Hate Sites

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is running an a piece today on a "hate group" who has a forum on Orcut. (Orcut, for those of you who don't know, is the new Friendster.*)

Apparently Jews still feel a need to respond to this sort of stuff. If there is an antisemite somewhere, there is a need to complain. Then there has to be committees and appropriate responses, and letters to the editor, etc.

This is dumb.

So I checked out the group mentioned in the article and it has a grand total of (drumroll please. . .) 15 members, (mostly Arabs, Iranians, and Brazilians) and 3 recent posts. Orcut has in total (according to my quick estimate) over 880,000 groups. I am not sure this would rate as even moisture in the bucket, let alone a drop.

Apparently some of the member of Jewish organizations have fired off letters to Google who owns Orcut, and also Blogger. They want Google to take this site down.

I am pretty baffled as to why some major Jewish organizations care about whether there are a dozen kids who don't like Jews out there. I am perplexed as to why they think that writing these letters is called "fighting anti-semitism". I always thought that the best way to fight anti-semitism was to have Jews be good Jews. If Jews were to be a positive force for the world, and the planet, then there is little for anyone to gripe about. If they do, screw them.

Censoring some 18-year olds from Iran will not help the cause of freedom anywhere. It will just make them believe that 1) The Jews control the internet, and 2) America (the country of Orcut) is about as rife with censorship as their crappy country. Why bother reforming if freedom is censorship too?

Jewish organizations need to justify their existence in the same way any political machine needs to - they show you that there are many problems out there. If there are many problems, then we need big organizations to fix them. (That is why politicians, especially Democrats, never tell you good news, only bad.) Jewish groups have to look around and find every little thing, blow it up, call it an "incident" and file a big complaint, change the world, and look like dorks in the process (remember the recent ADL condemnation of Borat?).

As Jews, this should really be our biggest problem - a handful of Arabs wondering if Bush's friendship with the Saudis is more dangerous than his friendship with the Jews (an actual post on the Orcut site).

I hope they don't go after Blogger next. I am sure there is plenty of blogs by people who don't like Israel or something. (Maybe you should try to have this site shut down because today I don't like you.)

To Brian Marcus, director of Internet monitoring for the Anti-Defamation League, who plans on doing something about this: Get over it, pal, and start spending the ADL's money on something useful, like maybe getting computers in to Yeshivas, getting good Jewish content on the net, or something more general, like making people feel happy about being Jewish instead of being paranoid that a kid in Brazil doesn't like them.

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*I do not have accounts with either of these, but some of my best friends and alter egos do.