Yesterday, Linda Sarsour retweeted this tweet from MPower Change, the organization she founded:
It links to this petition.
Dear Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg,
In a world full of walls, social media is a powerful tool to help us share our stories and support one another and our common humanity — no matter our religion, race or nationality. We know Facebook is considering its responsibility to implement guardrails to keep the platform safe and accessible for us to connect across space and difference.
But we are deeply concerned about Facebook’s proposed revision of its hate speech policy to consider “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew” or “Jewish.” The proposed policy would too easily mischaracterize conversations about Zionists – and by extension, Zionism – as inherently antisemitic, would harm Facebook users, and would undermine efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism, extremism, and oppression. We cannot dismantle antisemitism if we are blocked from voicing our opinions and sharing our experiences with each other. We can discuss, debate, and even disagree, as long as we share the belief that all of us deserve safety, freedom and dignity. We ask Facebook to not erect barriers impeding users from connecting with each other as we engage in this work.
This is the wrong solution to a real and important problem: those who fuel antisemitism online will continue doing so, with or without the word “Zionist.” In fact, many antisemites, especially among white supremacists and evangelical Christian Zionists, explicitly support Zionism and Israel, while engaging in speech and actions that dehumanize, insult and isolate Jewish people. Importantly, this move will prohibit Palestinians from sharing their daily experiences and histories with the world, be it a photo of the keys to their grandparent’s house lost when attacked by Zionist militias in 1948, or a livestream of Zionist settlers attacking their olive trees in 2021. And it would prevent Jewish users from discussing their relationships to Zionist political ideology.
What a disgusting thing to tweet, made even more disgusting when it was done on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In fact this is the only thing about antisemitism that Sarsour posted on this day.
Anyway, back to the tweet:
Thank you to all who signed, it’s long past time @Facebook stops silencing Palestinians and their accomplices fighting alongside them for liberation.
She got that right!
