Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Update on Harry's place

[another update: Although I haven't managed to bring the site up yet, reports are that they're back.]

Further to this recent post, which focused on how Jewish participation in the discussion of antisemitism is being attacked, Harry's Place may have some difficulty.
Harry's Place may be removed (or rather have it's DNS disabled) after a 'complaint' to the company that our domain name is registered with.

We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this 'complaint' originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters.

Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.
In and of itself, this is little more than harrasment in this day and age where they can always put up a new site somewhere. In that way, it's unlike Galloway's libel suit that shut down a radio station. But it is rather serious as harrasment, and threatens to destabilize Harry's readership and the influence they've earned. The ease with which this sort of thing can happen is frightening, and I'm not reassured that the decision will apparently be in the hands of a DNS company completely and utterly unfamiliar with advanced ideas of rhetoric. (It was, after all, such a computer programmer who banned me from Newsvine in order to defend antisemitism on the grounds of free speech.) Further, it is entirely likely this action is a prelude to a libel suit which may be much more than harrasment.

3 comments:

WestEndGirl said...

Matt, just to let you know that Harry's Place has totally disappeared as from today. It has been archived/moved to a different place on a variety of platforms thanks to ModernityBlog. Go to Engage for all the details!

Matt said...

Yes. I've a link to the Jenna Delich Archive in my post. It does, however, appear that they are not posting much at all there for whatever reason, in which case the threat to shut them down seems to have been more successful than mere harassment. Rather than 5 or 6 posts a day, with hundreds of comments each, they've got less than 1 post per day with almost no comments.

WestEndGirl said...

I am really heartbroken over all this. I just can't understand how one of the major unions in the UK can be so literally hijacked by the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel BDS extremists.

And to make things worse, they have shut down Harry's Place by bullying and underhand methods - ironically in the very way that they constantly accuse "the Zionists" of. I would laugh at their hypocrisy if it wasn't so oh very dangerous....