An Attempt to Censor this Blogger?

Sally Zahav


Last night I received an email from support@blogger.com, informing me that one of my posts from last May had in some way had infringed on a copyright. Since the post has been taken down by blogger.com (as noted below), I wasn't able to see it on my blog as it had appeared back in May. But I found the original source on FrontPage.com, and didn't see anything that could have been substantially different from the other many articles I have posted. Here is the email from blogger.com:

Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.

A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr_counternotice&product=blogger.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects at http://www.chillingeffects.org

. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page at http://www.chillingeffects.org/search.cgi, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.

If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.

As Blogger suggested, I tried to search for the offending content, but when I went to the URL, what I saw was "Search is currently disabled." So I was unable to get any information about my supposed infringement.

A helpful feature of blogger.com is the ability to see various statistics related to my blog, one of which is a list of the ten countries that are the source of most page hits. The list is consistent from day to day, with few variations, and in general I get very little attention from Muslim or Arab countries. This week, however, was different. I cannot see which posts were viewed, but this week, Saudi Arabia was on that list. And then I got the seemingly bogus notice of copyright infringement.

Interesting.

I don't know what the Saudis were viewing but it's tempting to take an educated guess in this case. Here are some facts:

The post cited by the warning from blogger.com is an article that I posted on this blog on May31, 2012 by Daniel Greenfield, "The Best Foreign Policy Saudi Money Can Buy" originally posted on FrontPage Magazine. What? It's an article documenting bias in US foreign policy benefiting Saudi Arabia? Coincidence? But who is complaining? And why now? I've been blogging for several years,  without one complaint of this sort. And if copying an article from another blog and posting it on your own blog (while citing the original posting and the author) is some kind of transgression, then there are many bloggers all over the world who are petty criminals. 


On Saturday night, November 9, I posted "Driving my own Destiny", an article by Manal al-Sharif, a woman of Saudi origin, who is conducting a campaign, largely via Facebook, to encourage Saudi women to drive, both in a concrete sense and in an allegorical sense, to become the masters of their own lives and destinies. Here is the original post from which I copied the article. It's an inspiring story for anyone who values human rights and admires the courage it takes to break free from oppression.


On November 11, I posted an article by Salubrius, entitled "The Protocols of the Elders of Islam", which exposes concrete evidence of the plan by global jihad organizations for world domination.

Maybe all of these articles together or some combination of them proved to be too much?




I'm not claiming that the notice from blogger.com is an omen of censorship, or that they have been in some way coerced into threatening me. And if they have permitted the article that you're reading now to be posted, then maybe the whole thing can be chalked up as a glitch.

But we know that Islamists are attempting to distort the concept of freedom of speech. For them, all hate speech is permissible, even calls for genocide, as long as it is directed toward others. On the other hand, criticism of Islam = hate speech, and we know what fate awaits those who insult the prophet or Islam.  Stay tuned --

Sally Zahav