GOP Facebook group forced to remove Israel did 9/11

[maz]

Rivero posted this last month but I didn't see any topic here.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07 ... ti-semites

Mother Jones forces GOP's Facebook group to remove Israel did 9/11 messages from its page by shaming them with the "anti-semitic" label. Interesting that the posters were linking to Pro-Think's website for the Protocols, and Mother Jones links to the Pro-think.

The GOP's Facebook Anti-Semites
By Nick Baumann

After MoJo inquiries, the Republican Party promises to take down a Facebook page with offensive comments.

Israel is responsible for 9/11, Al Qaeda is "100% state sponsored by Zionist Jews," and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is actually an agent for Mossad, the Israeli spy agency—at least according to posts that appeared on the Republican National Committee's Facebook page. (You can see screen shots of some of the posts below.)

Several avowedly anti-Semitic commenters regularly posted on the national GOP's Facebook wall, encouraging tea partiers and "White, Black, Spanish, [and] Asian" people to "arm yourselves" and rise up against the "Zionist Jews" who, they claim, control the country and the media. They linked to a site that hosts purported versions of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and promoted 9/11 "truth" theories that allege "Israeli agents carried out the attacks."

The RNC could easily have deleted these comments—it's as easy as clicking "remove" if an administrator is signed in to the account—or blocked the users who were posting them. Even if the RNC decided it didn't have the resources to monitor its Facebook wall, it could have simply disabled the ability to comment on its wall. When Mother Jones contacted the committee for comment Thursday morning, the RNC disabled its Facebook discussion board, but not its wall containing the anti-Semitic comments. When a Mother Jones reporter explained the difference between a Facebook discussion board and a wall, RNC spokesman Doug Heye promised the wall "will be down shortly." (UPDATE, July 30: The comments have been removed, but the wall is still up.)  "We're interested in a civil debate, and any rhetoric or language that is out of bounds is not something we're interested in hosting and not something we're interested in hearing," Heye said. "We have decided we are better off closing down our discussion page." That's what Organizing for America has done with Barack Obama's Facebook page. (The White House's wall, however, is still live.) But until it was contacted by Mother Jones, the RNC allowed commenting to continue unabated—and apparently unmoderated.