Is Arafat allowed to be criticized on here - this article is crosspost so am deleting

by Raymond McInerney Wed Sep 25, 2002 22:08

Ya

by Blisset Wed Sep 25, 2002 22:11

But spamming with articles that leave out balance and compare the Palestinians to Nazis will be roundly criticised because the Irish in General (despite the quietude of the government) see the situation in Israel as colonialism gone mad, bad and dangerous.

Hitler had plans for the Irish people which you will find in Mien Kampf. The plans sound much like Sharons 'facts on the ground' in Palestine if you care to read and research them. Maybe I'll quote them after any other articles you publish. I'm staying up late too so I think u would be better off going somewhere else because your arguments are propaganda and we do not like propaganda around here.

by Daithi Wed Sep 25, 2002 22:44

But propaganda is welcome if it's not spam or crosspost. Propaganda is just someone else's radical, passionate and accurate telling of truth. There are no idealogical boundaries to that epithet.

Indymedia does not oppose anyone criticising Arafat or any other public figure and I would encourage whoever posted this piece not to go some place else, but to actually write their own argument rather than post whatever they pick up in their email or copy off another website. It's not the content that's being objected too but the total lack of invention and originality and creativity.

So if the poster here, if they are not one of our regular spam merchants, would like to use their own mind rather than their Copy command, and follows editorial guidelines, I assert to them that no matter how anti-Arafat or even pro-Sharon that their article is, it should not be interfered with.

by D Thu Sep 26, 2002 03:19

Oh I didn't doubt you at all :-) just making the hypothetical point that those who are a blight on the site with their lack of imagination and intelligence are are actually doing their own cause great harm, by appearing not to have anything more than rote arguments. If all sides in the Mid East dispute could stop trying to drown the world in rehashed form stage pieces something might come of all this talk...

by Bored - Bored HQ Thu Sep 26, 2002 09:13

just a thought. but the Zionist sympathy-gaining lobby never lets up; at least Finkelstein speaks out against it ! Fact is, Israel managed to monoploise the sympathy for nthe 1930s. The people of the USSR sufferd just as much (and in comparable quanitities) but oddly, they were never extended the same sympahy as was Israel...

by Bored - Bored HQ Thu Sep 26, 2002 09:19

what do you mean by "balance ?" it sounds good, but in fact it has very little to do with accurate, honest reporting. The BBC is very good at "balance" and in practice it turns out to be a very sophsitcated form of propaganda. The tendency is to balance out perceptive criticism with opinionated hyperbole. Please think more carefully about these presumed categories.
I personally freely admit to being unbalanced !

by o as if Thu Sep 26, 2002 12:03

yes but we are building constructive and occasionally eccentric debate between sincere contributors.
that means suffering a bit of spam.
nice if its spam-art.
but at the end it is HEART AND MIND
SHALOM = SALEEM
solidarity with all victims of
THE TERROR.
it has no flag.
but it wears unifoms