Minutes have been published of the Indymedia network meeting this weekend in Nottingham.
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkNetworkMeeting2008
Although the Saturday meetings and the Sunday morning are reported, the Sunday afternoon meeting minutes are not available. Piecing together things from what is taking place on the web it would appear that there are serious divisions within the moderators and members concerning what to do about Atzmon’s anti-semitic ‘say no to the Hunters of Goliath’.
The anti-Semites main supporter FTP has been in contact with his mentor, holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon throughout, but it would seem that he hasn’t been telling the whole truth. Atzmon’s hunters article was originally displayed as ‘disputed’ then appeared normally and is now a ‘disputed’ article again with the words ‘disputed’ all over it.
We welcome this development. It would appear that anti-fascist and anti-racist activists are finally getting a grip on how Indymedia is run. Although the Hunters article is not the worst, the Esther to Aipac one is much nearer to explicit holocaust denial, with its ‘daring’ of genuine anti-Zionist holocaust historians to engage in a debate with the flat earthers, sorry revisionist historians, it is the Hunters article that has been at the eye of the storm.
What has happened is important. Although we understand the irritation of some of those involved with what the tactics of anti-Zionists and anti-racists, without a persistent intervention it is likely that this issue would have been hidden away and forgotten like similar battles in April and October last year.
We look forward to Indymedia collective declaring an open and overt anti-racist culture which will automatically lead to the hiding if not deletion of racist and anti-Semitic articles. And by this we mean articles which single out Jews AS Jews because of what and who they are rather than what they stand for. We would expect the same for articles that attribute to Palestinians the normal stereotypes common in Israel today. Indeed the glut of Atzmon articles on Indymedia only makes more glaring the lack the scarcity of articles which detail the systematic racism of the Israeli state towards Palestinians.
No to holocaust denial and No to anti-Arab racism
For a Democratic, Secular State of Palestine
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html?s=disputed
