Terror-supporting NGO advises Facebook on Israel content moderation
Organizations that celebrated terrorist attacks against Israelis and support boycotting Israel have advised Meta, Facebook’s parent company, on its content moderation regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed
A report from NGO Monitor, which researches the activities and funding of organizations active in relation to the conflict and Israel, found that Meta and BSR, a company hired to evaluate its policies, had extensive interactions – regarding making decisions about what constitutes incitement against Israel – with organizations such as Human Rights Watch and 7amleh (pronounced “hamleh”) that have documented histories of anti-Israel campaigning.
The result is a report by BSR recommending, among other things, that more leeway be given for posts praising the terrorist group Hamas.
Emi Palmor, former Justice Ministry director-general and the only Israeli on Meta’s 18-member Oversight Board – which is meant to be the company’s “supreme court” – said “there is no doubt [that Israelis’] voices are not heard,” in part because pro-Israel organizations and figures don’t take part in the process even when they are invited to do so.
HRW and 7amleh, however, are well organized in the effort to influence Meta, leading an effort accusing the social media giant of silencing Palestinians and demanding a change in content moderation. They also appealed to the Oversight Board, which led the board to recommend that Facebook commission an independent report on the matter.
The company undertook a review of its policies following the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Palestinian terrorists and rioting in mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel. Facebook removed content promoting violence and supporting Hamas that was in violation of its community standards, which the NGOs said means they were silencing the Palestinians.
7amleh calls itself an “advocate for Palestinian digital rights,” but regularly celebrates terrorists and attacks against Israelis. It also advocates for boycotts of Israel and campaigned to have Palmor removed from the board. 7amleh is a “trusted partner” of Meta when it comes to content-related decisions in the region and a member of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council.”
7amleh has a history of supporting terrorism against Israel
The NGO and its officials have repeatedly and publicly supported terrorism against Israel. 7amleh criticized Zoom for canceling an event hosting Leila Khaled, a hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is designated a terrorist group in the US, EU and Israel. The group lauded Sabri Khalil Al-Banna, leader of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and deceased PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani as “distinguished Palestinian personalities.”
Board member Neveen Abu Rahmoun called the barrage of Hamas rockets on Israel in May 2021 “the popular uprising,” saying that “all Palestinians have come together.” When the operation ended, Abu Rahmoun praised “Gaza the powerful... with their combative action, [they] surpassed the political leadership and returned to us the meaning of Palestinian togetherness.”
My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions, and think outside the box. It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter. And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) nationals, sixth at the Harvard national, and was runner-up at the Emory national."US Angry at 65% Tax on Hostile Israeli NGOs Receiving Foreign Contributions"
After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami. There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.
First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze—perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis—she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA. That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not “spread”—speak a mile a minute—debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes “impacts”—the reasons why an argument matters—debaters adjust accordingly.
But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
On Sunday, the Ministerial Legislative Committee will debate a bill submitted by Likud MK Ariel Kallner that takes away the tax credit from Israeli donors to NGOs that receive donations from a foreign entity, and in the two years before or after said donations promoted a public cause by appealing to the court, the Knesset, the government, the municipalities or bought advertising space.
In addition, the NGO will lose its not-for-profit status and be taxed at a rate of 65% of its income. The bill is part of Otzma Yehudit’s coalition agreement with Likud, which committed to enacting it within 180 days of the formation of the Netanyahu government.
On Thursday, MK Kallner tweeted his reason for the bill and mentioned Sven Kuehn Von Burgsdorff, Head of “the delegation representing the EU in West Bank and Gaza and to UNRWA,” who last August participated in the reopening of Addameer, which Israel had declared to be an arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP was designated as a terrorist organization by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel, and according to a 2021 NGO Monitor report, many individuals employed at Addameer have links to this terror group (Addameer Employees’ Violent Social Media Accounts).
“We’re putting an end to foreign political subversion!” Kallner tweeted, adding, “The fact that the head of the European Union delegation, Mr. Sven Kuehn Von Burgsdorff, thinks that the Jews are occupying the land to which they have returned, is the small problem in the story,” although, as he puts it, saying this about the remnants of European barbarism and mass murder is a tad insolent.
“The problem is that in addition to taking the position, foreign countries, mainly from Europe, do not stop acting within the Jewish state by funding civil society organizations,” and he mentions the anti-Zionist NGOs Yesh Din, Emek Shaveh, and Peace Now – to name but a few.
This did not go over well with US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Committee, Michele Taylor, who said publicly that “Israel must ensure that human rights organizations and other non-governmental organizations can operate freely, without economic or legal pressures being applied to them that would harm their activities.”
Ambassador Taylor should consult her government’s Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, requiring the registration of, and disclosures by, an “agent of a foreign principal” who, among other things, solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of a foreign principal.