So, not taking my own advice about Christmas news, I hit Google news, and there I'm presented a top headline with an unusually charged title: "Four Palestinians Murdered in Fresh Zionist Attack in Gaza." So I click on it, and I find this website. Jihad Unspun, which offers a view of the middle east that is both anti-american, and anti-semitic, to the point where it breaks with sanity. I doubt even BL's followers view the situation this way. Crazy conspiracy theories are presented, and the english reader is told that people who buy into them are "independent thinkers" whereas those who criticize them are lemmings. Its almost a caricature of left wing literature, except they aren't kidding.

All of this is, of course, presented as an unbiased, spin-free view of the situation, an explanation that is now formally synonymous with "whacked out ramblings of crazy radicals," thank you very much Mr. O'Reilly. Double-speak is clearly not just the providence of governments anymore.

So, I'm curious what people have to say about this website, so I google it, and of course I learn that the best response to insanity is more insanity. I'll spare you the websites explaining that Jihad Unspun is a CIA front and proper young men looking to "get involved" with terrorism should look elsewhere. The other side of the picture is this website: http://internet-haganah.net/harchives/001236.html Its a bunch of jews who track down and shut down islamist websites. Apparently they managed to get jihadunspun's Cafe Press store pulled. (The store apparently sold pro terrorist clothing for children.) They seem to be having difficulty understanding the distinction between speech by people who appear to like murderers and speech which directly insights or assists violence. Fortunately for them, they don't operate through actual courts, and so they can freely propagate misconceptions about the notion of freedom of expression because most companies simply don't want this stuff on their networks and will take it down on the slightest pressure, with the most simplistic justifications.

The two things worth thinking about here are:
1. Whose worse, the islamists or the anti-islamists? Its really hard to say. On the one hand we have liars, and on the other hand we have censors (which is sort of like saying tomatoe or tomaato.)
2. Should Google news consider this a valid news source? What is it about a website that ought to qualify it for inclusion in Google News. It seems to me that they either include anything that does original news reporting, or they employ editorial control. Where should they draw these lines?

Jihad Unspun - A short adventure in the media information war