The Internet Archive has been caught censoring pro-Palestine literature and imagery, and then bringing some back with an NSFW blur covering the search preview. Now, it's perfectly easy to declare the Internet Archive to be another zionist stronghold on an internet full of zionist strongholds and call for a boycott of it, but it's been my personal experience that people simply have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to the conquest of Gaza.
Like I said, the internet is whacked shitless with zionism; some of it is intentional, most is not. This is because so-called "western" media as a whole is similarly whacked shitless with zionism. News bureaux, who should technically know better, push a very strong anti-Palestinian agenda, with the AP style guide going so far as to discourage the use of the name, "Palestine", when referring to the State of Israel, which is just called "Israel". Moreover, the term, "Palestinian", is applicable only to the Arab population of Israel so as to highlight the fact that there are no Arab Israelis. Well, there are Arab Jews, but in zionist philosophy, you aren't actually a proper Jew if you're an Arab. Technically, you're also not a proper Jew unless you're Israeli, either.
Semantics. Whatever. The point is, Jewish zionists use World War II and holocaust-denialism to their advantage, in order to paint themselves as generational victims who are entitled to cause suffering and death because of the suffering and death of the Jews in Hitler's concentration camps. Zionists love to shut down arguments by pointing to the Shoah and saying nothing else. This is their justification for inflicting generations of suffering upon Palestinians, physically, psychologically, and in the propaganda machine.
The most frequently-recurring question is "Doesn't Israel have a right to defend itself?" This question is based upon a faulty premise. It assumes that Israel is a real country and not stolen land acquired by forcing European settlers upon a native population. It makes more sense when we re-frame it: A group of robbers have burst into your house and thrown you out onto the lawn. They change their personal mailing addresses to your address and say that they live there. You attempt to retake control of your house by breaking in through the bathroom window, only to have one of them blow your head off with a shotgun, and your neighbours all agree that they were just doing what they had to do to defend themselves. "Israel" exists for this very reason. A group of British zionists broke into Palestine in 1948 and threw all the Palestinians out of their homes, then bought weapons and built walls to protect against anyone trying to return; then they scream and cry "Oh, woe is me!" every time the Palestinians try to drive them out again.
The other most-frequently recurring misconception is that zionism and Judaism are interchangeable. It is assumed that all Jews are zionists. First, what is a "zionist"? Essentially, this is a person who believes in Israel for Israelis. To a zionist, Palestinians aren't people so much as stuffed dummies, bowling pins to be stood up and knocked down. Zionists are the kind of people you think of when former Christian atheists say "radical Judaism" in the same breath as "radical Christianity" and "radical Islam". That having been said, what is a Jew? This is a person who practises Judaism. Don't zionists practise Judaism? Well, Joe Biden is a zionist and he's Catholic. Yes, the majority of zionists are Jewish, but the majority of Jews are not zionists. That isn't a riddle, by the way. Consider for the sake of argument that there are 1,000,000 zionists in Israel, and 980,000 of them are Jewish. As you can see in this demonstration, most of Israeli zionists are Jewish. Then, consider there are 25,000,000 Jews in the world and only 2,000,000 of them are zionists. As you can also see in this demonstration, most of the world's Jewish population is not zionist.
Most people are under the mistaken impression that Israel has existed since antiquity and that the Palestinians are akin to the Muslim caliphates of old, attempting to take over Israel for themselves. This is partly due to bad education and partly to zionist propaganda that has entered into the mainstream. This also gave rise to the impression that Hamas is a terrorist group, like al-Qaida, the Taliban, or the Mujahadeen. I'll admit that I, also, was under that impression. The very first thing I ever wrote about the conquest of Gaza equated both the Israeli government and Hamas to different variations on the Ku Klux Klan. Well, there's only one analogue to the Klan here, and that's the Israeli occupation forces.
The entire support structure of not only the Gaza affair, but the entire State of Israel, crumbles into a wiggling mass of false assumptions and fabricated evidence when exposed to logical scrutiny. However, we enter into the corporate feudal tenet of the Annoyance of Thought again; most people have a particular network of information that they use to give them data about the state of the world, not realising (or, in the case of FOX News viewers, caring) that the data is flawed at a fundamental level. They know only what their network tells them and cannot be bothered to find additional confirmation. The problem as I see it is this: FOX News and CNN have never seen eye-to-eye on any issue, have they? And yet, they both are able to support each other on their reports from Israel. Furthermore, democrats and republicans have also not seen eye-to-eye on any matters at all since at least 2012, with the core republican dogma since 2020 being the democrats are lying, scheming election-thieves. And yet, they are able to agree on everything when it comes to the Gaza affair. Even the most pro-Trump republican voter can look at this situation and see something is wrong. "Why are my allies and my enemies suddenly agreeing with each other?" The fact of the matter is that something is operating behind the scenes to cause this type of collusion. As the information networks that people rely upon will certainly not report that they are conspiring with their rivals to smear an entire population, we can safely assume that most support for Israel in this matter is the result of unintentional ignorance, rather than full-throated zionism.
The Internet Archive is operated by humans, not AI processes. These humans are exposed to hundreds of gigabytes of data an hour, seeing more information than most people see in 10 years—mostly hackneyed attempts at piracy at an open port—and have to pick and choose what they pay attention to. And, being humans, they have their own information networks just like everyone else; their own confirmation biases, their own beliefs, their own personal philosophies, and their own tastes. Just because you work as a moderator for the Internet Archive doesn't mean you know everything; consider that there's more data on that one single website right now than 100 of the ancient Library of Alexandria. How is any one person supposed to fit that lot in their brain? As for me, I will require more data that suggests clear zionism on the part of the Internet Archive before I remove it from my Helpful Hyperlinks section and recommend that people stop using it in general.
--27 November 2023--