Britain's Largest Mobile Network Blocks Pro-Israel and Anti-Jihad Sites

No Jews, please. We're British.

Edgar Davidson of the Edgar Davidson: Confronting anti-Semitism and Israel hatred blog reports that EE (the largest mobile network operator in the UK) and the Virgin Network are censoring or blocking anti-Jihad and pro-Israel websites.

From Davidson's analysis and the helpful comments on his post, it appears that the blocking varies in type and severity. For example, for a few, the mobile blog version opens but is blocked for the "View web version." And if you spend the time, you can supposedly get around many (most? all?) of the blocks by, among other things, changing the parental control settings on your phone. Needless to say, however, Davidson did not find these blocks on the anti-Israel site counterparts, such as the well known and not-so-subtly titled Death to America and Israel. He assumes that the network operators are using the same 3rd party provider for their content lock system, and this is being gamed by antisemitic, pro-Jihad groups.

Here are some of the blocked sites. As you can tell by looking to the right of this blog, many of them are sites I link to on Mahound's Paradise:

• Pamela Geller
• Jihad Watch
• The Religion of Peace
• Bare Naked Islam
• Israel Matzav
• Israpundit
• Elder Of Ziyon
• Sultan Knish 
• Abu Yehuda
• Robin Shepherd 
• Edgar Davidson
• Daphne Anson 

(I keep forgetting to add Sultan Knish to my links. The name alone qualifies it. OK, done.)

Disturbingly, Davidson found that the blocking harassment is getting worse, with Pamela Geller and Jihad Watch being added to the block list at some point in August. Obviously, no self-respecting censor should leave those out.

I was alerted to this by Israellycool (also linked to on Mahound's Paradise). Curiously, Israellycool is the only site Davidson could find that was originally blocked but is now unblocked.