The Meta Oversight Board has just ruled that the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” which expresses the Palestinians’ desire to wipe the state of Israel off the map and control all its territory, isn’t hate speech. Apparently genocidal anti-Semitism isn’t hateful — how proud Adolf Hitler would be.
There has never been a Palestinian nation (or a Palestinian people until their invention in the 1960s), and the founding of the state of Israel, on the land owned by Israelites thousands of years ago, was thoroughly legal and legitimate. Yet Islamic jihadis continue to claim their “right” to all Israeli land while perpetrating constant terrorism, most heinously in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The independent Oversight Board for Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) has just lent legitimacy to terrorist propaganda, from Hamas and its allies, by claiming “From the River to the Sea” does not violate Meta’s rules.
The board reviewed three cases that all included the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” and made the astounding majority decision that Meta’s rules on Hate Speech, Violence and Incitement or Dangerous Organizations and Individuals were not violated. Ironically, the board previously upheld Facebook and Instagram’s 2021 suspension of Donald Trump based on the false claim that he “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible”!
From the new Meta Oversight Board decision:
Specifically, the three pieces of content contain contextual signs of solidarity with Palestinians – but no language calling for violence or exclusion. They also do not glorify or even refer to Hamas, an organization designated as dangerous by Meta. In upholding Meta’s decisions to keep up the content, the majority of the Board notes the phrase has multiple meanings and is used by people in various ways and with different intentions. A minority, however, believes that because the phrase appears in the 2017 Hamas charter and given the October 7 attacks, its use in a post should be presumed to constitute glorification of a designated entity, unless there are clear signals to the contrary.
At least some part of the board retained a shred of sanity. Again, it doesn’t matter if the phrase includes the words “kill” and/or “Hamas.” By its very nature, the phrase demands the obliteration of Israel, and thus the genocidal destruction of its people.
It is noteworthy that one has to search considerably far down in the decision to find the admission that the “phrase refers to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” but Meta immediately after uses Hamas propaganda by referring to “Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories.” The latter is a terrorist fiction.
There has never been a Palestinian people. A conglomeration of Arabs who wished to have Muslim control of the Jewish state of Israel began calling themselves “Palestinian” in the 1960s. There has never been a nation of Palestine, and, from the 1960s and Yasser Arafat through our present day, the so-called “Palestinians” have ALWAYS practiced terrorism, denied the legitimacy of Israel, and refused all offers of their own state in favor of destroying Israel. Their goals and aspirations are no secret; they have proclaimed them loudly and acted on them violently for many decades.
Meta’s Oversight Board laughably claimed Palestinians want “self-determination and equal rights.” Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s why Hamas was voted into power by the Palestinians, and the majority of Palestinians continue to support Hamas even now, after the Oct. 7 atrocities. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians don’t want self-determination or their own state; they want to destroy Israel and massacre its people. Hence, even young Gazan children are taught in school to glorify terrorism.
As soon as Israel’s modern rebirth occurred, Muslim Arabs invaded and launched a period of anti-Israel jihad that continues up through our own day. Muslim jihadis believe their god commands their war against Israel — after all, Islamic sacred texts endorse killing Jews.
As the son of Hamas’s co-founder, Mosab Hassan Yousef, said, Hamas wants to engage in ethnic cleansing, because “In Islam, to kill for Allah is a way of worship.” Furthermore, again in Yousef’s words, the Meta Oversight Board and all those Westerners who are willfully blind to the Palestinians’ goals are nothing more than “useful idiots.”
