CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ZOOMING IN TO STOP TERRORIST PROPAGANDA
IN ACADEME”
Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google get
plenty of justified criticism for condoning posts that promote bigotry of many
stripes, plus terrorism and racist violence. Not to mention their inconsistency
about removing political advertisements purveying outright lies and their frequent
regurgitating of obviously faked news in their many and varied feeds.
But there’s one Silicon Valley company that now stands out
for refusing to passively accept this stuff. That’s the San Jose-based Zoom
Video Communications, perhaps best known as the service without which millions
of schoolchildren could have been almost completely cut off from education in
this pandemic-infused year.
Yes,
other video conferencing apps exist, like Google Meet and Cisco Webex. But Zoom
has made itself synonymous with the genre, just as Xerox once was the only word
anyone used when talking copiers.
For
the most part, Zoom is as passive as its Internet cohorts, interfering with almost
no meetings on its space, no matter what they touch on.
But
when a well-known anti-Israel and anti-Semitic academic at San Francisco State
University scheduled a Zoom event this fall featuring Leila Khaled, infamous as
the world’s first female airplane hijacker and one who has gone unpunished for
her misdeeds for 50 years, Zoom just said no.
The company waited until after San Francisco State
president Lynn Mahoney had seemingly exhausted her supply of politically
correct sophistry in allowing this event to proceed. Mahoney conceded that even
though she believed academic freedom demanded the seminar on Zoom be allowed to
proceed, she realized it would be “deeply wounding to our Jewish students.” No,
she did not mention that the pro-violence rhetoric for which Khaled is known
could spur actual wounds – not mere figurative ones – to those Jewish students,
who have been threatened before on the San Francisco State campus.
“Words can wound,” Mahoney said. She ignored how they can
also lead to killings, as when instigators from Charles Manson to Adolf Hitler implied
their minions should act while they themselves stood by and did little or
nothing physical.
This putative conference was organized by SFSU’s Department
of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, whose chairperson is Rabab
Abdulhadi, well known for her own incitements. Abdulhadi is a disciple of the modern
form of anti-Semitism which condemns Zionism and Israel while claiming it’s not
anti-Semitic.
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These folks, of course, ignore the longstanding Jewish tenet
immortalized in Psalm 137 after the Babylonian conquest of the ancient Jewish
kingdoms of Israel and Judah: “If
I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you,” and more. This passage,
enshrined for millennia in the Bible, demonstrates the enduring tie between
Jews and their ancestral homeland, making denial of Jewish rights to sovereignty
there plainly anti-Semitic. Khaled has not
merely employed rhetoric. In 1970, she was part of a team from the
terrorist-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that
hijacked TWA Flight 840, a Boeing 707 diverted to Damascus. Later that year,
after being treated like a heroine by Syria, she underwent plastic surgery to
disguise herself and then helped hijack El Al Flight 219 to a remote airfield
in England. She was quickly released by British authorities and lives today in
Jordan. There was scant likelihood
Khaled could ever be admitted to the U.S. to speak. But a Zoom conference over
the Internet would take care of that slight problem. Then Zoom spoke up
and the event was off. “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of
ideas and conversations,” a corporate statement said, “subject to certain
limitations contained in our terms of service, including those related to
user compliance with applicable U.S. export control, sanctions and
anti-terrorism laws. In light of the speaker’s affiliation or membership in a
U.S. designated terrorist organization and SFSU’s inability to confirm
otherwise, we determined SFSU…may not use Zoom for this particular event.” This was a seminal
statement from a major Internet company, leaving San Francisco State with egg
and hypocrisy on its face. It also should serve
as a precedent for other electronic giants to clean up their acts and their
app spaces. |
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Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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