Crackdown on Israeli Bloggers Begins
Israel Hasson's bill to make any website with over 50,000 hits a day be legally considered a newspaper and liable for the comments left in its talkbacks have passed preliminary reading in the Knesset.
Now as a wave of censorship is hitting European and Canadian bloggers, that wave is now hitting Israeli bloggers as well. British blogger Lionheart's potential jail time made headlines and now a a blogger from Mystical Paths has been called in for interrogation for "possible involvement in planning anti-public activities, and for publishing a Violent Anti-Government and Anti-Homosexual Blog - Mystical Paths."
R. Nati is a former United States Marine but Mystical Paths is a primarily religious blog with a side emphasis on events in Israel.
Mystical Paths is on the opposite spectrum of violent, as the name alone would indicate. Anti-Public activities is a creepily Stalinist term. It is critical of the Olmert government and as a religious blog it of course views homosexuality like any other sexual perversion but does not spread hate toward individuals. Neither of those two things should in any case result in a police interrogation but it was probably posts like these written by R. Nati detailing the police crackdown during Bush' visit that sparked the police's ire. A highly religious post that at the same time describes the abuse behavior taking place.
But this interrogation is itself is a signal that the wave of crackdowns on Israeli bloggers is underway. government is trying to push through a massive series of terrorist concessions that the entire country opposes and it is trying to do so by silencing voices of protest wherever and whenever it can.
Consider what happened during Bush’s visit when three activists attempted to hand out booklets to reporters about Fatah's terrorist activities.
The detention of three activists during President Bush’s visit to Israel has sparked claims that Israeli police are intentionally targeting groups and individuals who oppose the push of Ehud Olmert’s government for a two-state solution.
The three activists — from the Israel office of the Zionist Organization of America and the National Council of Young Israel — were taken in by police in Jerusalem while trying to hand out booklets to reporters who were covering Bush’s trip. Israeli police said that the officer in charge initially suspected that the booklets, which criticized Palestinian leadership, might have contained “seditious material.”
Following that is the letter from the mother of a 14 year old girl, who is an American citizen, incarcerated without communication in an adult prison. The ZOA, one of whose activists had been handing out the booklets, has also issued a protest in regard to the 6 such girls who are still in prison.
The situation in Israel mirrors that in Europe where governments who are determined to sell out their own citizens to the Jihad pass laws and engage in police interrogations of anyone speaking out against it. Silence is the company policy and the graver the situation gets, the worse the crackdown becomes as governments become increasingly determined to silence anyone pointing out the disastrous course they are taking for their nation.
The press tends to be well in hand, staffed by reporters produced by liberal institutions and managed by editors who vote safely to the left. Conservative newspapers are kept in line through threats and intimidation and the inevitable to need to compromise in order to remain in business and prop up their "moderate" conservative parties.
The internet has changed the rules of the game. In America or in Israel or in Europe, the internet has become the main source of disseminating information about the rising terrorist and demographic threat from the forces of Islam. Governments who are determined to compromise with Islam are driven to find a way to silence those independent voices, by first creating laws and then using police harassment to silence independent websites and bloggers. The censorship sweeping the free world is meant to smother those few who are protesting against the dark wave of the Jihad approaching our shores.
Censorship though is no solution but a frustrated political and media elite will still try to do their best to "silence the extremists." It is our sacred duty not to permit their voices to be silenced, across the world and around the globe, ex-Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Hindus, Right, Left and anything in between. We confront the prospect of a new dark age that will drown all we love in darkness and slaughter and enslave our families and those we care about. Every voice that shouts, whispers or murmurs against the darkness is the voice of freedom.