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May 23, 2006

Is Google next on the conservative hit list?

The main reason that conservative blogs and websites exist is to destroy those who disagree with their beliefs. In general, they don't go after the ideas..they go after people personally. They did it to the Dixie Chicks. They did it to John Kerry. They did it to Tom Daschle. On a "closer to home" level, I watched Stefan Sharkansky at Sound Politics try to do it TJ at AlsoAlso blog by trying to get his real life information.

It isn't about an exchange of ideas or debate with these people. Its about utterly destroying the individuals that disagree with them.

That makes this mornings hand wringing by uber conservative blog Newsbusters worth noting.

According to them, Google recently yanked the Jawa Report from Google News for "hate speech":

As reported by NewsBusters, the most recent occurrence of this unexplained phenomenon was Friday, May 19, when Frank Salvato, proprietor of The New Media Journal, realized that his content that day hadn't been disseminated at Google News as it had been on a daily basis since he reached an agreement with the search engine in September 2005.

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of "hate speech" at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that: “Upon recent review, we've found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News.” For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.

Two weeks after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi’s MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi’s case, the three pieces provided as examples of “hate speech” were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about – you guessed it – radical Islam and terrorism.

See a trend here?

As a sidebar, the NewsBusters article that first broke this story on May 19 cannot be found by doing a Google News search even though other recent articles by NewsBusters can.

Newsbusters failed to link to any of the articles in question so I have no idea if there is hate speech within the content of those pieces. But having read the Jawa Report multiple times, I'd agree that their site contains hate speech on a regular basis:

Killing Americans and Jew can be great! Just like frosted Flakes! The westerners are justifiably outraged. So are we intolerant for making war and killing those who murder us and call us pigs. Of course the Islamic terrorists always blame it on being “oppressed” or “mistreated” when in fact they are responsible for the state of their nations. But when did they ever work at making anything better? Never, they are lazy! They destroy and whine hoping someone will come in and fix their lands which they have ruined. Why? Because it’s easy, Taking responsibility for their actions and building a future for themselves is just too much work. So their brilliant minds all seem to land on, “Lets blow shit up”. The lazy cowards, how about you Mr. Abu Ayman, when will you martyr yourself? Or, being the coward that you are, will you leave that to some brainwashed teen?

That's pretty mild. They've written much worse (its what I had time to cut and paste this AM).

So how long until Google is Dixie Chicked?

Posted by Carla at May 23, 2006 07:15 AM

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