A lot of people were upset when we reported that Facebook had removed our picture of Golda Meir with the quotation that “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” They responded by sharing the image on their own pages and it was seen widely on many of our subscribers own networks. They sent us a message saying that her quotation violated their community standards are represented a “genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.”
A friend of HonestReporting works with Facebook and was able to get in touch with officials there to raise this issue. We were very pleased when we received the following response from Facebook:
Hello,
A member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Facebook. This was a mistake, and we sincerely apologize for this error. We’ve since restored the content, and you should now be able to see it.
The Facebook Team
This is yet another example of how people can make a real difference in the way Israel is portrayed in public and online.
HonestReporting CEO Joe Hyams adds:
While we welcome Facebook’s acknowledgment of this particular ‘oversight,’ we still need to be on guard for a pervasive intolerance of Israelis and Zionists which Facebook considers to be “institutions not subject to hate speech policy infringement given they are not direct attacks on people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin…” To deny that Israelis are not being persecuted due to their shared history and ethnicity ignores the anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism that drives so much of the hate directed at the Jewish state on Facebook and other media platforms.
Such a definition of individual versus group hatred makes a mockery of Mark Zuckerburg’s admirable sentiment expressed following the Paris attacks, calling for tolerance of Muslims and being on guard for hate directed at groups of people generally, and indiscriminately.
