“What’s a Kos?”: Write about Palestine & get libeled & banned
Last night I had been complaining bitterly to a friend because I had written a diary entry on the Daily Kos regarding injustice in Palestine and had gotten brutally libeled and then banned as a result.
“How come it’s completely acceptable to write diaries on the Kos regarding injustice in America and everywhere else in the world — but if you write about injustices happening in Palestine, you get libeled and banned.”
My friend just looked at me in confusion. “What’s a Kos?” he replied.
Well that certainly put things into perspective.
“The Daily Kos is a liberal internet website with over a million readers. It’s famous.”
“Never heard of it,” said my friend. Whew.
PS: Here’s a link to that diary entry that got me banned: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/26/913726/-Palestinethe-Daily-Kos:-Dog-whistles-Or-Google-Alerts. Scroll down and read some of the libelous comments attached to it if you want an instructive lesson on why requesting justice in Palestine may be very detrimental to your health. I get called crazy, nutty, silly, a conspiracy theorist, antisemitic, a piece of [dookie], hateful, whacked-out, loony, unhinged, etc. And someone even accused me of having twigs in my hair. Twigs in my hair? What kind of intellectual rebuttal is that?
These are the kind of almost-scary sleazy comments about me that I get all the time from various sleazy right-wing bloggers. But I certainly didn’t expect anything like this kind of nastiness to be dumped over my head by the readers of the Daily Kos, purported to be a liberal blog with excellent progressive creds.
The Kos even has a weekly column that relates some of the libelous wingnut comments that have been sent to its editor. Perhaps the Kos might consider putting some of its own readers’ libelous comments about me in that column.
And why didn’t the Kos ban some of its more offensive commenters — instead of just banning ME?
PPS: Here’s a quote from an article from the New York Times entitled “Smothered by Settlements,” regarding injustice in Palestine. How come the Times gets to write about injustice in Palestine without getting libeled or banned — but I don’t!
“….The only way to save the two-state solution is for the Palestinians to declare the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, and to demand that the world community recognize it and its borders — as it did in the case of Kosovo.
“That would also mean supporting the right of Palestinians to struggle nonviolently to end the occupation of their state. Any future negotiations, therefore, would not be about the right of the Palestinians to have their own sovereign independent state, but rather about how to apply and implement that right.
This would be the true test of the state-building strategy of the United States and the donor community. It would be the real instrument to finally demarcate the difference between support for free Palestinian institutions in a sovereign and viable state, or footing the bill of occupation and using E.U. and U.S. tax dollars to maintain under various guises what will never amount to anything but an apartheid system denying Palestinians their human and national rights.
“If the world community turns its back on such a declaration of independence by using the well-worn and insulting argument that every step should first be verified with the Israeli government, then the message will be clear: Peace based on two states is no longer an option.”http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/opinion/15iht-edbarghouti.html?_r=1&ref=global
PPPS: Here’s what Reuters reports regarding injustice in Palestine. Now we need to ban Reuters too?
“A senior U.N. official condemned attacks by Jewish ‘settler extremists’ on Palestinians’ olive trees in the occupied West Bank and called on Israel to ‘combat violence and terror by Israelis.’ Robert Serry, U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, also said he was alarmed that work had started on hundreds of new homes for settlers in the occupied territory since the end of Israel’s settlement freeze last month.
“Serry was speaking to journalists on Tuesday while olive-picking with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the village of Tormos Ayya north of Ramallah. He said settlers had destroyed hundreds of trees in the village in recent weeks. Palestinians began harvesting olives across the West Bank this month. ‘I am appalled at acts of destruction of olive trees and farmlands, desecration of mosques and violence against civilians,’ Serry said. http://alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE69P1NK.htm
(Photo is of one of the highly-recommended protective measures you might consider taking if you are planning to write on the Kos regarding injustice in Palestine.)
Connect the Dots: Here’s How We Became the ’99 Percent’
…and some things we can do to change it.
Deregulation enacted by Republicans and conservative Democrats, and an unprecedented Supreme Court decision allowing corporations the free speech the Founders intended only for flesh-and-blood human beings, led to the majority of Americans steadily sinking economically, as the nation’s wealth flowed to the top. Here are some simple demands to reverse this lethal course, along with a few suggestions of my own following the highlighted portion.
Here are my suggestions:
– End the corporate charter of any corporation that repeatedly or recklessly does harm to their customers or the environment.
– Revamp the rules regarding the appointment of boards of directors to corporations, making shareholder meetings more convenient to attend, or hold them online, and streamline voting procedures so that shareholders can more easily vote on the compensation packages of top executives and who will serve on the corporate board.
– End the practice of buying stock ‘on margin.’ (In other words, you must prove you have the money to pay for any stock you are buying.)
– Stricter enforcement of SEC regulations.
– Tax companies that outsource jobs or other assets overseas at a rate that will remove the profit in doing so.
– Tax offshored assets at the same rate domestic profits are taxed.
– Hold top executives responsible for a corporation’s criminal acts in the same way an individual American would be held responsible. (Example: If an executive approves a heart drug that his company’s internal studies say induces heart attacks, he or she would be as criminally liable as an individual who knowingly provided another person with a drug that caused a heart attack.)
– No corporation that sells equipment or electronics to the government will retain the right to secret proprietary codes or other information on their products.
– Finally, of course, we have to ban corporations from lobbying our government officials and limit the money spent in our elections.
But these suggestions are only a start; perhaps we should rethink the whole concept of the corporation as an entity for doing business as they have now become Too Big to Fail behemoths that threaten our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and our form of government, and many continue to exist only through taxpayer bailouts. As Ambrose Bierce put it more than a hundred years ago: “Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” It’s time we brought back responsibility to the marketplace.
Watch the video here.
Here’s a simplified version of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Economic Bill of Rights, proposed in 1944, which, if enacted, would solve a great many of our problems: