Because
One, I share the opinion with Zaheer Abbas Merali that what Israel is doing is wrong, that I hope the international community will indeed condemn Israel’s actions and that the people in Lebanon and Palestine are getting a oppressive treatment by Israel.
Two, it’s my opinion that a personal blog, being syndicated on planet.gnome.org or not, is a free-speech instrument that definitely can be used for making political statements and expressing opinions. That what we, software developers working on GNOME software, write in our personal blog should not be censored because we get to come on a popular blog aggregator like planet.gnome.org.
We are very much allowed to write anything we want in our blogs. Knowing them personally, I’m very sure every single person in charge of planet.gnome.org agrees with that. I’m sure all of them also know that if they wouldn’t allow us to write anything we want, very few GNOME developers would want to be syndicated on planet.gnome.org. Nor had any of them, as far as I know, ever had the intention to forbid any such thing.
To make sure I piss off everybody who made these comments to Zaheer, I repeated his opinion and made sure it gets on the planet.gnome.org aggregator again. I strongly disagree with the opinion of anybody who says that we, GNOME developers, shouldn’t be allowed to write anything at anytime on our own personal blogs. I will also fight for my right to say whatever I want. Whenever I want. Wherever I want. As long as I don’t intend to discredit somebody or some group by making false statements (like unproven racist statements or telling lies about somebody to destroy his or her reputation).
If you cannot grasp that, you definitely have a huge culture difference with me. Maybe you shouldn’t use the Internet if you don’t understand this? The Internet is, for me, the free-speech instrument of this century. If necessary, I will strongly defend the free opinion and free speech of Zaheer.
“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism. — Wole Soyinka”
“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it. — Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire”
I am one of Linux and Gnome enthusiasts, and have a lot of respect for what you are doing. It is therefore very painful for me to hear good people such as yourself or Zaheer say things like that about Israel. Here is a simple “why”:
1. Hezbollah is the one who started the whole thing on the northern front when they did an unprovoked attack on Israeli soil, killed wounded and kidnapped Israeli soldiers who were merely patrolling an internationally recognized border. This took a lot of planning and military sophistication, as Israeli defenses and soldiers are not so easily fooled.
2. Hamas is the one who started the whole thing in the south when they did an unprovoked attack on Israeli outpost and killed, wounded and kidnapped Israeli soldier. It is exactly same situation. In order to do so the needed months or planning, they needed to dig an underground tunnel, they needed to prepare hiding place. In other words, it wasn’t a “spontaneous stone throw”.
3. Both Hezbollah and Hamas immediately made unreasonable demands to release convicted murderers out of prisons. In thousands. No matter how important is well being of those soldiers is, the well being of people that will in the future loose because several thousand terrorists walk free will be even greater. Not to mention the simple principle that they just don’t deserve to go free.
4. What did Israel do in response? What any other self respecting country would do. They refused to negotiate with terrorists and started to subdue them with force. While they are doing this they take any possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties. (in fact if they didn’t body count would be skyrocketing by now). What do they get in response? Missiles, flying at schools and homes and cities as big as Haifa on the north and Sderot and Ashkelon on the south. Fired into the midst of civilian population.
5. Why, you might ask, Israel is bombing Lebanon? They are destroying infrastructure of this democratic country, the hope of middle east. True. But look. 1) Hezbollah is in the Government of Lebanon, in Parliament, and are considered legitimate. Lebanese government should take the responsibility for that. 2) There is a good reason to do that damage – to prevent reinforcements from the Iranian revolutionary guard that is such a heavy supported and supplied of Hezbollah, and to prevent communication between different groups of Hezbollah. This is how good strategies look like. The more highways get damaged, the less human casualties it will take to defeat Hezbollah.
6. And defeating Hezbollah one must. Because it is a terrorist organization, armed, by the way, by Iranian holocaust-denying president who on every occasion talks about “destroying the Zionist regime”, or other words, repeating the Holocaust. Last couple of days Hezbollah fired rockets and half a dozen cities wounding more then hundred civilians and killing several. They are fixed on destroying Israel. There is no choice.
7. Just to conclude, please note that besides the usual suspects, countries that put the blaim oh Hezbollah are: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and … even Syrian president Assad (although he probably didn’t really wanted to).
After that, how can you say you hope for international condemnation? You mixed up the victim and the aggressor.
The planet.gnome.org admin has done nothing to censor Zaheer (or censure him either).
For the record it is disheartening to see so many open / free software projects turn a blind eye to censorship. I was recently k-lined permanently from freenode because I questioned the conduct of a ubuntu op. If ops can’t be questioned on IRC, where does free speech fit in?
Murrayc: If you mean that I should have written censored, I fixed it ;-)
Philip, I mean, he’s not been censored, so there’s no need to tell us how bad censorship is.