A few weeks back I took down a post about an evening I'd had in New York (including hearing Israelis talking Hebrew on West End Avenue and feeling anger that they could move easily between societies) because it offended a friend. I still plan to put it back up, with some slight changes.
Yesterday I took down a post by Rob Browne about his cousin's decision to move to Israel and join the IDF after Rob changed his mind about discussing his upset about family members publicly. Rob asked me to take it down, I did. It was his call. I think he might revisit the subject before long, but it's his call.
Back in newspaper days, once something was printed, you couldn't pull it back. Though sometimes newspapers would pulp an entire run when they had misgivings about an article!
On the internet, you can always take something back. So we've done it twice. Neither story was a classic news story, they were taken down because they revealed intimate moments that hurt people. Still: let's be clear, we censored ourselves.
I've erred by not explaining this to readers. I'm sorry for that. I can't promise it won't happen again. It seems to come with the territory. Next time I'll try and explain the decision more promptly.
Okay. The blog is great and we understand the various pressures. But a certain amount of ‘offending ones friends’ is a requirement in this area, as you know, since, sadly, many are offended by any references to jewish privilege or chauvinism.
Phil’s essay, “Feeling the Hate in New York,” was one of the best posts on Mondo — it was raw, immediate, personal, and reflective of strong emotions he possessed immediately after returning from his eyewitness sojourn to Gaza. Only a few of us were able to catch it before he pulled it off the site without explanation (although it may still be available in a cached version on Google search).
His personal entries are the mortar that hold the bricks of the rest of the site together. Without the personal narraive of Phil from time to time (with Phil trying to make sense of this clash of civilizations, put it in the context of his self-identity and the reflexive tribalism that maintains the Palestinian apartheid) the Mondo site is a relentless parade of human rights crimes being committed by Israel as it seeks to erase the Palestinian culture and peoples from the pages of history.
It’s not self-censorship if you take down a post, revise it, and re-post it. It’s . . . self-editing . . .
Phil, what you are calling self-censorship is not in any way unreasonable. It’s respectable and responsible to try to strike a balance between unvarnished truth and “intimate moments that hurt people”. I think you and Adam are doing a great job pushing the envelope, reporting on and exploring an extremely emotional and difficult issue. I sometimes forget in my own stridency and impatience that this drama is all taking place against a backdrop of mass murder. I think that public figures, broadly defined, should be completely fair game, but explicit discussion of extraordinarily painful private struggles should in most cases be voluntary. You were right to take the post down at his request, and while I’m not sure what I would call it, I wouldn’t call it self-censorship.
I read Rob’s piece before it came down and I was blown away. I was preparing to write an appreciation to him for Daily Kos. Please tell him how powerful his story is and I hope he finds a way to share it eventually.
“Back in newspaper days, once something was printed, you couldn’t pull it back. ”
Actually, you’re thinking of the Roman poet Horace, who famously advised writers to spend a long time revising, polishing, etc., before publishing anything, because (as he put it) nescit vox missa reverti, once you let go of a word it doesn’t know how to come back home.
With the wayback machine (you do know about that, right?) I imagine the same still applies. Those essays are out there, somewhere.