Banned from Peter Beinart's Open Zion

For the record:

I disappeared from my blog for a few weeks as my time was rather occupied in "Open Zion", Peter Beinart's allocated playground on The Daily Beast ostensibly intended for opening up the conversation on Israel, Palestinians and American Jews. 

Yesterday, I was banned (by the newly-appointed moderator, Lisa Goldman) from commenting on this blog after posting the following comment on this comment thread:


"Why isn’t the targeting of Palestinian olive trees considered an act of terror, given that, for many, these trees are their livelihood?"

Why wasn't the targeting of a Jewish day school in Montreal considered  an act of terror, not even a hate crime? 

"... Two 18-year-old Muslims, Sleiman El-Merhebi, and Simon Zogheib, were later charged with arson and conspiracy.
Sleiman El-Merhebi pled guilty to arson in January 2005 and was sentenced to 40 months in prison in exchange for prosecutors dropping a conspiracy charge. Police charged Rouba El-Merhebi Fahd, the boy's mother, for acting as an accessory after the fact because she tried to arrange for her son to leave the country and go to Brazil after he set fire to the library. She was convicted in 2008 and served 12 months probation. Charges against Zogheib were dropped due to insufficient evidence in October 2004. A court-ordered reporting ban limits available information on the case against Zogheib."
  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Talmud_Torahs_of_Montreal#Arson_in_the_elementary_school_library

http://thebea.st/1h645h7
_____________

Other comments I posted on the same thread:

According to Rabbis for Human Rights, nearly 2,000 Palestinian olive trees have been either uprooted or burned across the West Bank in recent months alone.""
It is scandalous that trees are destroyed for no reason at all except that it assuages a certain need for revenge. Anybody who planted a tree in his life would know how much joy and care are involved in the process of seeing it grow and yield fruit.  I have no quarrel with anybody who would decry such wanton destruction of olive trees. 
But I do have a quarrel with these rabbis who have decided to devote their efforts and time to fighting this hatred. Did any of them -ever- trouble themselves to travel to Sderot at the time when children were being targeted with qassams, their childhood traumatized forever? Did anyone of these virtuous rabbis think to spend time with these kids, comfort them, reassure them, read them a story, tell them how much they care for them and that they were not alone?
No doubt in the circles of the Incomprehensible Left, there are levels of causes and the prestige that goes with them. Visiting and consoling the kids of Sderot would bring with it half the fame and salutation that a bunch of rabbis would get for decrying the destruction of Palestinian olive trees.
This I find beneath contempt. This I find shallow and opportunistic.  
 http://thebea.st/1h63fB3


Well Edo if you can't take the comments except in their lopsided  support for your article perhaps it would be better to just close down the comments to this article and be done with it. This way you can have your article posted without having to worry about commenters contradicting you. And we as commenters won't waste our time writing comments and doing research just to have them deleted as arbitrarily as your moderation seems to be implying.

http://thebea.st/1ahWTor

@cervelovan I suspect the second part of your comment, which probably attempted to qualify and expand this statement was deleted because Edo can't take any criticism.

Hysterical.
http://thebea.st/17ZzpEJ

Big surprise. As if V*** is ever capable of NOT agreeing with antisemites. 
http://thebea.st/1f6PIEO

  I don't recall you putting out even the feeblest squeak when ****** regularly refers to Israel supporters as prostitutes, squealing pigs, Zio-Nazies etc.
 http://thebea.st/17ZyGmW

 The first amendment is very relevant but in this case I have to demur in defence of Beinart, whom I usually criticize quite mercilessly: 
This blog is not obliged to accept and publish any comment or article that anybody may wish to post.  If you want to stand in a street corner and preach to the pedestrians about your positions I dare say your first amendment right applies. If you wish to call a meeting of like-minded people in your own house and discuss your ideas with them, the first amendment applies. What the first amendment does not do is guarantee to you that  any blog or paper you wish to write in is obligated as per law and right to provide you with that platform from which to ventilate your opinion. 
Censorship is indeed a vile thing and blogs and media that resort to it can no longer complain when other venues deny them the opportunity to respond and explicate. Indeed, they cannot complain about any issue pertaining to restriction and restraint of opinion.    But that's a different issue which has more to do with civilized debate and toleration of dissenting opinion and nothing to do with the constitution.

 http://thebea.st/HuEsXM


"A few years ago, anti-Semitism in France was still hiding behind the mask of "anti-Zionism" and hostility to Israel. It is still true, but more often now, the targets are the Jews themselves, and the mask of "anti-Zionism" has fallen away.
In a recently published book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, Manfred Gerstenfeld explains that what happens in France is happening all over Europe. "Polls show," he wrote," that well over 100 million Europeans embrace a satanic view of the State of Israel (...) This current widespread...view is obviously a new mutation of the diabolical beliefs about Jews which many held in the Middle Ages, and those more recently promoted by the Nazis and their allies."
 http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4039/france-antisemitism
 http://thebea.st/1ahXnuO