to add that YouTube is a privately owned company with the right to run their business as they see fit.
HOWEVER: that brings me to the larger problem…
We go through this all the time.
Earlier this year, YouTube pulled Caroline Glick’s pro-Israel parody song “We Con The World,” and threatened the account of Atlas Shrugs’s Pamela Geller.
As I’ve written time and again:
Those who trumpet the advent of YouTube, Google etc as tools that have “permanently changed the media landscape” and will make it easier for right thinking people to get their messages past the legacy media blockade, take note:
These sites are all just tools, privately owned by individuals with fears, weaknesses and a perfectly commendable desire to make money.
These tools belong to people who are not like us and don’t like us in many ways; we must develop our own independent YouTubes and Googles to ensure that developments like these will have minimal impact in the future.
As Mark Steyn observes:
[Companies like YouTube] don’t want to deal with belligerent Muslim lobby groups and similar sorts, and they will inevitably find it easier just to cave to them. Their technological iconoclasm is, alas, all too often accompanied by soft-left squishiness on broader philosophical points such as freedom of expression. I long ago lost count of the number of places, from Toronto Airport to Marriott hotels, that have SteynOnline blocked as a “hate” site.
Oddly enough, jihadist networks calling for death and destruction of western civilization, including the crappy Marriott round the back of the airport, never seem to fall into the “hate” category.
The fact is: we really don’t need yet another site like FrumForum or Glenn Beck’s The Blaze or (and we all love you, Andrew Breitbart) BigHollywood.
What we really need is someone on our side with the capital and fortitude to launch a competitive, viable, technically and ideologically bulletproof video sharing service that will not censor pro-Western sentiments.
(Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury, now entering its 11th year. Her latest book is Acoustic Ladylandkathy shaidle, which Mark Steyn calls “a must-read.”)
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