It is amazing that both the Anti-Defamation League and The Nation’s Eric Alterman are still buying MoveOn’s story that the anti-Semitic postings in MoveOn’s Action Forum “were taken down as soon as the MoveOn folks learned about them from the media” (November 20 letters page)

.

MoveOn.org was aware of the hate speech as long ago as April 2004, when it was brought to MoveOn’s attention by an E-mail from Mr. Jan Poller. In other words, MoveOn.org did not learn about the hate speech from the media; it knew about it all along and chose to welcome it while censoring opinions critical of MoveOn.org and the hate speech itself. This exercise of editorial control is what makes MoveOn.org responsible for the Action Forum’s content, in contrast to an unmoderated newsgroup in which trolls and flakes can post anything they please.

Furthermore, the Action Forum FAQ page says that MoveOn reads all the posts to garner feedback from the participants. It says, in fact, that the moderators read each posting twice. It is hard to imagine them overlooking, for example, a descriptions of Rep. Tom Lantos as a “whining, arrogant Jew,” another of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as “house slaves,” and slurs like “the Catholics are raping your children.”

There is also evidence, in the form of a large collection of hate speech that was harvested from the Action Forum a couple of weeks after MoveOn said the postings were taken down, that MoveOn removed only a handful of the postings in question. Those that were left online included a blood libel of Jews (saying that the Talmud urges Jews to “slaughter” non-Jews) along with hate speech directed at African-Americans, Catholics, and Evangelical Christians.

The bottom line is that MoveOn.org knowingly and willfully welcomed the indicated hate speech in a forum over which it was exercising editorial control, and then lied about it.