11 December 2018

A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH – Twitter Restores Tony Greenstein’s Suspended Account

Malicious Zionist Complaint of ‘Anti-Semitism’ by Jack Mendel of Jewish News has been Rejected by Twitter




Twitter's standard response to my initial appeals

On November 17th there was a message on my Twitter account informing me that my account had been suspended for ‘hateful conduct’.  It quickly became apparent that a complaint had been made by a ‘journalist’ Jack Mendel @mendelpol of Jewish News. 
I immediately posted an article and followed it up with another article a few days later. Mendel openly boasted of his cowardly deed stating
I reported Greenstein for repeatedly sending me messages filled with hate, including using far right ‘Zio’ term, and various comparisons of Jews and Israel to nazism.

 fake journalist Jack Mendel knows no shame
Jack Mendel was and is a liar. Far from me contacting him it was the other way around.  I was responding to him and his friends. Nothing I said had anything to do with hate.  I don’t do hate nor do I hate this ‘so-called journalist’ (his description not mine) who, unable to engage in the cut and thrust of political debate, reached for Twitter's censor. However I have nothing but contempt for a 'journalist' who attempts to close down free speech. All under the guise of opposing ‘hate speech’ no less. What I hate is racism and Zionism.
Twitter's standard response
The facts are quite simple. The Jewish Leadership Council, an unelected Zionist group tweeted three times its support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which was supposedly in response to the firing of firecrackers (‘rockets’). To the JLC and its faithful lapdog Mendel, Israel was reacting to Hamas’s firing. In actual fact Hamas was reacting to a botched operation in Gaza by an undercover Israeli military squad that went wrong.  Botched Israeli Operation in Gaza Endangers Human Rights Groups. Israel’s undercover squad posed as aid workers for a charity working in Gaza thus endangering all humanitarian relief workers.  They murdered 7 people for the loss of one of their own as they extricated themselves.
Battling for Israel - Zionism's Fake Journalist Jack Mendel
On November 15th I responded pointing out that there is a long record of aggressors posing as the victim. I pointed out that 80 years ago, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland it pretended that it was the victim. Nazi soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms staged a mock attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. The details can be found in the second of Richard Evan’s trilogy ‘The Third Reich in Power’. pp.699/700.
According to @mendelpol these were ‘despicable remarks’.  To most people with a few brain cells this was a historical analogy. That is what history is about, comparisons.  Otherwise how do you make sense of historical events? Being unable to rebut my remarks Mendel sought the assistance of Twitter’s censor.  
Canary article helps launch campaign against Twitter censorship
On the 16th November I responded by saying that what was despicable was the shooting down in cold blood of 200 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza and the decade long starvation siege. In Mendel’s morbid mind this became ‘This morning a Jewish activist sent me a tweet filled with anti-Semitic tropes.’ Zionists love the word tropes. It’s a cliché they use as a substitute for thinking, probably because it rhymes with dopes. According to Mendel ‘Being Jewish or having Jewish ancestry isn’t a free pass to saying things which play down antiSemitism/in the second case are anti-Semitic.’  
Being incapable of responding with anything useful Useless Jack Mendel reached for Twitter's Censor
I agree. Being Jewish doesn’t mean you can’t be anti-Semitic. Mendel himself is a good example of a Jewish anti-semite. Zionism was founded by an anti-Semite, Theodor Herzl and it is led today by another anti-Semite, Benjamin Netanyahu, a Holocaust Revisionist who cuddles up to all manner of anti-Semites including the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban. [see Rewriting the Holocaust – Jacobin]
It wasn’t me who said that Palestine was an ‘institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’ but Israel’s first Minister of Justice, Pinhas Rosenbluth. Zionism is a form of Jewish Anti-Semitism. 
Nothing I said was even remotely anti-Semitic. How can condemning Israel’s siege of Gaza or the murder of  unarmed Palestinians, including 21 year old medic Razan al-Najar, as she was dashing to help the wounded, be anti-Semitic?
If Mendel tried for once to engage  what passes for his brain he might realise that if anyone was being anti-Semitic it was he. What he was suggesting is that the murder of children and unarmed demonstrators is the embodiment of Jewish identity. That it is Jewish to kill innocent people. That is akin to saying that Jews are bloodthirsty creatures who enjoy killing children and young people.  It’s a modern version of the medieval blood libel. That is Zionism in the 21st century. 
To this very day Yousaf's account is still active although it hasn't been used for 2 years, which suggests that it was a paid Israeli troll account
Being told it was a pity you didn't die in the Holocaust was not a breach of Twitter rules!




What was particularly outrageous about Twitter’s closing of my account was that repeatedly over the past two years I have complained of abuse from Zionist trolls including being told by a George Yousaf that it was a great shame that my family and I had not died in the Holocaust. To all my complaints Twitter responded that these were not breaches of their rules yet Mendel's false and malicious complaint was upheld. When I appealed against my suspension I received a negative standard response and got the same response repeatedly. Clearly these replies are not generated by human beings but by algorithm.
An example of the comments that Twitter found didn't breach their rules
It was only when a live human being at Twitter, because none of the responses I got was signed by a named person, was contacted personally and told that their refusal to reinstate my account was unacceptable and their practices would be raised if necessary in Parliament that my account was reinstated.

Twitter's standard response to complaints
What happened to me is not unique. Twitter and Facebook have been removing accounts of anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians at the behest of Zionist bigots like @mendelpol. Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets are giant monopolies akin to the great trusts of the 19th century.  The reaction then was to break these trusts up as being inimical to the public interest.  The control of an important area of public debate by private groups is something that sooner or later parliament is going to have to regulate.  It is unacceptable that unaccountable corporations can remove or censor people at will.
Abuse by Zionist supporter of Tommy Robinson, Mark Haringman - I am a thief, fraudster, child abuser and socialist - in no particular order - only in the twisted mind of a Zionist fascist would being a socialist be a crime!
Twitter finds that Haringman (Newsdude) Tweets are in order
Like the privatised utilities, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. should be treated as emanations of the State and thus be subject to public control and susceptible to Judicial Review and other forms of legal restraint. At the moment faceless people or machines make decisions without any independent oversight.






As long as Twitter and Facebook remain privately controlled one can expect malicious Zionists like @mendelpol to use the power of the Israeli state and Zionism's pernicious influence to effect the same censorship that the Israeli state itself imposes on its subjects.
I have a number of people and organisations to thank for helping me reverse Mendel's squalid little attempt at censorship. In no particular order.
Philip Weiss, of Mondoweiss, who carried my article Twitter closes down my account for ‘hateful conduct’ at a time when I was eager to get my story out.
A big thank you to Afroze Zaidi-Jivraj a journalist on the Canary, the Independent Media site whose article Twitter censors pro-Palestinian Jewish activist while allowing antisemitic abuse against him was immensely helpful.  Afroze was also helpful in other ways despite not being well. 
Thanks also to Asa Winstanley, the Electronic Intifada journalist for his article in Middle East Monitor, The relentless censorship of anti-Zionist Jews which started with the line that Tony Greenstein is slowly but surely being disappeared from the internet’. I began to wonder whether my death sentence had been pronounced prematurely!  In the purported words of Mark Twain, the announcement of my death had been greatly exaggerated!
Also to be mentioned in dispatches are Ali Abunimah, the Director of Electronic Intifada and Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam for their helpful advice at a difficult time
Naturally the right-wing pro-war site Harry’s Place, despite purporting to defend free speech, engaged in a piece of whatabouttery in order to rationalise Twitter’s censorship. HP, despite having as their slogan Orwell’s ‘Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear’ refused to defend my right to tell Zionists like @mendelpol what he didn’t want to hear!  But then HP has always been quite selective when it came to deciding whose free speech they defended! Or as the Muslim group Mend suggested, Orwell’s ‘‘Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful … and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’ is far more appropriate to hypocrites like HP and Jack Mendel.
It is to be expected that Zionist papers like Jewish News will employ ‘journalists’ who see it as their job to censor those whom they disagree with. That is because the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle are not so much newspapers as Zionist propaganda rags. Contrast this with the vigorous Jewish Forward in the United States which doesn’t hesitate to debate out all these issues.
It is a small but vital victory over those who would limit the free speech of Palestinian supporters and anti-Zionists.
Tony Greenstein

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