
It looks like the militant pro-Israel crowd may be engaging in hijinks against one of our intrepid progressive Jewish bloggers, Jerry Haber at The Magnes Zionist. When he attempted to write a new post today he was informed that his blog had been frozen as a potential splog (spam blog). Of course, Magnes Zionist is far from a splog. In fact, Jerry provides a unique perspective on the Israeli-Arab conflict as a liberal Orthodox Jew and academic.
It is an absolute travesty that Blogger has taken this unjustified action against Jerry. And this is an insult not just to him, but to all of his readers and the rest of us who rely on him as a unique voice in the Israeli-Palestinian online debate.
Jerry has a hunch that one of the right-wing pro-Israel trolls who frequent the web has reported him to Blogger and caused him to be shut down:
Not to be paranoid, but I think that my blog is the victim of the sort of electronic warfare that so-called Israel advocates take part in.
Considering the content of his latest post about a settler Goon who accompanied Jerry’s latest tour of Hebron’s settler Gan Eden (“paradise”), it’s highly credible that such a person could’ve engaged in such behavior. The GIYUS/settler crowd probably finds such tactics entirely kosher in the war on behalf of their God-given right to occupy Palestinian land and single-handedly (well, almost single-handedly) prevent resolution of the I-P conflict.
If you blog, please consider publicizing Jerry’s tsouris. If you have a Blogger blog consider that something like this could happen to you. Find ways to publicize Blogger’s egregious conduct. You can use this link to complain about Jerry’s treatment and demand reinstatement of his blog. Even if you can’t help directly, visit Jerry’s site and send him encouragement.
He has set up a temporary Blogger blog that he can update (until the goons report this one as well). I will update you about Blogger’s response to Jerry’s appeal for reinstatement of his blog. Meanwhile, I’m encouraging him to shift to a different platform like WordPress.com where narischkeit like this won’t happen.
When I first started a blog on blogger, the bots detected it as spam within a week. I got an automated message saying that if I replied or something, they’d know it was a real person running the blog and restore it within 48 hours. About a week later, I recceived another automatic notification to the effect that my blog had been restored. But it hadn’t. I never managed to contact anyone and eventually moved to another host. My ‘current’ blog has not experienced any problems.
My blog, Jews sans frontieres, Antizionism vs antisemitism, and many other explicitly antizionist blogs survive on blogger. While I certainly wouldn’t rule out deliberate interference, under the circumstances I’m inclined to suspect a glitch in their system. That’s not necessarily good news. In my case, it was never rectified. If it does result from a complaint, there’s always the prospect of redress, I suppose.
Jerry’s blog has been unlocked by Blogger.
Yesterday when I was visiting some of my favorite bloggers, many of them were having the same trouble as Jerry Haber. Funny thing is, their politics and views are the opposite of Jerry’s. I guess you completely erred when jumping on the ‘blame the bad Jews’ bandwagon. Will we be seeing an apology in the near future? I bet not.
This is not the first time and will not be the last time that bloggger or blogspot site has been frozen, allegedly by a robot for alleged spam!! Many bloggers’ blogsites by have been frozen by google, not once but repeatedly ( one of them being my friend). Some of the boggers quit and formed their independent website e.g. Palestine Think Tank. Yes, some bloggers are allowed to function without interference but it is just a matter of time when something written in the blog will upset someone at google and the site will be frozen.
@Sarah: I didn’t “blame the bad Jews” I blamed the settler extremists. If they are Jews they are a grotesque caricature of them.
Jerry Haber believes they likely had a hand in his blog’s being locked. I don’t disagree w. him. Unless you can prove otherwise, I trust Jerry’s view on this a little more than yours, thank you.
Sarah is right – the splog problem was technical, not content-related:
http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/08/you-are-not-spam.html
Yet another reason not to choose Blogger as a blogging platform. I was particularly tickled by this statement from Blogger:
“Except when we have one of our many technical meltdowns which prevents you from ‘owning or controlling your own posts.'”