[Maybe that why Dr. Tom Sunic, Dr. Kevin Macdonald, myself and a number of other nationalists who were all purged from Twitter in April have not been reinstated. CAFE retained a lawyer but we’ve had no explanation or satisfaction. As Andrew Torba explains, sadly Elon Musk succumbed to the ADL cenrsors.]
Over the past few days a grassroots campaign popped up on X calling for the platform to ban the ADL. The campaign, united around the hashtag #BantheADL, has been trending on the platform for days with hundreds of thousands of posts.
This campaign comes after the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, made a post gloating about his organization’s sheer power to control the platform that Elon Musk purchased for tens of billions of dollars last year. Although the #BantheADL campaign effectively highlighted the significant influence the ADL holds in regulating the flow of information online, it is essential to delve into the reasons why Elon Musk cannot remove the ADL from the platform or hinder their effective management of his company, even if he were inclined to do so.
First we have to understand a bit of the context for how a platform like X actually works and is able to exist on the internet along with the inside baseball of how the ADL flexes its power to control massive corporations without owning a single share.
X is built on the rails of multiple third-party services including, but not limited to the Google Cloud infrastructure among others. X has had a partnership with Google Cloud since 2018, and Bloomberg reports that this collaboration has incurred annual expenses ranging from $200 million to $300 million for the company. Jonathan Greenblatt has openly bragged about the ADL’s partnership with Google, YouTube, Facebook, and X, going so far as to change the algorithms of these companies to meet their demands.
With one phone call to Google the ADL can cripple X. If Google pulls the plug on the cloud hosting deal massive parts of X’s critical infrastructure will be down for a long time, possibly the entire platform would be taken offline with one click. We saw this happen in 2020 with Parler when Amazon AWS pulled the plug and the platform was taken offline. They were never able to fully recover and recently shut the platform down completely after it sold to a third-party.
Going after the cloud hosting providers is just the start for the ADL’s ability to utterly destroy X. Next come the app store bans. With that same phone call to Google the ADL could easily highlight the hundreds of thousands of “antisemitic” posts on the platform and point the the #BantheADL posts as their prime example. Don’t put it past them. They likely have multiple studies going on behind the scenes tracking the “rise in hate” on the platform since Elon took over and will use this to present their case.
Without critical infrastructure and the app stores X would be in serious trouble, but Elon may be able to pull off a miracle and keep the platform online. Next come the advertisers. The ADL has close connections with all of the top Fortune 500 companies and will use their mafia-style power to get these companies to pull their ad dollars from X. This has already been going on since the moment Elon took over the platform. X is operating in a cash flow negative situation and reports claim that ad revenue has fallen by a dramatic 50% since Elon took over.
That’s only the beginning. Next the ADL will contact the sitting members of Congress and the Biden White House. We’ll see Elon be summoned to testify in Congress about the rise in “misinformation” and “hate” on the platform since he took over.
Elon is in a unique position because he’s not only running X. He’s also running several other companies including SpaceX and Tesla, both of which require him to appease the Regime and stay within their favor. The ADL can and will go after not only X, but all of Elon’s companies. It’s no coincidence that the CEO of X is having meetings with the ADL just days after the DOJ announced that they were suing SpaceX.
How do I know all of this? Because I lived it–and survived it by the grace of God.
The ADL has been attacking Gab and me for many years. Their smear campaigns against us successfully lobbied dozens of third-party services to deplatform us and cripple our infrastructure. Despite all of their efforts this didn’t stop us. We were able to rebuild our own servers, payment processing, and so much more in order to keep Gab online. It took many years and it wasn’t easy, but we are still standing.
The ADL has also come after me personally. They pay Google to promote their smear articles about me to the top of search results. They lobbied the DOJ to investigate me after January 6th, even though I wasn’t even in attendance. Jonathan Greenblatt went on national television and called me “one of the most toxic people in public life” effectively painting a target on my back.
None of this stopped me.
I don’t fear the ADL. I don’t answer to the ADL. I fear and answer only to God almighty.
The ADL has NO POWER over Gab which is why they hate us. It’s that simple. There is absolutely nothing they can say or do to get us to censor opinions they don’t like and it’s going to stay that way.
Elon has a choice. He can continue to allow this disgusting organization to run his company by proxy without his approval or he can fight back, take a stand like Gab has, and face the consequences head on. He can continue to have his CEO take groveling phone calls and enforce the ADL’s strategy of freedom of speech but not freedom of reach or he can tell them to pound sand. If he can’t run his own business without permission from some ghoulish vampire at the ADL there’s no sense in running a business at all.
For me it was an easy decision.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
There have recently been a number of incidents that would be of interest if one has concerns about the sorry state of free speech in Europe and the United States, the so-called “democracies” who tend to boast about their freedoms and the rights of their citizens. The chosen weapon in the US and elsewhere in the Anglo-sphere has been the designation “hate speech” which also covers “hate writing,” “possessing hate literature or films,” and even “hate thinking.” In Europe, where “hate speech” is often referred to using the English words, the expression is often preceded by the word “illegal” to make sure that the point about consequences is made and the potential penalty is clearly understood. Some Europeans have in fact been convicted and sent to prison when they have falsely believed they were exercising free speech.
Though the “hate” designation was originally coined to discourage racist language and other forms of expression it has increasingly been exploited by Israel and its associated Jewish support groups to criminalize any criticism of Israel or of Jewish group behavior. It has extended its reach by moving into subsets, notably “holocaust denial” and “antisemitism” which are also regarded ipso facto as hate crimes in a context in which Jews are always regarded as victims, never as perpetrators of violence.
Much of what is going on might be described in fairly simple terms: Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its unprovoked lethal attacks on its neighbors might reasonably be described as “deplorable” or even genocidal in the case of the Palestinians. Beyond that, Israel, which pretends to be a democracy, operates a system of control over the Christian and Muslim minority within its own borders and also in the area it illegally occupies that is describable as “apartheid,” where the minority is compelled to accept limited resources and consistently harsh treatment from the dominant Jewish population. More to the point, the extremist government coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the situation even worse for those non-Jews that it controls, with talk of introducing mass expulsions and imprisonments. The death toll of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces has also been going up, with more than 150 Palestinians killed this year, including 26 children.
To be sure, Israel has become a home for Jews that can no longer tolerate anyone else. Some ministers in the new government are particularly vile in their views but it is to be assumed that Netanyahu and others in his administration are genuinely supportive of turning Israel into a truly and even exclusively Jewish state, which is in fact how it legally defines itself. The one minister most cited for his cruelty and racism is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for support of a Jewish terrorist group. He is a former supporter of the now deceased right wing fanatic Meir Kahane, and, like Kahane, envisions an Israel that is as Palestinian free as possible and centered exclusively on Jewish interests. He has called for deporting Arabs who aren’t loyal to a Jewish Israel, annexing all of the West Bank and exercising full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the Muslim venerated Al-Aqsa mosque is located. He supports legislation defying international agreements to “divide” the Al-Aqsa site to permit regular Jewish worshippers and there have even been suggestions that the Israeli government will seek to rebuild the so-called Biblical Second Temple, destroyed in the First Century by the Romans, in that location.
Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He has led marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns and has even brought settlers and other extremists to the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and to interrupt Friday prayers. To cap the irony, he has been since November 2022 the National Security Minister, which gives him authority over the police, to include the so-called Border Police as well as the police forces located on the illegally occupied West Bank. Indeed, as a practical matter, Ben-Gvir is seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians. He has also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.
Another extremist who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He demands a state judiciary that relies only on Torah and Jewish traditional law. Accused of inciting hatred against Arab Israelis, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, that “it’s a mistake that David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw all of you out in 1948.”
The increasing brutality of the Israeli government and its security forces have produced a reaction among many observers worldwide, so the supporters of Israel have engaged in their own first strike frequently using the “hate crime” weapon. They have basically turned the hate crime legislation to their advantage by convincing many nations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of the “hate crime” antisemitism to automatically include criticism of Israel as being equivalent to hatred of Jews. When that doesn’t work the powerful Israel lobby can also resort to much more brutal threats. When Iceland sought to make illegal infant circumcision five years ago, regarding it as genital mutilation performed on an unconsenting child, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) threatened to unleash Jewish power to destroy their economy and international reputation as punishment for making their country “inhospitable to Jews.”
Now that the “hate crime” genie together with the associated links to holocaust denial and antisemitism have been released from the bottle, they are being used regularly to silence anyone who even indirectly criticizes prominent Jews like George Soros. Conservatives including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have recently been on the receiving end of the antisemitism label after referring to Soros and his “Globalist” agenda. It is my belief that Tucker was fired at least in part due to Jewish pressure on FOX as he had been very critical of groups like the hysterical ADL and its hideous director Jonathan Greenblatt.
Roger Waters, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd, has emerged as a powerful critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As a consequence, he has been hounded by authorities in Europe, has had his concerts canceled, and has been threatened with legal action to make him shut up. The Biden Administration’s antisemitism Czar Deborah Lipstadt has also attacked him, saying “I wholeheartedly concur with [an online] condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.” She was referring to a tweet stating that “I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis. In Germany. Enough is enough. Holocaust trivialization is criminalized across the EU.” The State Department, speaking for the White House, then piled on adding that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust… The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”
One might observe that the depiction of Waters is basically untrue – he is a critic of Israeli crimes against humanity but does not hate Jews. One might also add how the fact that the United States State Department actually has a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism speaks for itself and tells you exactly who is in charge in Washington. I wonder how much it costs to run Lipstadt’s mouth from a no doubt well-appointed office in Foggy Bottom each year? Maybe someone should do a cost/benefit analysis and give Debbie her walking papers.
Beyond that, several other recent stories show how it all often works in practice to confront and silence critics. Swedish pop star Zara Larsson is facing what is obviously a coordinated backlash on social media after criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In an Instagram message to her 6.3 million followers, the 23-year-old declared the ongoing cross-border violence, which is killing mostly Arabs, was a “crime” against Palestinians. Her effort to be somewhat even handed was ignored, in the message, which she later deleted, where she wrote “We have to stand up for Jewish people all over the world facing anti-Semitic violence and threats, but we must also call out a state upholding apartheid and KILLING civilians, funded by American dollars.” She ended the message with the hashtag “#freepalestine.”
Larsson was hardly calling for targeting Jews or anything like that, but the reaction to her comment was symptomatic of the typical overkill response engaged in by Israel and its friends whenever anyone challenges the standard narrative of Israeli perpetual victimhood. Two other instances of comments about Israel leading to an overwhelming response to punish the perpetrators took place during the past month in the United States at college commencement ceremonies. The first was on May 12th, at a graduation ceremony for the law school of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Queens native who was selected by the graduating 2023 class to speak during the May 12 ceremony, praised CUNY for supporting student activism, citing in particular the acceptance of student groups protesting against Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians. She said “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young and even attacking funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinians homes and businesses. As it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes. Silence is no longer acceptable.”
The response to Mohammed was immediate, including a scathing news report in the New York Post, a call by several Jewish groups to cut funding to CUNY and demands that the law school dean be fired. And the controversy again made news when a second student spoke out at a commencement at El Camino community college in Torrance California. Jana Abulaban, 18, strongly criticized Israeli government policies during her speech on June 9th.
Abulaban, who was born in Jordan in a family of Palestinian refugees, reportedly felt “inspired” by the speech of Fatima Mousa Mohammed and she told the audience “I gift my graduation to all Palestinians who have lost their life and those who continue to lose their lives every day due to the oppressive apartheid state of Israel killing and torturing Palestinians as we speak.’’
There was, of course an immediate reaction to the Abulaban speech coming from a variety of West Coast and New York pro-Israel sources. Brooke Goldstein, a claimed human-rights lawyer founder of The Lawfare Project, said, “This is yet one more example of the systemic Jew-hatred we’re seeing on our college campuses. When a student gives a commencement speech targeting Jews, trafficking in modern tropes of antisemitism, it’s clear that there has been a complete failure in that school to promote social justice for the Jewish people. If any other minority group were targeted like this, there would be consequences for the bigot. The Jewish community deserves no less.”
Of course, both women only spoke the truth about what is happening in the Middle East. Neither attacked the Jewish religion or Jews per se and only criticized Israel’s appalling behavior. When I last checked, Israel was a foreign country with both foreign and domestic policies that are considered very questionable by most of the world, so why should it be protected from being challenged in the United States? The two women were brave to speak up as they did, surely knowing that they would be targeted by the Jewish state’s many friends and supporters. Those of us who continue to speak out on Israel’s genocidal policies can likewise expect no less, particularly as both the federal as well as many state governments and also the media are now on a witch hunt directed against those who seek to speak the truth. But we must persevere. As Fatima Mousa Mohammed put it, “Silence is no longer acceptable.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
CEO of social media platform nixes Trust and Safety Council amid spike in extremist content
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk disbanded an advisory panel set up in 2016 to address hate speech and other harmful content on the social media platform.
However, since the tech billionaire bought Twitter in a $44 billion purchase he has reinstated the account of former U.S. president Donald Trump among some 62,000 accounts brought back online. Musk also suspended the account of antisemitic rapper Kanye West.
Three Council members resigned last week, stating in an open letter that “the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline” despite claims to the contrary by Musk. The three members who left are Eirliani Abdul Rahman, Anne Collier and Lesley Podesta.
The Council consisted of volunteers who served as advisers with no governing or decision-making authority.
“ADL (Anti-Defamation League) was an active member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council because we strongly believed that social media companies should learn from the best practices of civil society and those communities most affected by hate, harassment, and extremism online on how to best address these issues,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
“It is disappointing that the Council was dissolved because it’s members had valuable insights about how to make their platform a safer place for all users,” Greenblatt added.
Arik Segal, an expert on online conflicts such as hate speech and fake news, told i24NEWS that the Council was ineffective and that this was done on purpose.
“The big tech companies have this method to counter public outcry about all the troubles that they create online like fake news,” said the professor, who teaches at Israel’s Reichman and Bar Ilan universities. “They create this kind of council that doesn’t really do anything but at least they can say that there is a council. I don’t think it was meaningful [and its disbanding] won’t mean anything.”
Antisemitic posts spiked more than 61 percent in the first two weeks that Musk took control of the company, according to online hate monitors. The Network Contagion Research Institute said in early November that terms associated with Jewish people were being tweeted more than 5,000 times per hour and that antisemitic tweets were receiving the most engagement from users.
“The things that are much more troublesome with [Musk’s] behavior are the fact that he allowed those who were blocked on Twitter to be pardoned,” Segal said, expressing concern that Musk’s call on Sunday to prosecute U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci could give rise to more conspiracy theories on the extreme end of free speech.
Segal said that more structured or organizational antisemitism could be more of a problem, citing the BDS movement as an example.
“If it’s more structured antisemitism or influencer antisemitism and hate content on Twitter, that could disseminate to other platforms,” Segal warned. “The problem with the other platforms is the echo chambers — especially WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups — and those people actually go and do something about that.”
ADL Demands that Elon Musk Remove “Denizens of Hell”
Jonathan Greenblatt heads ADL, a militantly anti-free speech lobby. On CNN, today he demanded that Elon Musk remove “the denizens of hell”; that is, nationalists and critics of Jews. Get this straight: Groups like ADL &, in Canada, the Canada Israel Affairs Committee are the worst enemies of free speech.
Jews
Target Free Expression in Fight Over ‘Hate Speech’
The tyrannical assault on the First Amendment and freedom of
speech, thought, and inquiry has reached a whole new level, as establishment
spokesmen and media outlets openly advance the notion that America needs
“hate speech” laws.
In a recently published op-ed in The Washington Post, Richard Stengel, a former high-ranking
State Department official under President Barack Obama and a former editor
of Time magazine,
argued that the United States should consider enacting “hate speech” laws
similar to the tyrannical laws in many European countries that criminalize such
things as “Holocaust denial” and “incitement of racial and religious hatred.”
These types of laws have effectively been used to persecute and punish any
individual investigating complex and disputed aspects of history, particularly
relating to WWII, as well as those who criticize massive Third
World immigration into the West, refugee resettlement, globalism
more generally, and other politically incorrect topics.
“All speech is not equal,” Stengel hypocritically argues in his
op-ed. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m
all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate.”
The very concept of “hate speech,” long promoted by
organizations such as the ADL and SPLC, essentially amounts to any criticism of
any aspect of the New World Order agenda and the forces behind it. Freedom of
speech, thought, and historical and scientific inquiry, bedrocks of the
American political tradition specifically and Western civilization more
generally, have increasingly been undermined and eroded by private entities
such as Google, YouTube, and Twitter that censor and punish dissenting opinions
on their platforms. Individuals expressing politically incorrect opinions also
increasingly face the risk of becoming targets of radical leftwing
organizations and activists, such as Antifa, that work tirelessly to publicly
shame and expose “thought criminals,” often leading to social ostracization and
loss of employment.
With establishment figures openly pushing for “hate speech”
laws, the Senate and House have both established Bipartisan Task Forces for
Combating Anti-Semitism, an initiative lobbied for by the Zionist lobby
dominating Capitol Hill in an effort to punish those who criticize Israel and the
pro-Zionist policies promoted by the D.C. establishment. Jonathan Greenblatt,
the CEO of the ADL, praised the recently established task force, arguing that
“we must all come together to fight the rise in anti-Semitism that threatens
communities everywhere.”
Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress,
likewise has called for more laws to combat anti-Semitism, especially online
anti-Semitism.
“After three decades, anti-Semitism has now reared its head,”
Lauder said in part during the recently concluded Second World Jewish Congress
International Meeting of Special Envoys and Coordinators for Combating
Anti-Semitism. “We want laws that really mean something.”
Of course, to them, anti-Semitism is not just about racism
against Jewish people. It includes criticism of Israel as a way to muzzle
opposition to that country’s policies.
Additionally, local and federal officials have even launched
investigations into harmless flyers simply declaring “It’s OK to be White” at
various universities across the country in an effort to determine if those
responsible for posting the flyers committed a “hate crime.”
At Oklahoma City University School of Law, investigators are
searching for the man who posted the flyers “to determine his intent and
whether the actions are a hate crime,” according to a local ABC affiliate in Oklahoma. Similar flyers
were posted on the campus of Western
Connecticut State
University recently,
prompting an official investigation by local and state police as well as the
FBI. University President John Clark described the posting of the flyers as “an
attack on our university community” and assured students that his office is
“making every effort to see that those responsible are caught and properly punished.”
The trouble is, even if the posters of these flyers only
intended to state the obvious in protest of the vilification of white people
especially on college campuses and never intended violence, it wouldn’t matter
to leftists. Once their identities are exposed, they will be harassed,
threatened, fired from their jobs, and likely driven from society all because
they had the audacity to try to push back against the establishment today.
NB: This article was originally published by American
Free Press on November 25, 2019. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!
