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http://www.forward.com/articles/vitriol-proliferates-on-jewish-blogs/
Vitriol Proliferates on Jewish Blogs
Rebecca Spence | Wed. Jun 13, 2007
When Richard Silverstein, a liberal Jewish blogger, claimed credit for
shutting down an extremist right-wing Web site that listed the names
of thousands of left-wing Jewish activists, the cyber-retribution was
swift and harsh. Days after his blog posting went up in late March,
Silverstein received an e-mail directing him to a defamatory Web site
purporting to be his own.
Article tools
The fake blog, called "Little Dickie's Diaper Droppings," wasn't
pretty. In addition to the scatological references, the site was
riddled with graphic sexual innuendo. Even Silverstein's children were
targets: Underneath a photograph of Silverstein and his 4-year-old son
baking cookies - lifted from the blogger's own Web site - was a
caption claiming that the two were making a bomb to put on an Israeli
school bus. The site listed the longtime peace activist's favorite
book as "Mein Kampf."
The case of Silverstein, a 53-year-old former Jewish charity
fundraiser who operates his "Tikun Olam" Web site out of Seattle, is
but one example of the below-the-belt discourse that has taken hold in
the world of Jewish blogging. Scurrilous barbs and sharp-tongued
insults are routinely tossed back and forth through cyberspace from
one Jewish blogger to another, appearing in long threads in the
sections reserved for reader comments. The invective often revolves
around political stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with
bloggers on the left and on the right painting one another into
corners and caricaturing one another's beliefs.
"Because of the challenging views I've expressed with regards to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I've been called a Zionazi by Left-
wingers and a self-hating Jew by Right-wingers," Daniel Sieradski,
founder of the blog Jewschool.com, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward.
"I've had people write that I, personally, am why the Holocaust
happened."
In recent months, Sieradski said, he has begun editing reader comments
on his blog to keep the conversation civil. But his first attempt at
reconfiguring Jewish blogger etiquette came in 2005, when Sieradski,
28, launched a campaign to lift the language out of the gutter.
"Jewish Bloggers for Responsible Speech Online" invited Jewish
bloggers to insert a photograph of the Chofetz Chayyim, a 19th-century
Lithuanian Jewish scholar who redacted the religious laws governing
speech, on their Web sites. The picture would then link to an
explanation of the edicts against speaking negatively of others, known
in Jewish law as lashon harah. The move, Sieradski said, grew out of
his frustration over verbal skirmishes with a competing Jewish group
blog, Jewlicious.com, founded by David Abitbol. Dozens of Jewish
bloggers have since added the link, Sieradski said, but Abitbol's
operation is not among them.
Abitbol, a 42-year-old Jerusalem resident, said that to adopt a code
of speech for the Jewish blogosphere would tamp down the free and open
debate that gives it its zest. "There's a lot of testosterone on the
Internet, a lot of swagger," he said. What makes "the blogosphere
interesting is the fact that it is dynamic and anything can happen."
David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, said that posting rules governing blog etiquette
poses a significant risk of discouraging people from speaking their
minds. Still, he said, laws that regulate speech do have a place on
the Internet, despite the fact that exactly how and when to apply them
is not always clear cut.
The vitriol that abounds on the Jewish blogosophere seems to be
reflected in the wider world of blogs. By nature, blogs are a public
forum, most often anonymous, used for expressing anything from
political opinion to the most intimate matters - matters once reserved
for the diary page.
In recent years, Jewish blogs have proliferated into the hundreds.
Jewishblogging.com, which indexes Jewish and Israeli blogs, counts a
total of 664 registered on its Web site since 2005. The topics covered
vary widely, from blogs devoted to views on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict to those that parse the often fractious issues of Orthodox
Judaism.
One such blog, 
Orthomom.blogspot.com
, which covers Long Island's
Orthodox Jewish communities, was the subject of a recent lawsuit
brought by a local elected official who charges that she was slandered
on the blog. Last February, the official, Pamela Greenbaum, who serves
on board of education in Lawrence, N.Y., filed a lawsuit in a New York
state court in an attempt to force Google, whose subsidiary hosts the
blog, to reveal Orthomom's identity. Greenbaum claims that she was
called a "bigot" and an "antisemite" on the blog.
In response to Greenbaum's lawsuit, Public Citizen, a national public
interest group that has played a lead role in defending free speech on
the Internet, rushed in to defend Orthomom and filed a motion to
quash. A decision in the case is still pending.
Paul Levy, the litigator for Public Citizen who filed the motion, said
that while some of the comments on the Orthomom blog are "over the
top," those of Orthomom herself do not come close to reaching the
level of defamation. Orthomom, he added, is immune to liability and
lawsuits for any comments that others post on her blog.
Levy called anonymity on the Internet "a good thing," because it
allows for people who wouldn't otherwise speak out to do so, and it
can be an important forum for whistle-blowing. "Our view has been that
unless you show you've got a reasonable case, you shouldn't be able to
identify your critic," Levy said. "Otherwise, anyone who can afford a
lawyer can say, 'I have a claim and I want to identify my critic.'"
The flip side, Levy added, is when anonymity is abused. In those
cases, he said, there are remedies for wrongful speech on the
Internet.
In Israel, the line between free speech and defamatory language over
the Internet has already been tested in court. In 2006, Neve Gordon, a
dovish politics professor at Ben-Gurion University, launched a civil
suit against Steven Plaut, a hawkish professor at the Graduate School
of Business at the University of Haifa, for referring to him in an
article published online as a "fanatic anti-Semite" and a "Judenrat
wannabe," among other slurs. Plaut lost and had to pay more than
$18,000 in fines to Gordon. Plaut is now appealing the case.
In the United States, Silverstein has invoked the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, a 1998 law that covers copyright infringement on the
Internet, in his attempts to have the fake blog taken down.
Silverstein said that when he contacted Blogger.com, the Google
subsidiary that hosts the defamatory Web site, to demand that the site
be removed, he was only partially successful. The photographs, which
he owned - and that therefore fell under the umbrella of copyright
protection - were removed, but the blog itself remains active.
"Clearly the people who run these sites know they've violated
copyright, and what they're trying to do is thumb their noses at me,"
Silverstein said. "But what they're actually doing is putting
themselves in jeopardy."

appare irrilevante, perderci tempo č stupido.
Infatti.  La trovo una cosa molto ma molto ipocrita. (Persio)

 Vitriol Proliferates on Jewish Blogs
questo Torrieri è ossessionato dagli ebrei.
Un caso veramente grave
A