In “Pay Pal’s Jihad Against Journalistic Liberty and Freedom of Thought” at Big Journalism today, Pamela Geller recaps the PayPal imbroglio:
Last Friday, the PayPal accounts for my blog AtlasShrugs.com and my organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI) were suddenly and without warning “restricted.” After a recent review of my account, Paypal said that it had been “determined” that I was “currently in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.”
Huh?
Hate? Violence? Racial intolerance? Financial exploitation of a crime? SIOA is an advocacy group devoted to defending the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and the equality of rights of all people. Atlas Shrugs is a news site and a political blog. I am not responsible for the bad news in the world. I just report on it.
I posted this news at Atlas Shrugs over the weekend and received over a thousand letters of support, along with hundreds of ccs of PayPal account cancellations. The people spoke! I love that.
And so on Monday, a very pleasant and rather deliberately clueless executive named Leslie called me from PayPal to say it was all a big misunderstanding and Atlas would be reinstated (and the subsequent restriction of SIOA and FDI removed also). […]
It is a victory that they came back crawling, but needless to say, I am not going back to PayPal. I told Leslie that, too. She wished I would reconsider. But no. I am sticking with GPal — the G stands for guns!
The real story is that we stood up, and the weasels backed down. We will fight each battle this way. We will not let them stigmatize us for standing up against Islamic supremacism and its war against free speech and free people.
Hate speech? It’s love speech, baby.
Oh, yes. Read it all.