Wednesday, July 11, 2007

COUNTER-JIHAD SITES
BEING BANNED
IN WORKPLACES AROUND THE U.S.
UPDATED AT BOTTOM


And, they are being banned as "hate speech." Great. Think about that. It is called hate for us to expose the workings of Sharia law which calls for the stoning of gays, and people who make a choice about what religion to follow.

Think about how fucking stupid that is, and then think about the fact that corporations like Fidelity Investments are, apparently, among the group of corporations who have banned our sites:


Banning Jihad Watch
by Robert Spencer
Posted: 07/09/2007

I began getting the emails several days ago: Jihad Watch readers telling me that they had been accustomed to reading the site at work, but now their employer had blocked access to the Jihad Watch site on company computers. Many reported that the ban on Jihad Watch was explained with the assertion that Jihad Watch contained “hate speech."

This was true even in some Federal Government offices.

Jihad Watch was also blocked, readers informed me, on the computers of the State of Connecticut; the City of Chicago; Bank of America; Fidelity Investments; Site Coach; GE IT; JPMorgan Chase; Defense Finance and Accounting Services; Johnson Controls, Inc. IT; Boeing; Tenet Hospitals in North Carolina; Provisio; the Sabre Group TSG; Wachovia bank; and others.

This is an attempt to silence us, as an email from a federal employee made abundantly clear:

I wanted to drop a line about the inability to access JihadWatch at work. I work for the Fed Gov. Three weeks ago, Memri was blocked. Two weeks ago HotAir, which I used to look at on my lunch break for your updates, was blocked. As of Friday, June 29th, JihadWatch was blocked.

I can however, visit CAIR, read anything about Islam, and even get the Arab news.

The censors I deal with are from the Dallas area. It is very easy to see that this censor is not operating according to the proper rules of access. They are operating by their political beliefs (or hopes.) It is unfortunate that these people block the very information that we need in these times....

Obviously this is a decision made in some central location, with impact within all these different places -- but I am not certain of the source of it. I have contacted a web filter service to which several of these organizations apparently subscribe and which therefore may have initiated this general ban, but have not heard back yet.

In any case, the matter of most concern in this is the likelihood that the decision was made to ban Jihad Watch was political. If it were merely a matter of filtering out controversial material, sites that treat some of the same material from a different perspective -- particularly pro-jihad sites -- would also have been banned. But they evidently have not been.


Jihad Watch is dedicated to the defense of human rights for all against those who would impose Islamic law, with its institutionalized discrimination against women and religious minorities. There is no “hatred" in this, except when we report the words of hatred and supremacism of the Islamic jihadists.

We are trying to raise awareness of the nature, extent, and goals of the global jihad, which threatens everyone who loves and cherishes freedom and the equality of rights of all people before the law.

However, to tar such initiatives as “hatred" is a tried and true tactic of the Left. Intellectually bankrupt, they can't answer us, so they try to shut us up and discredit us.

The Internet, for all its faults, has delivered the coup de grace to the control the PC media have long had on the news. Neither liberal or conservative news outlets dare to face the truth about the global jihad in any thoroughgoing or realistic way, but you can get it at Jihad Watch. And so, we are going to fight this.

We're establishing a mirror site for Jihad Watch, and will continue to try to get the ban reversed -- and in the process, hope to draw attention also to the politicization of Net filtering companies. We are not going to take lying down being vilified and silenced, when we are telling the truth.


Be scared, my friends. Be very scared. And, things are only likely to get worse.

At IBA, I have long thought that this kind of shit was coming down the pike, and I have plans in the works for what to do, were we to be taken down. I have already established several alternative IBA's.

The problem, though, is getting the word out.

The fact is, IBA did go offline for a period of time, but I believe that was not due to oppression, but instead, it was due to a Google glitch.

In the three months or so that we were down, we lost 75% of our audience. In the month and a half we have been back, we've doubled our audience.

Word is getting out, but it doesn't happen that fast, without big time promotion, which I simply don't have the time or resources for.

Anyway, we need to heed this event as a warning, because I believe it is our future. How will we deal with this?

UPDATE

Quan Tranh writes in with some important advice:

We need to make an effort to inform Websense and Surf Control (the two largest companies that make web blocking software)that Jihad Watch, IBA, and others are news sites not "hate", or "racist" sites. What is happening is people write these companies and tell them they believe a certain URL should be filed under a specific category.

I'm willing to bet that this is an automated process and nobody really checks the sites, much like You Tube accepts a certain number of "inappropriate" flags before the video is automatically removed.

We should also fight fire with fire by reporting jihad sites to these companies. http://haganah.org.il/ keeps a close eye on Internet Jihad. Not that many companies in Pakistan use Websense, but we shouldn't take this lying down.

5 comments:

Michael Travis said...

At the America's Truth Forum symposium on Islamic Terrorism (Las Vegas-11 Nov.2006)we were all nervous about the lawsuits against Ehrenfeld and Williams. There was an informal consensus that either Bob (Spencer) or Joe (Kaufman) would soon become the real target of Islam's rage.

If Robert Spencer was not so consistently excellent, the dark forces of American Jihad and Dhimmitude would have left him alone.

Anonymous said...

We need to make an effort to inform Websense and Surf Control (the two largest companies that make web blocking software)that Jihad Watch, IBA, and others are news sites not "hate", or "racist" sites. What is happening is people write these companies and tell them they believe a certain URL should be filed under a specific category. I'm willing to bet that this is an automated process and nobody really checks the sites, much like You Tube accepts a certain number of "inappropriate" flags before the video is automatically removed.

We should also fight fire with fire by reporting jihad sites to these companies. http://haganah.org.il/ keeps a close eye on Internet Jihad. Not that many companies in Pakistan use Websense, but we shouldn't take this lying down.

Anonymous said...

I didn't realize that this blog was banned too. I wonder how many of the lesser-known blogs are affected.

Pastorius said...

We weren't banned, that I know of. We were, however, taken down by a glitch for three months.

It was a problem with Google.

Anonymous said...

This is a bug bear of mine.

In the instance of these sites being banned, it may not be for the content of the site, more the comments that they carry from anonymous posters.

For instance Jihadwatch is a place where people in the comments section discuss the merits of Nuking Mecca, this isn't helpful conversation and often disppears into hate speech.

Either moderate comments aggressively or ban comments before complaining about being banned for hate speech.

TFI