One week ago, on January 6th, I wrote an article “Behind Israel’s Siege of Gaza: Palestinians Have Oil and Gas.” I thought that it would end up like all my other articles: Published by a handful of websites.
My friend, Roland Michel Tremblay, a writer living in London, thought my article was good. He emailed me and told me I should keep a list of the places the article would surface. Roland was right and I knew it so I decided to check google and some of other search engines periodically.
Op-Ed News published my article within two hours of sending it to them. I thought at the time, “This is a good sign..”
To my surprise, my article was picked up all over the world. I faithfully pasted these addresses on a list. As I continued to do this, I was surprised that the google list kept changing. The older entries usually disappeared (never to be found again,) even when I tried searching with different combinations of key words.
According to the list I made, I have 103 addresses of websites that published and/or discussed my article plus the editor of UNCENSORED magazine called me from New Zealand tonight and told me he was publishing the article on his website. So that will make 104 websites that I know of where my article has been published.
But if you google “Martha Rose Crow Palestine” or “Martha Rose Crow Gaza” you will be lucky if you find 40 “hits” for my article and many are duplicates.
This problem of finding information about my article is harder with the other search engines, e.g., alta vista, dogpile, meta crawler, web crawler, so forth. When I search them, I find a handful of “hits.”
It’s like information about my article has fallen down a deep, dark hole.
I’ve had problems with being censored by google and other search engines before. It took about 4 ½ months to get my article, “The Nine Stages of American Autogenocide” to be posted on google and other search engines. Because this article shows how countries secretly kill their own citizens, I knew that it would be hard to get it listed.
Frustrated at trying to get my article published on search engines, I wrote some left websites and told them my story about the censorship. A few of them helped me get listed by publishing the article on their websites..
On January 8th, Global Research published Michel Chossudovsky’s excellent article “War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields”. I was very happy to see Chossudovsky’s article because it backed up my article plus it went further into the subject of Palestinian natural resources that the mainstream media has been ignoring.
If you go to google and type “oil gas Palestine” in the search box, both Chossudovsky’s and my article are barely listed. It’s obvious that google wants to keep our articles off the world table.
Ironic, if you type “Michel Chossudovsky War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza's Offshore Gas Fields” in google’s search box, you find at least 120 websites carrying his article.
But what if you want to know if Palestine has oil or gas and don’t know about Michel Chossudovsky’s article or my article? Again, if you search google or other search engines using the key words “gas oil Palestine” you will get all kinds of useless sites and a sprinkling of mentions of our articles.
Democracies can be measured by the free flow of information and free speech. There’s no free flow of information or free speech when articles against the status quo are censored to be disappeared.
I know and know of several writers who have been censored by search engines, google, youtube, so forth.
Recently, an associate of mine, Walter Burien, posted his video, "The Biggest Game in Town" on google video (click here This video is about another “taboo” subject that the Matrix Internet Masters don’t want people to know about.
A former wal-street (spelling intended) financier, Walter made this video to warn the Village that municipalities, government entities and school districts all across America are secretly and heavily invested in the financial instruments of wal-street and the public doesn’t know anything about it. Walter caught google changing the video stats and he got proof: Walter took snapshots and posted them (http://cafr1.com/GoogleStats.html).
Walter was clever. He outfoxed the fox.
By the way, Walter’s video has been seen by over half a million people since he posted it on December 25, 2008.
It’s been a while since I searched more than one search engine for something. So now that I’ve been doing it, I’ve noticed there are fewer search engines. This means tighter control for searches.
As more search engines disappear, merge and/or get swallowed up by the bigger ones (monopolistic corporatism for globalization of communication), censorship on the internet is only going to increase.
A modern Library of Alexandria is going to burn if we don’t find a way to stop the Censor Trolls.
Any ideas? I’ve had two so far.
I wrote this article and I officially became a serious blogger tonight. The first thing I did was post all my censored articles on the blog so they are centralized, thus easier for people to find.
It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.