Daily Kos’ banned me and smeared Rachel Corrie, but we can’t give up on the Democratic Party

by MainStreet, Thu Dec 02, 2010 at 10:15:33 AM EST

Daily Kos boasts that MyDD is its "blog father," but there is no greater evidence that this son of blogs is an errant one, engaging in censorship and bias in its hosting of liberal Democratic efforts to gain a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jim Harris, like many writers before him, is a peace activist formerly with the International Solidary Movement to achieve Palestinian freedom and self determination, who was BANNED, for no particular reason that he presented diaries about the ongoing injustices that are taking place on a daily basis in the Palestinian territories, completely ignored by the mainstream media. Here's his reflections on this incident (published by Mondoweiss): 

.....I was banned from the site after writing on it for over 4 years.

My diaries mostly dealt with the daily and routine violence of the occupation. Home demolitions and evictions of Palestinians from their homes are the subject of many (and the mockery they make of a “peace process”).  I was also not afraid to criticize the Jewish establishment, including the ADL and even groups like Hillel when some locals hosted Efraim Eitam. But the last straw was perhaps my last diary, a report of the protest of Israeli peace groups and their concern that Israel is becoming a fascist state.  The pressure must have been too intense for the DKos administration to withstand, so it became easier just to ban me.

I was not all that surprised.  In one of my comments, made in regard to the ADL’s attack on the Muslim Community Center planned in New York, I stated that no matter where we live in America “we can demand that bigotry be rejected by all, including New Yorkers, and the ADL.” It elicited this emphatic and crude response:  “You have no fucking standing my friend, to demand anything.” That statement, I believe, encapsulates the view that, at Daily Kos, unless you conform to certain limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli policy and of the institutions that support Israeli policy (including the Democratic Party), you simply do not have any standing.  For example, saying the Israeli settlements should no longer expand is permissible. But say that the US should cease the funding of Israeli aggression and you can expect to be attacked as being an anti-Semite.

A case in point, and again, very crude but not at all subject to administrative sanction at Daily Kos: in attacking the memory of Rachel Corrie and supporting the Official Israeli line about how she was killed....

SEE LINK TO CONTINUE: http://mondoweiss.net/2010/12/daily-kos-banned-me-and-smeared-rachel-corrie-but-we-cant-give-up-on-the-democratic-party.html

Sons often rebel from their father's teachings, but in this case, it is a rebellion from the kind of liberal principles that led to the Civil Rights Act, which tore down the fabric of Jim Crow segregation. Now we have a similar situation in foreign policy that the US government is funding that goes well beyond separation of people; it extends to the military subjugation of a people, their occupation, while their homes and lands are being stolen. This is not a Democratic principle. Yet it seems that Daily Kos has appropriated the "except when it comes to Israel" stance now prevalent in the Democratic party.

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DailyKos

Is the fundamental problem.

The party will not unfail while they are driving.

They ignore where the road goes and instead where they want the road to go.

by donkeykong 2010-12-02 11:56AM | 0 recs
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RE: DailyKos

I think you over-estimate the influence of DKos considerably.  It's certainly not driving the party.

by Strummerson 2010-12-02 12:08PM | 0 recs
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RE: DailyKos

Can't agree more. Just take the last election when every DKos diary was optimistic about the near future. The average voter couldn't care less about DKos and what its members think or believe. All that ranting did not do a thing to change the direction of the election.

One clue: Obama had forsaken the very Democratic apparatus that made his election possible. Howard Dean deserved the credit but was then thrown under the bus as all ears was on Clinton's out moded sophistry. I can see picture him sitting on the back of an old pickup truck talking to a handful of people in South Carolina (I think) in a pathetic attempt to sell Hillary's brand. So why would anyone follow this guy by kissing up to the Republicans. The country went left to elect Obama, and now Obama is turning right, going back to old Clinton politics.

 

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 01:33PM | 0 recs
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RE: DailyKos

Dkos's influence is certainly overestimated. Still, it is because the Israeli propaganda machine is fearful of DKos, as it is of Huffington Post and Salon, that it continues to believe that it is dangerous. Well, maybe it is. Just who reads DKos? Young college educated people, indeed college students themselves.

And that is where the danger lies: idealistic college students as seen in the anti-humus protest at Princeton where Israel's very nature is seen in the open. Israel can push the president's button's perhaps, but not those of ordinary decent people who understand the brutality and oppression with which it deals with the Palestinians, whose country it now inhabits.

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 01:41PM | 0 recs
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Sadly, the Obama administration, nay Obama himself, who has become a poodle to Netanyahu's every wishes.

What this all amounts to is another eight years of Israeli fawning for fear that the Lobby will nix a second term. Perhaps near the end of it, as with Bush, we will see another round of peace negotiations, perhaps even another conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How "unhelpful" it all is. What we are being told, in reality, that America is no longer the most powerful country in the world. Israel is!

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 02:04PM | 0 recs
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For those who might be confused, Jim Harris blogged on DKos as Tom J.

Tom J. was a very prolific writer on DKos, and that might have been the problem. Meteor Blades, a DKos administrator, was undoubted frustrated by Tom J's output. He was popular but it was too much. I saw this happen before with other prolific bloggers. The right wing Likudniks were not happy. Kos gave the word to cut him off. And so he was gone.

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 03:26PM | 0 recs
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For those who might be confused, Jim Harris blogged on DKos as Tom J.

Tom J. was a very prolific writer on DKos, and that might have been the problem. Meteor Blades, a DKos administrator, was undoubted frustrated by Tom J's output. He was popular but it was too much. I saw this happen before with other prolific bloggers. The right wing Likudniks were not happy. Kos gave the word to cut him off. And so he was gone.

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 03:26PM | 0 recs
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For those who might be confused, Jim Harris blogged on DKos as Tom J.

Tom J. was a very prolific writer on DKos, and that might have been the problem. Meteor Blades, a DKos administrator, was undoubted frustrated by Tom J's output. He was popular but it was too much. I saw this happen before with other prolific bloggers. The right wing Likudniks were not happy. Kos gave the word to cut him off. And so he was gone.

by MainStreet 2010-12-02 03:26PM | 0 recs
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If only I knew Jim Harris's DKos handle...

(hum)

by RickD 2010-12-04 05:19PM | 0 recs
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RE: If only I knew Jim Harris's DKos handle...

Tom J.

by MainStreet 2010-12-05 09:43AM | 0 recs
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DailyKos runs our party

Our last election was one where a small group of people decided that they knew better than the party and their candidate would be projected on the party.

 

I call that group dailykos but its really all the most energetic most liberal most out of touch of us who happen to be good at raising money.  These are the people who decided to attach the Clintons even when Bush was in office.  These are the people trying to primary Lieberman so that when we need his vote the most he has cover to become a Republican.

 

Hillary was the one the party members backed at the start.  If our election system was a mail in ballot where everyone's vote was counted and we didn't have states with mafia confrontation systems where only the most energetic get out for primaries Hillary would have won at the end too.

 

Its really a clear choice.  Do we as a party stand listening to the voters or do we as a party stand telling the voters.  Do the voters in Florida count more or less than party control of the order in which primaries are held?  The dailykos crowd was massively in favor of punishing the voters for "party control" of the primary.

 

Is our party run by you and me and millions of other normal people?

or

Is our party run by elites like at dailykos who filter out all but the most extreme views and then try and project those on the party relying on loyalty for us to follow them anywhere?

 

Its a simple choice do you really believe in democracy?  Dailykos at its core doesn't.

by donkeykong 2010-12-06 09:37AM | 0 recs

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