What’s With Boosting Non-Factual, Politicised, Divisive Opinions But Not Boosting The Jewish Voice?
Is this bias I see before me?
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Dear Medium,
I am writing to address a great concern I have since learning that an essay referring in its title to the apparently mutually-understood “Genocide” was boosted under your Boost programme.
The awareness of this fact came after I had, as a fairly new member of the Boost Nomination Pilot Programme, nominated a story of my own that expressed the Jewish voice, following the recent, highly politicised and controversial Eurovision Song Contest. I write many pieces on the media wars and the rising antisemitism in the world that have resulted from the Israel-Hamas war and have never had any boosted. Nor have I ever requested that any are boosted until this particular one.
The reason why I decided, after much deliberation, to put this one forward, was because I felt that it was an important topic to broach — the plight of an innocent 20-year-old singer who faced some of the most ugly protests, threats to her life, booing while on stage, and hostility from the other contestants and country juries. She was there to sing and perform, representing her country — not her government. A country made up of many people who not only oppose the decisions of the government but have worked for peaceful relations with their neighbours. Yet a country made up of people who are powerless in the face of the terrorist governments who rule over those neighbours, and the level of indoctrination among those populations to hate and hunger for their destruction.
The story I wrote was designed not as a political statement on the war, on the decisions of either side, but as a clear depiction of the hypocrisy in the world right now, especially directed towards the people of Israel and Jews in the diaspora. There were minimal political references or opinions. I could have said so much more but I wanted to focus on the bigger picture of what had gone on.
When I received the email that told me it wasn’t selected for a boost, I wasn’t surprised and had largely expected that. After all, I, and other Jewish writers who have been writing on the conflict and the surrounding topics have reflected that none of these pieces have ever been picked up for a boost owing to Medium probably trying to avoid being seen to promote content that could appear biased in this very, very difficult and controversial situation — a stance I completely respect, assuming it was the case.
Which is why I was then somewhat surprised to learn that this piece about “The Genocide” was selected for a boost. It undid all the assumptions I had made about Medium’s approach to the conflict and made me aware of what appears to be a very clear bias that, it turns out, is rigged against voices like mine — Jewish voices who seek to be heard and seen for our humanity.
Let me explain. The use of the word “genocide” when used to address Israel is a highly politicised action in itself. There is no reliable stated fact anywhere on or offline that what is happening is definitively a genocide. It’s an accusation that has been brought before the International Court of Justice but the only plausibility that has been found so far is that the Palestinians may be having their rights denied. In addition, there was plenty of evidence presented to negate this claim of genocide. That is fact.
Death in war is devastating. No one here is denying that. But it may not equate to genocide.
So to infer a genocide is at best misinformation, at worst a weapon. Not a verifiable fact. Saying that, it is listed on the website, Genocide Watch under “Genocide Emergencies”. It comes 10th in the list, under Darfur and Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India, and Uyghur Muslims of China. It is listed as “Hamas genocide of Israelis; Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza”. Yes, it leads with the genocide against the Israeli people. This is due to the entire situation now unfolding in Gaza being triggered by a genocidal act that resulted in butchering, torturing, raping, burning, and cruelly murdering Jews alongside other nationalities who happened to be there. This aligns with the legal sense of the Genocide Convention, since it is based entirely on intent to destroy a group of people, in whole or in part, as Hamas has explicitly stated in their charter, through the evidence of the detailed plan behind October 7th, and in the genocidal educational material used in UNWRA schools.
So exactly which genocide was the author of this essay referring to? Well we all know the answer to that one because the common narrative only refers to one. And likely most people don’t know about any of the others. The possibility that the term is being intentionally weaponised due to its almost-exclusive use as a reference to the very people who suffered the worst genocide in recent history — the holocaust — which took 54% of its population before the perpetrators were thankfully stopped, can’t be overlooked.
That’s a people with a documented ethnicity that goes back more than 3,500 years. Compare that to the Palestinian ethnicity which was newly coined in 1964. That’s not to negate their connection to the land but to clarify that it’s a term that has no history, and relates to a population of vastly varying descent, beginning with the Arabic Muslim conquest which colonised vast areas of the Middle East. The vast majority of the Palestinians who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are from families that descended from Syria and Egypt, and later Jordan, but are now stuck in a perpetual refugee status due to the coining of the Palestinian ethnicity.
But the essay you chose to boost brushed over the injustices towards Jewish people when it spoke of the “brave students” protesting at campuses across the USA. It’s really hard to ignore the entirely biased perspective and missing facts when, although it’s likely that many of the protestors were peaceful and believed their actions were for the benefit of humanity, the leaders and their supporters were screaming violent slogans that were threatening towards Jews and calling for aggression over peace. Jewish students were being dehumanised, attacked, and prevented from reaching their classes. They were being told to return home for their safety. Zionists were being told they deserved to die.
How do you stand behind something that misses these vastly important facts?
I understand that everyone has an opinion on the matter, but is it really okay to let that opinion rule what you choose to boost? Given that in Medium’s own Boost Guidelines, it explicitly states, “The story demonstrates that the author has credible, first-hand experience with or knowledge about this subject,” I wonder how that can be applied in any manner whatsoever to the discussion of the situation provided by the author. It goes onto say, “and they care deeply about communicating it effectively.” I would argue that to communicate something effectively, you need to understand exactly what you are saying and the implications of it.
It can also not be overlooked that the essay, with its distortion of facts and the message it is promoting, breaks Medium’s own best practice guidelines. While the author, to her credit, may not have even understood that her facts weren’t facts, and the opinion expressed was completely whitewashed, for curators to not see this looks very disingenuous to me.
It could be that the curator is entirely uneducated on a topic that they are making executive decisions over. Also not ideal when lack of education enables a mindset to push content that depicts Israel as ‘The Problem’ when it’s a knowingly perverted angle on this multidimensional issue. I, like many Jews both Israeli and non-Israeli, are vehemently opposed to the Netanyahu government and many aspects of this war. Personally, when I saw that Israel had launched airstrikes on Gaza in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I was devastated. I know what Israel’s military is capable of and I could not get out of my head the terror of the innocent civilians in Gaza stuck in such miserable circumstances. And I say that as a British-Israeli Jew whose cousin had been among the 3,000 participants of the Nova festival, running for her life while being shot at with AK47s just the day before.
I don’t equate the violent brutality of Hamas and its poison with the entirety of the 2.3 million Gazans living there. At the same time I feared dreadfully for the hostages that were taken from Israel, and I still do.
And I can tell you now that there are many Jewish writers — excellent, considerate, intelligent, compassionate Jewish writers — here on Medium who feel the same way. None of us supports the military operations currently underway in Gaza, or the killing of innocents anywhere. But we won’t tolerate the indisputable aggression shown towards our Jewish brothers and sisters, purely owing to pride in their ethnicity.
And we deserve our voices to be heard, not kept in the background while entirely biased and non-factual content gets boosted. At least have one rule for all. Or if you are going to boost some, then make sure you have someone who is actually educated on the topic.
I am not here to say that Israel hasn’t behaved with brutality and hypocrisy. It has, since 1947. But I promise you, the Arab-led revolt, since the middle of the 19th century when my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref was murdered in Jerusalem, is not innocent in the slightest. Is your curator who makes these decisions aware, for instance, of the Nazi-cooperation and endorsement of Amin al-Husseini, the man who led the massacres on Jews in the 1920s, the 1936–9 Arab uprising, and the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war? Are you aware of the propaganda on both sides? Israel was atrocious and I am ashamed of the lies they told, but morally-driven Israeli historians have since forced the state to own up to many of these. Yet any aspect of the Arab narrative that is proven lies and propaganda is merely shouted over to drown out the evidence.
Equally, I don’t support the actions of the Jewish settlers, determined to re-establish their right to reinstate Jewish communities when there is no equality given to the Arabs to return to their homes. The Jewish state has failed to show fairness there and has brushed over their own atrocities.
The point is, this situation has come about through decades of lies and aggression from both sides, and yet the author of the essay that was boosted seems entirely oblivious to the manipulative strategies of the Arabs that created and perpetuated the Palestinian cause to focus purely on Israel’s wrong-doing, probably through complete lack of education. Does that author, for instance, understand that there are well-fed, well-clothed Palestinian “refugees” that had their Jordanian citizenships revoked and were then forced into refugee status simply to help the “Palestinian cause” while appealing to the generosity of the UN to make the Arab leaders rich? Some of whom are extremely wealthy Palestinian “refugees” living in the West who still make up the numbers to secure UNWRA’s funding. How else do you think Hamas leaders have become billionaires and could afford to build all those sophisticated terror tunnels? If there are impoverished Palestinians too, which there are, it’s not for lack of money.
And yet, in Syria there are 6.8 million displaced people and 7 million children in need of humanitarian aid, but no daily aid trucks going into there from the West. All while UNWRA keeps sending more and more and more aid to the Palestinians, which mostly ends up being hijacked by the terrorist groups and then sold…yes, sold…to keep lining their own pockets. Or used to indoctrinate their children into Jew-hate and martyrdom for the cause.
But there’s another aspect to this: all of these Jewish writers who I have seen express their feelings on the situation are not taking any hard-line finger-pointing approach, like the “genocide” labelling approach does, or the crowds protesting outside the Eurovision Song Contest venue were. We all understand that Palestinians are suffering. And we understand that there is a common enemy for both Palestinians and Jews (and Iranians, and the whole of the West). It’s the Islamist political movement, the Islamic Republic and all it’s proxies, and coming up the inside in terms of the Palestinians, it’s Hamas. If we as a compassionate community of writers wishes to find a unified approach it should be one that stands up against the antisemitism, the support of terrorism (that we have seen at pretty much every protest), and the exploitation of the Palestinian people. Against Hamas. Against Islamist politicism.
I genuinely believe we are playing with fire here and we need to be thinking very carefully how we handle it.
Isn’t it time that the ‘caring’ among us recognise that the war Israel is fighting is not some superficial “us versus them” attempt to steal land and knock out the obstacles in our way, such as a population, but a genuine threat to the future of Western democracy? Anyone still claiming to care yet waving around the flag of “genocide” is just telling me they are clueless by doing so.
So if your curators are themselves lacking in the education around this very sensitive topic, perhaps they should refrain from choosing to push a narrative while ignoring the Jewish voices that dare to express our hearts, and state facts as facts.
In the essay I self-nominated, I specifically kept away from inappropriate bias. I chose not to assess the other contestants or comment on their behaviour, though I could have.
In fact, I was delighted for Nemo, the Swiss contestant, that they won. Their performance was impeccable, the song was great, and their personality was charming and humble. In my eyes, very well-deserving.
As for the Irish contestant, Bambie Thug, I could have really let loose. The immaturity and hypocrisy exhibited in ‘fae’r (chosen pronoun — yeah give me a fucking break) interviews, complaining that Eden Golan, the Israeli contestant, had been kept away from the other country contestants (not entirely true) yet, at the same time demanding that Eden was moved to another hotel so that fae (yes I’m sniggering evilly) didn’t have to see her.
But I didn’t. I kept it clean because I understand the difference between painting another with my own emotionally-driven bias and being smart.
I suggest you teach your curators to learn the difference too, and to make informed choices that reflect your values I believe you hold dear, as a considerate, morally-driven platform.
To be clear, I’m not writing this to express my disappointment at not having my essay boosted. I couldn’t care less about that, mostly because I never expected it to be. I felt it was worth nominating because it was an important message, but knew the chances of it being selected were miniscule. I write these pieces because they are important to me, and not for any other reason.
No, I’m writing this merely to express my dismay at the fact that something so blindsided was boosted, despite content like mine — less-political, more educated and factual, and more personal, yet expressing a more controversial viewpoint — not being so.
Yours,
Sally תמר Prag
