First and foremost, I am not nor have I ever been “anti-semitic.” I’ve been friends with many fine Jewish people and have had good relationships with Jewish employers. Just like all sub-cultural groups, I’ve run across some bad apples, but by and large never have had any clashes with Jewish folks.
For the sake of this discussion, I wouldn’t normally place Mark Zuckerberg into the framework of his being “Jewish” except that he very clearly did so himself. And frankly, I’m a little surprised that he did. What I’m talking about is that Zuckerberg closed the Facebook accounts of several “extremists” based on his perception of “hate speech” and he did so in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
To be sure, one account he shutdown was that of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan who is unabashedly anti-semitic. I followed Farrakhan on Twitter for awhile just to see what he’s up to and finally I simply stopped following him because I got tired of what I considered to be negative rhetoric. However, even though Zuckerberg would seem to have a personal interest, it my opinion that as a professional who provides an open platform for the exchange of ideas, he should allow the good with the bad.
There are always legal limits when it comes to what people can say. Overt, credible threats, the obvious orchestration of illegal conspiracy, terroristic threats etc. are all legally actionable and that is where the folks who provide public platforms should also draw their lines. Facebook and Twitter have both gone off the deep end in their efforts to control the speech and ideas that they deem to be objectionable, based on their ideas of “politically correct,” even assigning their definitions of “hate speech” and “fake news.” It’s a very, very dangerous slippery slope for the singularly unique platforms that are both essentially monopolies of their own kind.
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist known for his assertions that the Sandy Hook massacre is a “hoax” is one of the other accounts that Facebook deleted in conjunction with Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jone has since conceded that Sandy Hook did actually happen but says that it was staged. There is absolutely no doubt, in my opinion, that Sandy Hook and several of the other mass shootings are in fact premeditated conspiracy. In that light, calling Sandy Hook a hoax is not inaccurate.
And so, for anyone who is also convinced that Sandy Hook was a staged hoax, and that it was a conspiracy that was orchestrated by people involved other than Adam Lanza, Mark Zuckerberg’s implied declaration, and anyone else’s for that matter, that the mainstream media version of events is absolutely correct – is essentially what Jewish people refer to as “blood libel.” It simply wasn’t totally, only and all the fault of Adam Lanza.
The events of Sandy Hook have been highly publicized and it really would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone listening to Alex Jones would be unaware that there is an “official” mainstream media version of what happened. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name of Alex Jones invoked without also hearing the word “theorist.” Alex Jones and the word “theorist” are practically synonymous.
In short, Alex Jones has suffered debilitating reprisals for giving his opinion, cast as a theory, because somebody else intends to control the public narrative. And, as far as I’m concerned from my theory of opinion, Alex Jones is being persecuted – for telling the truth.
This is really dangerous stuff. Our country is essentially based on the idea that open dialogue is not just a human right but is both necessary and effective at airing out differences without coming to blows. It isn’t necessary that freedom of speech and freedom of press will actually result in a single cohesive agreement over all political issues. It won’t. But history has shown that oppressive regimes that do not allow open dialogue are the ones that end up with draconian human rights violations, genocide, ethnic cleansing, rebellions, revolutions and wars that most people would like to avoid – just like Mark Zuckerberg.
This isn’t Europe, and there is no doubt that the American system has had it’s failures. But the fact is, the constitutional values that we portend to support are exactly why we have been able to make adjustments and change course and make progress more often than not in our fairly successful history. The overt censorship of how Sandy Hook and the other mass shootings have been orchestrated, and the punitive measures meted out by the establishment – even the so-called “free-media” toward people who have asserted a different narrative, is the stuff we expect from cold war Russia, or communist Red China.
The Internet does beg the question of whether we really believe in and are willing to support those lofty ideas. Everybody who’s going along with this system of censorship that has apparently been tailored especially for the “threat” posed by freedom of speech and freedom of press that has been greatly elaborated by the wide open Internet, should stop and rethink whether or not their short sited political motivations are really worth the blood they are flushing down the toilet.
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© 2019 – Jim Casey
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