There’s an activist who from time to time posts a diary about Mumia.

The guy literally gets hit with an avalanche of ridiculous fact free abuse.

When you ask some of the posters why they think Abu Jamal guilty you get the most absurd claims about the evidence. All of them are easily debunked, but not to the true believers in the tale spun by the Philadelphia officialdom.

What good is a cite, to the cause, that attracts so many ignorant, abusive people?

When the camera panned over to Kos’s face he looked like a deer in headlights.

That, for me… was a classic moment :)

Thanks for this great article, we thoroughly enjoyed it!

xoxoxo

In addition to Daily Kos, MyDD and Democractic Underground are so censored as not to permit IP diaries on their sites.

Assaf, I have seen you diaries on Daily Kos and enjoyed reading them. I hope that y ou will continue to do so, as it help to publicize the peace effort, the occupation/colonization, the treatment of Palestinians, and so forth. Jimmy Carter did a great deal to educate the American public, but more is needed, given the immense censorship effort Israel has directed at the US.

Moveon does more to deflate the Peace movement than perhaps any one single movement that supports Bush.

You may remember me. I am an anti-Occupation Israeli who started posting on Daily Kos last October, a few months before you were banned from there.

What I encountered there was that over 3/4 of the members had their heart in the right place, also in terms of Israel/Palestine. You could see that in any poll anyone posted on the site, etc. However, there was a vocal minority of “progressive on everything but right-wing on Israel” types, that tried to destroy any I/P debate and turn it into a personal mudfight.

What’s worse, whoever they marked as a target, they’d wait for this target and ambush it once the target has made a vulnerable step – a posting that can be unpopular, or some technical violation of rules. It happened to me a couple of times, though not to the level of banning. At some point I got tired of this childishness – and frankly, Carter’s book did such a better job than me in bringing the I/P’s ‘dark side’ to mainstream awareness – so I stopped posting on a regular basis a few months ago (my page is still there, username “Assaf”).

But leave Israel/Palestine aside, Daily Kos has two inherent problems by design:
1. It is privately owned and controlled by a small group in a very non-transparent way, and you cannot promote grassroots democracy with such a contradiction (we had the exact same problem with Israel’s “Courage to Refuse” organization).
2. Its declared goals are partisan – that is, they subject everything to the Democratic party goals.

The end result is, that DailyKos has become yet another tool in taking the immense grassroots energies released in response to this administration, and channeling them to benefit the Democrats – without any real mutual relationship.

I think that the Iraq issue has suffered much worse from that than Israel/Palestine, where American awareness still lags behind for many other reasons.

In any case, I think it is still worth it to crash the DailyKos party and continue posting there in an informative manner. There’s no question that most member’s opinions there are progressive on all key topics. Meanwhile, anyone who sets up a really democratic alternative to that site – please let me know!

Assaf