Using Google to help fight Arab anti-semitism

Two days ago I revealed that an Egyptian newspaper published two articles claiming, in lurid detail, the charges that Jews ritually drink Christian (and Muslim) blood on Passover and Purim.

This is hardly the first time Arab newspapers descend to pure Jew-hatred.

Exposing their hate is important, but unlike doing that for English-language articles, it rarely would cause a change in behavior. Ultimately, the goal is to shame the haters into not wanting to publicize their hate and poison the next generation, even if only a little.

I managed to embarrass the Palestinian NGO Miftah into removing a similarly offensive article, even if they attacked me for pointing out their hate. How can we do the same for an Egyptian newspaper?

Some six  years ago, I routinely highlighted Jew-hatred in a bizarre ultra-left wing site called The People's Voice. I asked my (then much smaller) audience to complain to Google News, because their site was indexed there as a legitimate "news" organization, and Google News has a policy not to link to offensive articles.

Complaints to Google News causes Google to contact the publisher of the sites asking them to remove the offensive article, and if they make a habit of it, Google will pull the source altogether from Google News.

The People's Voice freaked out over this, much like Miftah did, attacking me in a long rambling article claiming I was "censoring" them.

But, in some ways, they changed their behavior. Some articles were silently removed. While they still routinely publish crazed anti-Zionist articles, 9/11 conspiracy theories and the like, they generally stay away from direct attacks on Jews and Judaism as they had been doing, or they at least mask their Jew-hatred by replacing the word "Jew" with "Zionist." Even though this is only a small step, it is an important one.

There is no reason this would not work for Arabic-language hate as well. Letters to the editor would be ignored, but Google has clout. (Chances are, as with The People's Voice, they will misinterpret contact from Google into thinking that Google will stop linking to them even in its general search engine, not only Google News. This will scare them.)

So whenever I highlight Arab anti-semitism - generally from newspapers indexed in Google News - the proper thing to do is to go to this Google News complaint page. This page is not easy to find, so bookmark it. From previous experience, one complaint is not always enough to get Google to act.

In this case, you would need to note the offending article's URL (in this case, http://www.misrelgdida.com/Investigations/112946.html)  and the name of the news source, which in Arabic is  جريدة مصر الجديدة .