Jewblog

Although we showed how Google Canada stepped up to the plate last week (but probably not on their own accord), Google.com is starting to worry us.  It appears as though Google News publishes “news” from al-Manar, the official news organization of the terrorist group Hezbollah.  Google seems to have a process in place to choose their news sources, which makes their choice of Hezbollah’s news disturbing.

A more detailed description of this occurence is given in the Counter Terrorism Blog. The CTB gives the following advice:

If you find the inclusion of al-Manar as a Google News source outrageous, I encourage you to send a polite but firm e-mail to source-suggestions@google.com encouraging them to remove al-Manar as a news source.

Does Google actually think Hezbollah is a reliable source for news?  If you think that Hezbollah’s inclusion in Google News, write them at the above email address.  The more email they get about this, the better…  Apparently we have to keep Google in line.

It seems as though Google is living up to it’s motto “Don’t be evil”, at least in some jurisdictions. Unfortunately, it took a legal request to get Google Canada to remove JewWatch from their search listings for the search term “Jew”. JewWatch still appears to be indexed in Google Canada, but their main page (i.e. JewWatch.com/index.htm) has been removed. If one does a search on Google.ca, they will notice that JewWatch.com is missing from the search results and if one scrolls to the bottom of the first page, they will see the note:
In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

This note also comes up for the search terms “jew watch” and “jewwatch”. We had never heard of ChillingEffects before, but according to their site, their job is “monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity”. The detail given at the above link is extremely vague and the page interestingly mentions nothing about Canada. It is apparent that the German government has most actively tried to suppress the anti-Jewish JewWatch site, as anti-Semitism is a particularly touchy subject in Germany, for historical reasons.

Chilling Effects allows people to compare search results for Google.ca and Google.com for the search term used (in this case jew). Interestingly, Google.ca has not removed other anti-Jewish results - including links to an abridged version of the historical anti-Jewish texts “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” and “The International Jew — The World’s Foremost Problem” (the latter by Henry Ford). While Jew Watch is particularly vile, the Protocols and The International Jew are just as anti-Jewish and promoted by the same individuals, no doubt.

Looks like Google still has some work to do if they want to live up to their motto.