Protest against Facebook’s racism

Quite a number of people that I know on Facebook are not happy about Facebook’s racism, when they offered a French flag to cover one’s profile picture and urged people to Change your profile picture to support France and the people of Paris.

Lebanese Flag, posted on Facebook by Bruce Henderson

After the news that more than 120 people had been killed in terrorist attacks in the city, many people did change their profile pictures, but I and several others did not. It was not because we do not find the violence reprehensible, or that we do not sympathise with the victims. But we wondered why Facebook had not offered a similar option with the Lebanese flag the day before, when similar attacks had taken place in Beirut.

On Saturday a cousin’s husband posted a Lebanese flag (a cousin on the Hannan side of the family, in case anyone wants to know), and said the following:

Bruce Henderson

14 November at 12:08 ·

Today we see all the outpouring of sympathy for people I. Paris, but when will the western news puppets remember that on Thursday 41 people were killed in Beirut. Or is Lebanon not enough of a “friendly” nation. If you are gonna pray for Paris, remember Lebanon too. Terrorism is terrorism.

In the USA there has recently been a sustained attack by some people against the idea that all lives matter (if you don’t believe me, just Google “All lives matter”). And Facebook, by offering this option in one case, but not the other, appears to be part of this trend. In Facebook’s view, if Lebanese lives matter at all, they matter a lot less than French lives.

#BlackLivesMatter ? Not to Facebook

Earlier in the year, 147 students were victims of a terrorist massacre in Kenya — more than in Paris. Facebook never suggested that people change their profile picture to support the people of Kenya, nor did they offer a Kenyan flag to make it easy for people to do so.

So someone posted the graphic on the right. Not quite fair, I think, because Facebook did not offer the option of posting any of those flags. If it had, maybe more people would have posted them.

Similar events have also taken place in Nigeria. At one time there was a hashtag on Twitter #bringbackourgirls but Facebook did not offer a Nigerian flag either.

Like and share this on Facebook if you are not happy with Facebook’s racism.

And then someone else posted this graphic on Facebook, obviously trying to do what Facebook has refused to do.

If you don’t like Facebook’s racism, why not like and share one or more of these on Facebook, whether you have covered your profile picture with a French flag or not.

 

Lebanese joke

This joke is doing the rounds in Lebanon:

A Christian whose house was destroyed by the Israeli onslaught lost all his possessions. All that remained was a picture of the Christ. He took it with him and went to see Saad Hariri, who gave him 100 thousand dollars to rebuild.

Seeing this, his Shia neighbour took down his picture of Nasrallah and went to see Hariri with it. Hariri gave him $5,000. The man was surprised:

“But you gave my neighbour 100,000!”

“That’s right. He brought a picture of his Lord crucified. Bring me a picture of yours crucified and I’ll give you 5 million.”

Israel will achieve its goals in Lebanon

So says some spokesman on TV five minutes ago.

But what are their goals?

To judge from their behaviour over the last two weeks, they want to destroy the fragile democracy in Lebanon and replace it with an extreme militant Islamist government, which will have the dominant motive of revenge against Israel.

They, and the American government that provides them with precisioin weapons to deliberately kill children, are either completely evil or completely insane.

Why does the world need another militant Islamist government? Why is Israel, backed by the Bush-Blair Axis of Evil, so intent on creating such government in Lebanon and Iraq? What do they have to gain from it? What does the rest of the world have to gain from it?

Antioch Abouna: Lebanongrad

Antioch Abouna: Lebanongrad asks some pertinent questions about the apparent approval with which the Blair-Bush Axis of Evil regards Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, including the killing of civilians in a manner which can only be described as war crimes, which I noted in my other blog. Coupled with this is the deliberate destruction of educational institutions, churches, hospitals and schools.

Of course, we’ve seen it all before. In 1999 Blair and Clinton did it themselvers in Yugoslavia, instead of using a surrogate like Israel.

In Lebanon Christians were formerly fairly well-disposed towards Israel, but after their churches have been bombed and members killed, any goodwill that there was is dissipating rapidly, as the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.

But even that report cannot resist the temptation to brainwash Americans still further, when it adds the nasty little factoid: “Hezbollah triggered this latest Middle Eastern war when their fighters mounted an ambush two weeks go in Israel and kidnapped two Jewish soldiers.”

These factoids are slipped in, almost unnoticed, so that people are hardly even aware of reading them, but end up firmly convinced that “Hezbollah started it.”

Even some Israelis don’t swallow that sort of guff — see http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/736009.html.

So it may be worth looking at the ancient history of two months ago (before living memory, if not pre-historic for American journalists) to see just how the present conflict escalated.

CHRONOLOGY – how the conflict escalated in the last 2 months

2006-06-09 Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32. Following this, Hamas calls off 16 months of military truce.

2006-06-13 Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in an attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

2006-06-20 Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

2006-06-28 Palestinian militants launch a raid and kill two Israeli soldiers and capture a third, Cpl Gilad Shalit.

2006-06-29 Israel troops, having pushed into Gaza, detain Hamas lawmakers and cabinet members. Air strikes.

2006-07-12 Hizbollah captures two Israeli soldiers and kills eight. Israel calls it ‘act of war’ and widens Gaza offensive, killing 24 civilians. Air strikes destroy 10 bridges in Lebanon, and hit power stations and a water facility.

Israel claims that the soldiers were captured on Israel territory, Hizbollah claims that they were captured during an incursion into Lebanon.

2006-07-13 Israel bombs Palestinian Foreign Ministry and Beirut airport. Israeli Navy blockades Lebanese ports.

2006-07-14 Israel bombs Beirut-Damascus road and Shia suburbs of Beirut: 67 Lebanese civilians dead. Hizbollah launches 130 missiles at Israel, killing at least
two civilians. Israeli ship is hit by an explosives-filled drone, four dead.

2006-07-15 Israel warns inhabitants of village of Marwaheen in southern Lebanon, to leave. While they are fleeing they are attacked by Israeli aircraft and several families die.

If the last incident was not a war crime, what is? Ordering civilians to leave their town, and then shooting them up as they try to leave?

US President George Bush vetoed a bill on embryonic stem-cell research because he believed it crossed a moral boundary. But does not incinerating these children cross the very same moral boundary?

Technorati tags: Orthodox Church, religious persecution, US foreign policy, disinformation, human rights, Lebanon war, Israelr