The Forward in its current incarnation has never met an Anti-Semite it didn’t like. Especially a Jewish one. This time out it profiles the tragic wrongdoing done to Richard Silverstein or the Tikkun Hamas blog. Poor Richard has been having a bad month. First he wailed despairingly that Palestinians are busy killing each other instead of killing Jews (as he would prefer) and then someone created a mean blogspot blog parody of him.
When normal bloggers have parody blogs created of them, they shrug their shoulders and move on but as everyone knows the biggest bullies are the first to whine when anyone shoves them back. Their cowardice is exactly what drives their viciousness in the first place. Richard Silverstein has made a career of defending terrorists who kill Jews but when a blog mocks him, Richard runs for his lawyer.
So Richard Silverstein lawyered up and began threatening to sue Google. (You would think that a blogger whose blog is subtitled “Making the World a Better Place” while supporting terrorists would have more of a sense of humor or at least irony) and his hissy fit has been picked up by The Forward.
The case of Silverstein…is but one example of the below-the-belt discourse that has taken hold in the world of Jewish blogging. Scurrilous barbs and sharp-tongued insults are routinely tossed back and forth through cyberspace from one Jewish blogger to another, appearing in long threads in the sections reserved for reader comments.
Tragic. Simply tragic. You see once upon a time the Jewish blogsphere was an oasis of peace and good fellowship and then suddenly people began turning mean and throwing “scurrilous barbs” at one another. Then we all took out our sword canes and had it out before becoming peers of the realm.
The Jewish blogsphere has like the rest of the blogsphere seen its share of fighting because like most of the internet, it’s basically a place for people to hang out and talk to each other. Typical of media articles on the subject is some sort of phony pretense that the internet was once a utopia that suddenly went sour.
Richard Silverstein’s case however is irrelevant because Richard Silverstein and Tikkun Hamas are not part of the Jewish blogsphere. He’s part of the Palestinian blogsphere.
The fake blog, called “Little Dickie’s Diaper Droppings,” wasn’t pretty. In addition to the scatological references, the site was riddled with graphic sexual innuendo.
Oh dear. Scatological references. And scurrilous barbs. How Dickensian. Poor Richard. Poor, poor Richard. Sure he defended Hizbullah but how could he be expected to cope with scatological references. Oh poop.
In the United States, Silverstein has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that covers copyright infringement on the Internet, in his attempts to have the fake blog taken down. Silverstein said that when he contacted Blogger.com, the Google subsidiary that hosts the defamatory Web site, to demand that the site be removed, he was only partially successful.
“Clearly the people who run these sites know they’ve violated copyright, and what they’re trying to do is thumb their noses at me,” Silverstein said. “But what they’re actually doing is putting themselves in jeopardy.”
What Silverstein is doing is trying to silence a parody of himself. And he knows it too. Sadly he’s not in the UK or Israel so he has to resort to the DMCA, a bogus corporate funded law that doesn’t apply here. This is nothing more than harassment because a blogger who supports the terrorists shelling and murdering Israeli civilians is too thin skinned to cope with some scatological references.
So instead Poor Richard Silverstein is doing his best to try and intimidate everyone with threats of lawsuits while at the same time baselessly slandering a variety of folks including Steven Plaut, Aussie Dave, Rachel Neuwirth and others for conspiring against him. Somehow when he threatens to sue people because his sense of humor is limited to giggling when shells fall on Sderot, it’s a fight against cyberbullying. But when he slanders others and gets sued, he’s still the one being cyberbullied. This pathetic whining from Richard Silverstein would be ridiculous if it wasn’t being taken seriously by a major Jewish paper.
The Forward calls Richard Silverstein a liberal Jewish blogger but supporting terrorism does not make you a liberal. Certainly not Jewish. Jewschool might be a liberal blog. Maybe. Richard Silverstein is just Hizbullah’s spit bucket. The Forward’s claims of cyberbullying is limited to citing Richard Silverstein, Daniel Sieradski and Orthomom.
Is there any chance that the Forward would actually quote a conservative or Zionist Jewish blogger who has been targeted and harassed? I think the odds of that are about as good as Hamas and Fatah dancing the Hora together. Which speaks eloquently to the Forward’s bias.
And yet Richard Silverstein whines on.
If you’ve been trashed by Abitbol and his minions at Jewlicious you must have something important to say to the world. Only testosterone driven bullies like them would feel it was their right, nay obligation, to trash fellow Jews who diverge from their rather narrow religious-political views.
Behold the man. Behold the whine. The defender of terrorists cries suddenly for civility. You cannot serve as the propaganda outlet for the murderers of Jews and then hypocritically demand civility. Murder is the worst form of incivility imaginable and Richard Silverstein has made his blogging career trafficking in it. For a defender of murderers to plead for civility is hypocritical. It is doubly hypocritical for a professional slanderer and cyberbully to whine about bullying.
