Posted February 12 2008
Israel vs. Google
The city of Kiryat Yam is suing Google for a description which was posted on Google Earth that portrays the history of the city in a negative light.
The following is the description at issue:
“This is one of the Palestinian localities evacuated and destroyed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. For basic information about this locality, including brief history, the 1948 events, its current status, pictures and statistics, visit: www.palestineremembered.com.”
The Herald Tribune quotes Yossi Ben-Artzi of Haifa University as saying that “That’s simply complete nonsense, Kiryat Yam was built on sand dunes, and there wasn’t any Palestinian village in the area. The lands were bought in 1939 by the Gav Yam construction company.”
The problem with this is that the description was not made by anyone at Google, or even anyone associated with Google. The description was posted by the user Thameen_Darby, who lives in Jenin.
The fact is, my feelings about the accuracy of this description should not even enter into the conversation.
In a world with increasing freedoms of speech, we need to realize that we are bound to encounter more and more people who disagree with what we believe. This is not something to be feared. If people are allowed to write things that we disagree with then we are free to write things that others disagree with. If you have a problem with something a person says then tell them.
A friend of mine recently told me about how he went through an article on Wikipedia and simply added the word “allegedly” to items that were being portrayed as facts when they might not actually be. The first reaction was for the person who originally wrote the article to complain, but what happened next was that the community said that they should have someone look into what the truth was.
Google has responded to this lawsuit by saying, “It looks as though this particular user-contributed annotation does not breach our Terms and Conditions, nor is it in any way illegal.” Basically, Google is saying that they will not get involved in the dispute.
I have to say that I agree with Google’s stance on this one.
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So can someone go ahead and say (in Google Earth) that the Palestinians alleged rights to have land in the state of Israel is a fabrication OR that Gaza city was recently settled by terrorists? Can I say that Canada was settled and constitutionally established as a country by my great-great-grandfather 165 years ago (not actually true)?