Fired for tweeting link to anti-semitic video
Hot on the heels of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that hyperlinking can’t be construed as publishing comes further news that Palestinian envoy Linda Sobeh Ali has been ordered home because she’d posted a link on her Twitter page of to anti-semitic video urging people to ‘destroy the Jews’, says Haaretz, going on she’d tweeted a link to a video of a “Palestinian girl shouting a poem in Arabic earlier this month,”
“The video’s English subtitles at one point called on people to join a war against injustice, to raise the flag of Palestine in all the skies of the universe, and to ‘destroy the Jews,’ said “Shimon Fogel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs informed Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird of the link, who deemed it wholly inappropriate and expressed ‘profound disappointment’ to the Palestinian Authority on behalf of Canada”.
“The Palestinian Authority asked her to return home immediately after the Canadian government announced it would limit contact until a suitable replacement for Ali had been selected”, Haaretz states, adding,
“Before leaving Canada, a distraught Sobeh Ali apologized for tweeting the link and shut down her Twitter account. She told CTV that she had not watched the video before linking because she saw the link on her smartphone, and that she would not have posted it had she seen it.
“She also said that the issue had been ‘intentionally magnified’and misinterpreted by ‘certain lobbying groups.’
October 24th, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I apologise for the confusion in this post.
The server is being changed and the Automatic WordPress updates mean an incorrect version has appeared.
I’ll correct it as soon as I can. In the meanwhile, once again I’m sorry. For now, go To the Ha’aretz story For An accurate report on the incident.
October 24th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
Here’s a link to the actual CBC news story that the Haaretz article refers to:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/10/18/palestinian-tweet.html
No surprise, there’s no link given to the YouTube video that sparked this controversy.
The controversy, as is not unusual, seems to be over the precise meaning of an English word (or translation) as used by a non-English speaker.
Let’s not forget the hysteria caused by Iran’s president Ahmadinejad a few years ago when he said that Israel needed to be “wiped off the map” (implying nuclear annilization). Although this was a complete mis-translation — he never said anything even close — the media across America and Europe went wild.
But MEMRI, Israel’s military-officer-run translation service (often accused of making intentionally hawkish mistranslations) had a much more docile translation of that segment:
“This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” quoting the words of Khomeini.
But then Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman has never been shy about making incendiary comments, such as branding Arab-Israeli Members of Parliament as “traitors” that deserved to be killed, or proposing the forced ‘removal’ of all West-Bank Arabs. Unlike this hapless Palestinian diplomat, Lieberman offers no retractions or apologies, and Canada certainly doesn’t request any.
October 24th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
Thanks for the update!
October 25th, 2011 at 12:43 am
Check this funny defamation suit filed w/ the B.C. Supreme court:
Website Shut Down After Defamation Suit
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/10/24/40860.htm
A penny stock promoter claims former Columbia Journalism Review editor Mark Mitchell and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne defamed him in an Internet report that linked him to al Qaeda. A judge ordered the website shut down, The Province newspaper reported.
The court filing (PDF):
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/10/24/BCMoney.pdf
-They claimed that the hosting company is responsible for hosting it, and also responsible for the defamatory statements on their server.
-They claimed GoDaddy is equally responsible for registering the domain name, deepcapture.com
- They name google for having links to the site as well in their search engine. But don’t seem to make a claim against them. But they seem to be suing to have the links removed.
I think they forgot to sue the internet archive and other search engines.
The website appears to have went offline.