Monday, December 6, 2010

WikiLeaks, #2

A follow-up from the previous post.

I was looking last night at the WikiLeaks page on Facebook, and read a number of posts (many from other countries).

In that it is WikiLeaks’ page, it was not surprising to see many posts from people who think of Julian Assange as a great hero.

“One day soon,” one poster wrote, “we should choose a day and all use Julians (sic) profile pic as our own face book profile.”

Wrote another: “Julian Assange is a God!”

In short order, too, I came upon various anti-Israel and anti-Jewish posters.

One such poster had this for a Facebook picture: a Jewish star with a swastika contained within it.

Another ugly posting proclaimed the following (I am, unfortunately, no longer surprised by the ubiquity of this kind of thing):

“Weird that there never any mention (sic) about everything that's being done by Israel and the Jews who are running most of the governments around the world, including Sweden I'm sorry to say!”

(I am assuming that a significant amount of support for WikiLeaks comes from people who dislike the United States—and so it is not surprising that one would quickly come upon anti-Israel vitriol on WikiLeaks’ Facebook page. Anti-Americanism, and animus toward Israel, not infrequently go hand-in-hand, throughout the world.)

While I admit to being interested in some of the information recently released by WikiLeaks (such as, the evident behind-the-scenes desire of some Arab leaders to have the United States stop Iran, militarily, from acquiring nuclear weapons), WikiLeaks' indiscriminate publication of hundreds of thousands of highly-sensitive documents remains utterly irresponsible, and potentially perilous. (Assange's disclosures have certainly put lives in jeopardy—which includes his previous release of documents containing the names of Afghans serving as informants for the United States. Please see: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20011886-503543.html.)

And then, today, Assange’s dangerous campaign continued. This, via the CBS News website: “WikiLeaks has been condemned by British and U.S. officials for publishing a secret State Department inventory of sites across the world deemed vital to American security.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20024666-503543.html