A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
As if I needed another reason to hate Microsoft.
Time to build federated alternatives.
Meanwhile we get banned here for saying war crimes bad.
You can’t say war crimes are bad, because that helps Trump win. Trump will do more war crimes. Ergo, saying war crimes are bad means you’re in favor of war crimes.
Remember: today it’s “just” the Palestinians and you may not be affected or care. But tomorrow, it could be you.
Yep. If you ever shared a political opinion, that could put you on someone’s naughty list. If that someone gets a position of power and decides they want to attack, well, you could be the next metaphorical Palestinian.
Voting on Lemmy isn’t private (and is probably for sale on closed platforms) so just upvoting an opinion might be enough to get you on some lists.
Downvoted your comment just to be safe
Man, messed up innit. & how could it be made private without enabling a whole different set of bad actors (astroturfers, marketers, political axe grinders)
So what you’re saying is, that there is now an easy way to delete your MS account?
I don’t understand why it’s so mainstream to equate Palestine with Hamas. It’s as if there is an actual conspiracy going on to to support this genocide. Is it because it’s so easy to say you’re antiemetic if you oppose “the Jews”?
I don’t understand why it’s so mainstream to equate Palestine with Hamas
Decades of Islamophobic propaganda combined with a strong American economic interest in Israel might have played a role.
Do you ignore the majority of Palestinians support Hamas? It’s factual reality the majority of Palestinians democratically voted and elected Hamas which ran on a destroy Israel agenda. In reality they asked and started this war due to that election. It’s not because it’s so easy to say they are antisemitic it’s because it is factually correct to say it.
They didn’t actually support Hamas in 2023, until Israel bombed them into the stone age and supported shifted. Which is the same phenomenon we’ve seen in every war with a massive bombing campaign since 1936. They did vote democratically, and that vote was blocked by Israel and the US. The platform though was a moderate one in which they drew a line between Israel and people. They very much want to destroy the country but they believe they can live with the people as long as there’s not an apartheid power structure. A line they still have in their doctrine today, a line people like you blithely ignore. Also that election was nearly 20 years ago. Are you admitting that Hamas and Israel were already at war? Usually the party line is there was peace and doves and olive trees until the barbarous Hamas blew it all up. And the people in Hamas are also semites. They are literally semites.
It’s completely normalized racism. America has been institutionalizing Islamophobia for years to justify their invasions of the Middle East where we kill millions of
innocent civilians“terorrists”Before the 2000’s a lot of that manufactured hate was directed towards Asians because we needed to justify war crimes in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos etc.
Without America the Palestine people would have starved to death years ago. Their own Arabian brothers won’t even help them. America doesn’t need to institionalize islamaphobia when they do it themselves. You can look into any Islam media and you would find they actively burn u.s. flags on state media and call for our destruction. Nothing was needed to justify your made up war crimes in any of those countries because they all started the wars. Japan bombed pearl harbor. North Korea invaded South Korea. Vietnam Gulf of tonkin. Etc etc.
Without America the Palestine people would have starved to death years ago. Their own Arabian brothers won’t even help them.
Iran won’t help Palestine, but also Iran is the shadowy hand behind Hamas.
Egypt won’t help Palestine, but the CIA/MI5 need to coup the elected government every decade or three when it gets to Muslim Brotherhood-y.
Lebanon won’t help Palestine, but Israel says there are tunnels into Gaza from Lebanon so they need to start bombing again.
Turkyie won’t help Palestine, but the IDF had to murder Turkish aid workers in 2010 to prevent their aid flotilla from reaching the shore.
Iran won’t help Palestine, but also Iran is the shadowy hand behind Hamas.
Your point being what? That they fund Hamas so they’re helping?
Egypt won’t help Palestine, but the CIA/MI5 need to coup the elected government every decade or three when it gets to Muslim Brotherhood-y.
Somehow Egypt helps them by having secret govt backed coups? Instead they could have just taken in refugees but why would they do that? They’ll just have a coup instead.
Lebanon won’t help Palestine, but Israel says there are tunnels into Gaza from Lebanon so they need to start bombing again.
So Lebanon helps the Palestine people by building tunnels where Hamas stored weapons and hostages?
Turkyie
I recall the Turkish police raiding those same charity offices accusing them of being linked to Islamic terrorists.
You heard it here first folks, war crimes don’t exist if they burn your flag!
LO-fuckin-L at using Gulf of Tonkin, a well known false flag operation meant solely to draw the US into a protracted conflict we had no business being in. 🤡
I mean sure maybe the August 4th incident was overblown but the August 2nd 1964 incident did happen where our ship was attacked by Vietnam torpedo boats. Maybe you get attacked and don’t do shit at all about it who is the real clown there?
Ohhhh got it, only one false flag attack was committed by the US. That means the war in Vietnam was justified.
To be clear regarding “false flag” operations for anyone unaware: this entails attacking our own military in order to provide spurious cassus belli to enter a conflict we had no valid reason to enter. In this case, a civil war on the other side of the planet, in a bay we should never have been in to begin with.
How stupid does a person need to be to think that, not only was the war in Vietnam justified, but that the Gulf of Tonkin false flag incident is that justification?
Vietnam torpedo boats attacked our ship on August 2 1964. Deny that fact as much as you want. Our ship was in international waters when attacked. There were multiple justifications to get in that war I don’t really care to get into them. Tldr: We help our allies and protect democracy in the region.
🤡 👟👟
Early in 2001, the commission presented a report to the incoming G.W. Bush administration warning that terrorism would be the nation’s greatest national security problem, and saying that unless the United States took proper protective measures a terrorist attack was likely within its borders. Neither the president nor the vice president nor any other senior official from the new administration took time to meet with the commission members or hear about their findings.
The commission had 14 members, split 7-7, Republican and Democrat, as is de rigeur for bodies of this type. Today Hart told me that in the first few meetings, commission members would go around the room and volunteer their ideas about the nation’s greatest vulnerabilities, most urgent needs, and so on.
At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.
The same thing happened at the second meeting – discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.
Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.
“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)
So what you’re saying is: Lynne Cheney has been wrong for 23 years so far.
Plenty of folks on here have bought into the China Boogeyman narrative. Her family’s propaganda has been devastatingly effective. We likely will be at war with China in another generation, given our current trajectory.
China isn’t blameless. Factory and camp narratives aside, their naval actions are bellicose.
their naval actions are bellicose
The atrocities that western nations have had to commit to keep a foothold in places like Osaka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India really disqualify any of these folks from claiming another country is “bellicose”. We’re still out in Oceania committing genocides of native peoples, to this day.
That’s before you get into some belly-aching about a Chinese warship sailing through the Straight of Taiwan, as though its not American property.
Hahaha. First of all this is old, there’s not any bases in Afghanistan anymore. Second, this is the same propaganda Russia runs with about NATO. They do belligerent stuff and then complain when their neighbors ask the country with a bigger stick for protection. Also, did someone include HK in this graphic? I know there’s lots of US bases in the Pacific, but I think someone is gilding the lily.
But also no, it’s not just about sailing a ship through Taiwanese waters. We do the same thing to China all the time, just to remind them that under international law that’s okay.
It’s conducting war games that completely surround Taiwan.
It’s claiming a ridiculous area for it’s EEZ, far larger than international law allows and completely disregarding any potential EEZ for other countries in the area.
It’s sinking fishing vessels in international water
It’s hacking the government systems of it’s neighbors
The list goes on…
Many Palestinian protests have people cosplaying Hamas and waving Hamas flags.
Hanging out with people that like to dress up as a member of a group that wants to kill Jews makes someone a little antisemitic I think.
Denying that there’s an antisemitism problem in the Palestinian movement doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact that’s the sort of attitude that allows it to persist.
