PayPal Relents and Apologizes to Pamela Geller
On Friday, Pamela Geller received word her PayPal account for her website Atlas Shrugs had been restricted. The reason? She was told she had violated PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy and was promoting hate.
“… [A]fter a recent review of your account, it has been determined that you are currently in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime,” the email read in part.
“After five years of having PayPal on my site I received notification Friday restricting my website,” Geller said in a telephone interview Monday. “This came out of nowhere.”
In the meantime, as PJM’s Richard Fernandez reported earlier, Revolution Muslim was still being served by PayPal. Revolution Muslim is a site which, among other things, called for the murder of South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit and has a picture of President Barack Obama as Adolf Hitler.
“I got called a hate site and yet Revolution Muslim threatens death to the Comedy Central producers and they still take PayPal,” she said. Geller added that the DVDs of Imam Anwar al Awlaki, a jihadist cleric who has been linked to Major Nidal Hasan, the alleged Ft. Hood shooter, are for sale on eBay and can be purchased using PayPal.
“If the real killers can take PayPal then what’s the point of the hate site designation?” Geller asked. Her two other sites were likewise restricted and faced termination of their PayPal accounts. Those sites are for her two nonprofit organizations, Stop the Islamization of America and the Freedom Defense Initiative.
On Monday, after what Geller says was a storm of protest, PayPal backed down.
Geller said she received a phone call from PayPal early Monday morning informing her it had all been a “misunderstanding.”
“They called me back and said it was a misunderstanding and we’re all good,” Geller said. “They obviously received an overwhelming response.”
“I have a pretty big soap box, but what are the little guys supposed to do?”
Geller said she believes the “hate site” designation was the result of a series of bus ads her organizations ran in New York City and Miami, Fla., which promoted the website RefugefromIslam.com. Geller said the ads were in response to a series of bus advertisements she saw in Florida while covering the story of Rifqa Bary, the teenage Muslim girl who converted to Christianity and said she was afraid her family would kill her.
Geller said the ads were not intended to be offensive but to give those converting information about help they could find if they felt they were in danger.
“I think it was Islamist supremacists who reported it as (a hate site),” Geller said. “They wanted to turn off the spigot (of donations).”
Geller said the ad buys were paid for by small donations of $18 to $50 by visitors to her site.
“Honestly I have been interviewed intensively for the last two weeks (by major news outlets),” Geller said. “It apparently was offensive to Muslims. I don’t believe that, I don’t believe Muslim Americans don’t believe in religious freedom.”
Regardless, Geller said she believes she won a victory.
“It is a victory that they came back crawling,” she said, adding she will no longer be using PayPal, but a similar service called GPal.
“Apparently some disenfranchised PayPalers started the site and promote Second Amendment issues,” she said, adding she’d received several recommendations about the service over the weekend.
PJM made repeated requests for comment to PayPal which were not returned. In fact, we were given a non-working phone number as the number for a spokesperson.
PJM also made multiple attempts to contact former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who is running on the Republican ticket for governor of California. PayPal is owned by eBay.
Score one for the good guys. Suck it, CAIR!
Meg Whitman was not an eBay cofounder. eBay started as AuctionWeb in 1995, and changed its name to ebay in 1997. Whitman joined the corporation in 1998.
Glad to hear that PayPal got an earfull.
From within my PayPal account I asked them what criteria were used to deem Atlas a hate site. I gave them two days to answer my request. No answer yet. Guess I’m switching to Gpal too.
I did the same. It’s their right to set and follow an accepted use policy, but if they apply it in bad faith, they’ll have to suffer the consequences. I also asked them to apologize publicly. Sounds like they’re playing games instead. I’m trying out Gpal now, and if it suits, I’ll be switching to them. QuickBooks also has a service that’s not much more expensive than PayDhimmi so I might check them out too for my business transactions .
“Misunderstanding” my ass. That’s the explanation of cowards. “We’re good,” says Paypal. No, we’re not. We’ve all learned something about you now. I’m glad this happened. There is nothing like American competition to weed out the weak (and the cowards).
The boyz from the ‘religion of peace’ can park planes in the World Trade Center and their organizations can sell post cards showing their parking skills and take pay from PayPal while Geller can’t write about it?? I know there are people who are considered Dhemmi’s but could PayPal be considered a Moslem Dhemmi Organization? Could we get some one from the RoP to elucidate this point? Do they have to pay the Jizya or protection tax?
good for Pam! she’s one of a few strongly pro-Israel, pro-Western voices that will not be silenced–which is of course why They are targeting her.
Can’t wait to hear from Paypal that they have declared all sites promoting shelters for abused women to be ‘Hate’ sites. (Kidding!)
“I don’t believe Muslim Americans don’t believe in religious freedom.”
Well, it certainly seems that, Yes, They Don’t.
I’ve switched to GPal.
I wrote ‘em an angry letter and got a reply in 24 hours that they couldn’t comment on their relationship with another site. I’m guessing they got an earful. Happy to help.
I signed up for their coffee break thing and their were over 500 thread comments, all attacking them. I’ve been a retailer with them for years, so I signed up too and posted. Whoo-Hooh! I bet they never had more joiners. Finally our voices are heard. “Hate speech” is anything liberals disagree with, and you are a “racist” if you express the truth.
The fact that this one came out well enough is a tribute to calm, firm, genuine outrage and its use by adults for an important purpose.
This in NO WAY protects the right from similar assaults in the future, large and small, many performed by people of more spinal firmness than this particular bunch of American university products i.e. nonthinking leftists.
We are at risk of this kind of attack ALL THE TIME from all sides on all levels. Score one for us, but perpetual vigilance is the price of liberty, etc etc.
Well said.
They can yield to the Islamic elements all they want–it takes an uproar for them to do the right thing–I, too, have switched to GPal, and told them what they can do.
Some people take their Dhimmitude very seriously.
A clear case of Dhimmitude by
Pay PalSharia Pal.Sharia Pal is either dishonest or gutless; probably both and not too awfully much different that the equally gutless
ComedyDhimmitude Central.Score another win for Pamela Geller and the rest of the good gals and guys.
“Revolution Muslim is a site which, among other things, called for the murder of South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit and has a picture of President Barak Obama as Adolf Hitler.”
Murder is beyond acceptability, but if everyone who suggested a president, even Obama, were Hitler, were banned from commerce with wannabe respectable institutions like Amazon or Paypal, too many would be silenced.
We ABSOLUTELY need to know why!
WHY!?
I’d like to have the answer to that myself wannabe, however, myself and science and tech editor Charlie Martin both made multiple phone calls to several people at PayPal, and left messages explaining we would say exactly what we did, and we still got the run around.
Hopefully they are now regretting their refusal to communicate with us.
Patrick
Leftist agenda, meet the power of the free market. Get acquainted, you’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the next few years.
Another switcher to GPal.
Paypal is the worst. I’ve been boycotting them (and effectively, ebay too) ever since they actively abetted an ebay scammer ripping me off even worse than it would have been without their intervention. The pathetic part was that the phone drone couldn’t even begin to defend the ridiculous course of actions that their rigid policy lead them to take. I definitely got a resigned, defeated “you think that’s crazy, you should hear what else we do” vibe from him.
I’m not surprised they’re also politically dysfunctional. Many, many orders are not being placed and many, many donations are not being made because this wretched company still squats on its first-adopter monopoly.
The same thing happened to me recently.. I sold an item, buyer wouldn’t pay, finally did after sending thru resolution, sent item, buyer said she never got it. I had documented EVERYTHING… I neglected to send delivery confirmation, I was out $100, which is alot to me.. Buyer had her acct with ebay cancelled or she cancelled it..
Paypal sided with her, I was SO pissed.. I am now NOT a fan of Paypal.
Google, please take out eBay and Paypal. Im begging you.
Google is a part of the leftist/progressive cabal.. As is Youtube, Snopes, Widipedia, etc.
Not hard to believe paypal would take sides with the terrorists. Over the years there has been a few different articles which connected them. They all went poof in the blink of an eye. Paypal has millions of dissatisfied users. The web is full of anti-paypal sites. There’s a reason for that.
As for their conduct? To get a better understanding of the sad state of corporate culture at ebay you might tune into auctionbytes.com. In particular look for a post ‘Spin City: eBay Struggles to Control the Message’
Apr 28, 2009
I can summarize it for you here though:
ebay is criminally insane.
(Paypal is part of ebay)
They must believe they are above all laws, and not accountable to anyone for anything
They have lawsuits now filed against them for unlawfully seizing and holding funds without any explanation. Just the same runaround. Big problem for the users who deserve and need their money. They are causing a lot of undue grief. Avoid them.
For those that already have a PayPal account don’t bother dropping it…it is better to just give them an unused account and then change the password. Use your credit card thereafter rather than the PayPal account. Costs them money with no return.
While I am very glad that Paypal backed off, this is just an example of what we are in for. Pamela Geller is pro-West and pro-Israel. That makes her, and all of us who agree with that stance, enemies of Islam. We had all better get used to fighting for our rights. I am afraid this is the wave of the future.
Bravo Zulu Pamela!
Lesson learned: The front lines in this War Against the West are everywhere and no one is immune.
Remember Paypal and all the other spineless idiots who submit to CAIR/Islamist induced interpretation of our rules, regulations and laws, every policy, edict or good intention has its unintended consequences.
We submit to these obvious attacks against us because the enemy knows how we think: we have a fundamental adherence to the paramouncy of the Rule of Law in western society and that makes us extremely vulnerable.
It is time to consider legal actions to deal with cases where the intent of the complainant is clear.
Submission by Paypal or others, where unintended consequences are applied should be viewed as “aiding and abetting” the enemy and specific civil or criminal consequences should follow.
We need to start a campaign to get them to dump the hateful muslim sites, what about the muslim students, do they have accounts?? CAIR, etc.
I sent an email to paypal to show by suppport for Pamela and my disgust in their actions. They replyed to me with a form letter saying they were very busy and would get back to me later. I have not heard back after day six. Shame on PAYPAL.
i dropped pay pal a long time ago because they are incompetent and run by left wing traitors.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286784/Muslim-protesters-brand-war-heroes-murderers-homecoming-parade-turns-violent.html
England is in for a world of hurt.. It will come here if we let it.
Companies like PayPal and YouTube are stuck in the middle. They are just trying to make a buck by serving all comers while some political actors want to exploit them for their own purposes. They do this by abusing the company’s legitimate constraints.
Still, American-based companies have become sucessful ONLY because of the economic, social, cultural, and political environment of Western values where they are based.
Standing up for the values that allow them to flourish is an expense they would hope to avoid, an externality they would prefer to have others assume, although they do pay their taxes.
We’re seeing that daily, the pressure grows to stand up for one side or the other but that conflicts with the business advantage of being the dominant, universal market leader. PayPal is big because just about everyone in the market for such a service uses PayPal and has an account.
I registered for a GPal account when I heard the news about Geller. I noticed that they charge 2.8% compared to PayPal’s 3.0%. I bet PayPal was more concerned with the surge in new GPal accounts than in losses in PayPal users.
Globalization is slowly unraveling.
I’ve just canceled my PayPal account (dang! that felt good) and signed up for GPal. Plus I’ve told all my friends – giving them the scoop on what PayPal did to Geller, plus giving them all a link to GPal.
Boy, it would be something if there was a way to track the ripple effect of PayPal’s assault on Geller. I don’t know about the rest of you but the ‘ripple’ is sure feeling good to me right now.
WOW!!! After I couldn’t find the right e-mail for contacting Paypal I did go through the trouble to calling them. I let them know how wrong they were and they should be ashamed to cave in to Islamist pressure. Now I have to call them and tell them that they made the right choice and yet have to rebuke them not having a problem with this Islamist site. Thanks for letting us know.
Jerry Golden who has a ministry in Israel used Paypal for donations. They started to block the money to him and often he wouldn’t get it at all. Ever since Paypal has been on MY black list.
I just did what I said. I called Paypal and talked to a very nice young lady named Pamela. I let her know that either Paypal has no problem with Pamela Geller as well as Revolution Muslim or, in the least, criticizes hate speech where it truly exists and not pointing their finger at a site that doesn’t even propagate it.
UPDATE: PayPal’s pr firm contacted me late Wednesday evening and they are “trying to find the appropriate person to address this issue.”
We shall see what we shall see.
Patrick
Pamela Anderson is a wonderful Mother to her two sons! She is very glamorous, but also domesticated, making a healthy home environment, by doing her own house work and laundry.