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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Miftah keeps showing its commitment to "open dialogue" - with censorship

Yesterday I noted that a number of people politely asked Miftah on Facebook to explain how they could justify not apologizing in Arabic for their blood libel article.

Since then, Miftah deleted every single post on that thread, except for one that simply says "peace and harmony."

Most Orwellian is that Miftah's statement that people were commenting on states "Comments, including constructive criticism, are welcome on this page."

As you can see from my post, there is no way that most of those comments constitute "hate language and slander."

So I added my own comment:

At this moment, Miftah still has both English and Arabic articles on its website that justifies the publication of the blood libel article (and attacks me, incidentally, for noticing it.) The post says that the original blood libel article simply "fulfill[s] its mandate for open dialogue" and that you removed it simply to avoid "misunderstanding." Do you still stand by that statement?
Within an hour, this comment was deleted as well! And I was banned from commenting further. which is apparently what happened with the others that commented.

It's almost as if they act in ways completely at odds with what they say.

But a respected NGO that receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from multiple Western sources would never act that way, would they? I mean, they say they are transparent, that they have high ethical standards and that they are interested in respectful dialogue, so they must really mean it, right?

Really, it is past time for some reporter to get an interview with their spokesperson, and with their donors who have not responded to email queries. If Miftah thinks this is going to go away, they are very, very mistaken.