[Imc-uk-features] in a spirit of problem-solving

[David Gehrig]

Submitted in a spirit of problem-solving, and containing -- amazingly
enough -- an apology. Almost none of it is about Atzmon specifically;
if you're bored about that particular subject, just read down to the
line (but then you'll miss the apology).

The reason this debate is so painful is that it's sitting in the
crossroads of two key Indymedia principles: on one hand, free speech;
on the other, anti-racism.

Sometimes these central, core IMC principles collide, and the result
can be a noisy mess. Indymedia cannot be simultanously absolutely 100%
anti-racist *and* simultaneously absolutely 100% pro-free-speech. It's
then up to the wisdom of the collective to strike the right balance
between these opposing principles.

Mostly on IMC free speech wins, which is usually good. The process was
designed to tilt heavily toward free speech and away from gatekeeping.
This makes sense when posts don't violate other Indymedia principles.
But does it make sense as an absolute dictum in all cases, even when
the post in question *does* violate other Indymedia principles?

In particular, what should happen when part of a collective thinks a
post is racist, but unanimous consensus is for some reason impossible?
Should the collective follow the same procedures as when the
collective splits on any other issue, or does the anti-racist nature
of Indymedia demand something different in the way such a post -- a
post even collective members consider racist -- is treated?

For shorthand, I'm going to call posts that split a collective on the
racism issue -- posts that at least some collective members consider
racist but on which the collective can't consense unanimously -- 'grey
matter' because they reside in the grey zone between anti-racist and
openly racist. A post is classified as 'grey matter' not when Abe
Foxman or the ADL or some guy from Urbana calls it racist but when a
member of one's own IMC collective calls it racist.

Our collective's decision was this: if a part of the editorial
collective considers a post racist, or flirting with racist ideas
heavily enough to deserve hiding, then the rest of the collective
steps aside on that post and it is hidden. We as an anti-racist
organization don't give such 'grey matter' the benefit of the doubt.

Our reasoning was this: what are the respective down sides of hiding
'grey matter' versus keeping it up?

The downside of keeping 'grey matter' is this: if some editors
consider it racist, it's very likely that some readers will consider
it racist too. They will see Indymedia claiming to be anti-racist
while carrying racist posts. Indymedia looks like hypocrites.

If the reader complains, the reader must then be told, "sorry, rules
are rules -- even some of us think it's a racist post but we're
handcuffed, forced by our rules to leave 'grey matter' up." Which is
another way of saying, "Our rules are so supremely important and rigid
that we've decided we'd rather risk allowing people like you to be
ethnically or racially insulted on our site than bend our iron laws."

If it's 'grey matter' for the collective, it'll be 'grey matter' for
the Indymedia reader too. And if Indymedia is a place where posts even
many readers would consider racist are welcome, then immediate damage
is being done to Indymedia from the moment that 'grey matter' appears
under the Indymedia logo. Allowing 'grey matter' to appear seriously
compromises Indymedia's anti-racist mission. Worse, it invites more
'grey matter' as racists see it and decide the waters are worth
testing themselves.

On the other hand, the downside of removing 'grey matter' is real but
considerably more abstract and tenuous: the threat that some
unspecified editor, at some unspecified time in the future, might
start using the charge of racism as a pretext to enforce gatekeeping
on some political, rather than racial, issue. Like so much else in
IMC-land, the response to this possibility comes down to a simple
question: do you know and trust your collective, or don't you? If you
don't, maybe your collective has bigger issues than whether or not you
post 'grey matter.'

So the balance ends up being this: the immediate, concrete damage
caused by hosting a racist post -- damage to the site's reputation,
Indymedia's reputation as a whole, and to the frustration level of the
collective itself -- outweighs the theoretical damage that may
theoretically some day occur if everyone falls asleep at their posts
at once.

If someone has something they absolutely must say on Indymedia, let
them find a way of saying it that doesn't flirt with racism, and we'll
publish it. If they can't, then maybe its something that shouldn't be
said on Indymedia.

With my collective, the stance is, "newswire posts get the benefit of
the doubt, UNLESS they're 'grey matter.'" And we trust each other
enough to know that nobody's going to play that 'grey matter' card
unless there's a legitimate reason to consider a post racist. That
way, we don't have person A telling person B, "no, it doesn't matter
if *you're* racially insulted by this post, *I'm* not so it stays up."

The meeting at Nottingham offers a direct opportunity to take this all
into consideration. If the discussion is only about Atzmon vs.
Greenstein, and not about the larger 'grey matter' issue, then no
matter which way the Atzmon decision goes, it won't solve the problem
for long. Soon enough some new source of 'grey matter' is going to
appear and you will be back to the beginning again in the very same
kind of battle.

Remember there are two kinds of problematic gatekeeping: keeping stuff
out that should be in, and keeping stuff in that should be out. The
gate swings both ways. Indymedia procedures are, by design, heavily
stacked toward preventing the former kind of gatekeeping, at the
expense of making it very easy for someone to be the latter kind of
gatekeeper -- the one who props the gate open to let garbage goosestep
in, and then tells any collective members this offends that there's
nothing they can do about it. Which of these two kinds of gatekeeping
is the problem -- the noisy, intractable problem cropping up again and
again -- when it comes to 'grey matter' at Indymedia UK?

---

Slightly more specific:

It's maddening to see what's supposed to be an antiracist site proudly
running interference for a guy who's self-admitedly "happy" to spread
Holocaust denial propaganda, while a long post documenting that slab
of brownshirt-originated propaganda for what it is was furtively
hidden (http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/01/389971.html) without --
note -- that hiding being reported to imc-uk-features. If there isn't,
in fact, unanimous consensus that the post should be hidden, if after
looking it over someone decides I do in fact document my claims, then
I'd appreciate it if it were made visible again.

It's maddening to see someone like Atzmon intentionally playing with
all the greatest hits of antisemitic rhetoric -- right down to "the
Jews killed Jesus" -- just because he thinks it's fun to winds Jews
up, and knows he can get away with it. But maybe he can; after all, I
tried to show how he's distributed Holocaust denial propaganda, and
the article got hidden.

And it's just draw-droppingly maddening that, when the topic turned
last April to the Holocaust denier Kurt Nimmo -- check how many
different antisemitic and Holocaust denial sites his blog
(http://adereview.com/blog/) links to -- that some editors started to
*defend* him and attack his accusers, on the false presumption that
Nimmo was only being attacked because he's a critic of Israel, not the
antisemite he turns out to have been all along.

And it's also maddening to have my stance routinely mischaracterized
(that's the charitable way to put it) -- every, every effing time by
Atzmon's self-appointed defender. It is by *no* means my purpose to
shut down criticism of Israel on IMC-UK, as you can see by the fact
that I don't comment at all on the great majority of anti-Israel
articles on the newswire, and certainly not with a robotic reply of
"oh, well, they're all antisemites." Yet when I point out that there
are serious and long-running reasons to consider Gilad Atzmon an
antisemite, and document those reasons, a certain editor is always
there to wave it away (or, more usually, hide it) by saying "oh,
gehrig's just trying shut down criticism of Israel by inventing
charges of 'antisemitism' so you must ignore him." (But if I've
invented those charges against Atzmon, why did so many members of the
UK collective already put themselves on record as wanting to ban
Atzmon before I said my first word on the topic?) My stance has always
been that the antisemitism *never* helps the Palestinian cause, and
that Atzmon's ornately perfumed version of the same is no different.
For this, I'm called a censor, gatekeeper, and Nazi.

And I'll be the first to admit that I've let that anger over these
maddening things get the better of me sometimes, so let me apologize
for that. I've been known, in my frustration, to turn my amp up to 11
at times when another approach might have been wiser. I'd like to
believe I've been careful not to say undocumentable things, but in
case I haven't, let me spell out where I stand. I do not believe
IMC-UK is run by antisemites. I do not believe *any* member of the
IMC-UK collective is an antisemite -- although I think everyone could
stand to learn a little more about antisemitism's history, myself
included. I believe all members of the IMC-UK collective are
pro-active against antisemitism when/once they see it. I'm sorry if
I've said anything that indicates otherwise, and knowing me, I
probably did at some point. I'm not the slightest bit uncertain,
however, that I've said unhelpful things, and I apologize.

@%<