Egyptian Mona Seif has been nominated for what is known as the “Nobel Prize for Human Rights,” the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.  The nominee was chosen by a panel of human rights organizations which include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights First and the International Service for Human Rights.

Seif was nominated in her capacity as one of the main founders of an Egyptian grassroots organization, “No to Military Trials for Civilians,” which started a national movement bringing together lawyers, activists, the families of victims and other interested parties all of whom oppose what they insist are the inappropriate restrictions of Egyptian military trials for civilians who should not be encumbered with such restrictions.

Seif, along with others who sought to resist the freedom restrictions imposed by Egyptian president Mubarak, used social media to broadcast the oppressive moves of the Egyptian government, and helped mobilize protesters and supporters to join her in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution in January 2010 – February 2011.  In the post-Mubarak Egyptian world Seif has continued monitoring and broadcasting actions of the post-Revolutionary Egyptian government.

But the 27 year old biology graduate student has a darker side.  Although fully able and energized to advocate for Egyptian rights and freedoms, at the same time Seif gleefully tweets about blowing up gas pipelines to Israel.

This dualism is one that we have seen repeated with young Egyptian human and civil rights advocates.  Several times over the past year the West has at first applauded, and sought to laud, young Egyptian women activists whose pursuits came to the attention of the West because of their social media skills.  But each time, a darker side has been revealed, one that, once exposed, brought disgrace not only to the activist.  It also reflected poorly on those whose due diligence failures revealed an over-eagerness to reward non-Western activists.  The problem is that the activism of these particular individuals was animated solely by a desire to benefit those similarly situated, but who were just as willing as their own oppressors to vilify and deny rights to others.

A good example of this propensity was when First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry almost gave the “Secretary of State Woman of Courage Award” to an Egyptian woman, Samira Ibrahim, in early March.  Ibrahim, like Seif, was a Twitter activist in support of Egyptian rights, but Ibrahim also supported terrorism and the murder of Americans and Israelis.

However, just hours before Obama and Kerry were to present Ibrahim with the Award, the decision was cancelled (postponed they said at the time) after a relentless chorus of horror rose up to stop them.  It was social media that almost swept in Ibrahim as an honored activist by American leadership.  However, a wave of disgust towards Ibrahim who had tweeted praise for the murders of Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, extolled the terrorist bombing that killed 5 Israelis and a Bulgarian last summer, and praised Hitler, swept her back out just before the awards ceremony.

Turning back to Seif, a look at her social media accounts before selecting her as a potential recipient of such an important human rights award should have been standard procedure.  After all, she was well known and was brought to the attention of the human rights organizations precisely because of her extensive and sophisticated social media activity.  Perhaps after this fiasco social media searches will become de rigueur for all sophisticated due diligence efforts.

Because Seif’s Twitter account reveals a propensity to express the most vulgar kind of hatred towards Israel, both in terms of how she expresses herself: #F[expletive deleted]Israel is a popular choice, as well as the substance of her messages, which advocate terrorism against the Jewish State and which harshly criticize Human Rights organizations which dare to suggest the terrorist group Hamas should refrain from killing Israeli civilians.

Tweets of Mona Seif encouraging blowing up gas pipeline between Egypt and Israel, and using vulgar and violent hashtag.

In addition, Seif is sloppy with her facts and fails to remove slanderous falsehoods even after they’ve been definitively exposed.  An example of this is when she sent a picture on Twitter of a man mourning the murder of his small child, which she blamed on Israel.

A French Jewish group which last month sued Twitter for hosting anti-Semitic content has lodged a fresh complaint against the company and accused it of lying.

The latest complaint by the Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF, was filed on April 12 with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office against Twitter President and Director Dick Costolo. UEJF and another group, J’ACCUSE, said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or violence toward Jews.”

The complaint concerns tweets which appear on Twitter and which call for killing Jews and praising the Holocaust. UEJF last month sued Twitter for $50 million after Twitter failed to honor a ruling from January by a French judge who ordered the company to divulge within 14 days details of users who posted anti-Semitic statements. The ruling was on a lawsuit brought by UEJF against Twitter, an American California-based company.

France and other European countries have laws against hate speech that are considerably stricter than in the U.S., where the First Amendment to the Constitution is more lax on free speech.

In its ruling, the Paris court also ordered Twitter to set up a system for flagging and removing such messages, but UEJF said Twitter has not complied.

Additionally, UEJF accused Twitter of lying when it reportedly announced in October that it will remove similar tweets. The tweets are still available to any user who does not self-identify as being French, UEJF said.

Despite the tweets still being available, Le Nouvel Observateur reported in October that Twitter announced it had removed the tweets. It followed public outrage that erupted after the phrase #UnBonJuif (meaning “AGoodJew”) became the third most popular hashtag on French Twitter thanks to what Le Monde termed “a competition of anti-Semitic jokes” that evolved around it.

Twitter did not respond to JTA’s request for a comment on the latest Union of Jewish Students of France complaint.

Twitter is being sued for about $50 million in France for failing to honor a court ruling which ordered it to identify users who posted anti-Semitic hate speech.

The Union of Jewish French Students, or UEJF by its French acronym, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday with a Paris correctional tribunal, according to the French news agency AFP.

UEJF President Jonathan Hayoun said his organization filed the lawsuit because the California-based website has “ignored” a civil court ruling from Jan. 24, which gave Twitter two weeks to comply with UEJF’s demand that Twitter identify people who broke France’s laws against hate speech.

As an American company, Twitter argued in court that it adheres to U.S. laws and protected by the First Amendment and the broad free speech liberties it ensures. But the judge said that comments by Internet users in France are subject to France’s stricter legislation against racist and hateful expression.

“Twitter is playing the indifference card and does not respect the ruling,” Hayoun told AFP on Wednesday. “They have resolved to protect the anonymity of the authors of these tweets and have made themselves accomplices to racists and anti-Semites.”

UEJF sued Twitter last year shortly after the hashtag “unBonJuif,” French for “aGoodJew,” became the third most popular on French Twitter. A hashtag is a phrase which, when preceded by the symbol #, is used to index relevant tweets. Many users posted Holocaust jokes and calls to kill Jews under #UnBoJuif.

UEJF wants to deposit any damages it is awarded in a trial against Twitter with an organization working to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, AFP reported.

Atheist-for-hire and Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins has managed to outrage yet another religion after calling Muslims “barbarians,” the Daily Mail reported.

Dawkins, whose “The God Delusion” declared that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion (“when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”), Dawkins was condemning the severe damage caused by Islamist extremists to a sacred library in Timbuktu, Mali, telling his 600,000 Twitter followers on Tuesday: “Like Alexandria, like Bamiyan, Timbuktu’s priceless manuscript heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians.”

On Monday it was reported that Islamists burned down the Ahmed Baba Institute library, with its priceless manuscripts and artifacts. The source for the reports was Timbuktu’s mayor Ousmane Halle, who said: “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”

But a source in the University of Cape Town insisted on Wednesday that the extremists had only had time to damage or steal a few manuscripts, before they were forced out of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu residents reported that there was no destruction of any library or collection, according to Cape Town U., which has sponsored a modern facility to house the precious manuscripts.

Richard Dawkins is an equal opportunity insultor, and last year U.K. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks last year condemned a “profoundly anti-Semitic” comment in Professor Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” which likened the God portrayed in Jewish texts to a fictional villain.

Dawkins responded at the time that he was “anti-God,” not “anti-Jewish,” calling Rabbi Sacks accusation “ridiculous.”

Ancient Islamic manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, Mali.

Dan Senor, American author of Start Up Nation and former adviser to U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, sent out an electrifying message on Israel’s election day, January 22, claiming that two U.S. officials in Israel quietly conceded that President Obama’s statements to Atlantic columnist Jeffrey Goldberg were an intentional effort to hurt Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in the election.

If what Senor claims is true, and President Obama was attempting to influence the Israeli election, it is possible that it could become the subject of a congressional investigation.

The statements at issue were revealed in an article Goldberg wrote for Bloomberg on January 14.  That article, the headline of which was, “Obama: Israel Doesn’t Know What its Best Interests Are,” was filled with insider dish from Goldberg, and it was ugly.

Among the things that Goldberg claimed Obama has said about Netanyahu were that his policies were “self-defeating,” that “Israel doesn’t know what its own interests are,” and that “Netanyahu is moving his country down the path toward near-total isolation.”  Goldberg wrote that Obama made these comments frequently, and to several people.

The particular impetus for Obama’s dissing of the Israeli Prime Minister, according to Goldberg, was the decision to go ahead with building Jewish homes in Mevaseret Adumim (often referred to by the impersonal designation “E1.”)  The decision to go forward with building in this area came on the heels of the United Nations vote upgrading the status of the Palestinian Authority to non-member observer state in November of last year.

Goldberg, a centrist liberal Jewish writer who is considered to have credible access to the White House, opined in his article that

On matters related to the Palestinians, the president seems to view the prime minister as a political coward, an essentially unchallenged leader who nevertheless is unwilling to lead or spend political capital to advance the cause of compromise.

It is tempting to believe that Goldberg suffers from excessive hubris and confused his own views for that of the president’s.  But Senor’s tweet reveals that U.S. officials understood that what President Obama was doing was issuing a not so subtly veiled threat to the Israeli people that the U.S. may be willing to really put daylight between itself and Israel unless they choose a less intractable prime minister.

This is the Senor message and several responses.

Posting on Twitter, the IDF spokesperson outlined its five central resolutions for 2013, describing 2012 as a challenging year for Israel’s security. “Our soldiers faced many threats, from terrorist agents on Israel’s borders to rocket fire targeting civilians,” related the official IDF blog.

One of those soldiers was Captain Ziv Shilon, who lost a hand after a Hamas-planted bomb exploded on him during a routine patrol of the Gaza border. The bomb mangled the IDF company commander’s right hand. Despite the horrific injury, Captain Shilon stated that, while rehabilitation “was a long journey,” he was staying optimistic and planning to return to his soldiers once he recovered.

The first IDF resolution was, naturally, to provide security for the people of Israel.

In another resolution, the IDF firmly declared that it would stand ready for every possible threat.

That statement was recently tested during the rocket fire escalation during last November’s Operation Pillar of Defense, when the Iron Dome system became a huge asset in preventing Gaza rockets from striking heavily populated cities in Israel. The IDF soldiers behind the Iron Dome’s operation were the key to its success. One of them, a French-born Corporal Lolly, was defending Tel Aviv from incoming rockets. The Iron Dome system intercepted incoming rockets threatening Tel Aviv, helping to protect more than 1.5 million citizens.

Lolly is a lone soldier who says she knew early on that she wanted to work with the Iron Dome system. “From the minute I heard about the Iron Dome system, it was clear to me that is where I would serve, taking an active part in protecting the lives of Israeli citizens,” she stated on the official IDF blog.

In addition to protecting Israel’s borders and civilian population, the IDF also promised this New Year to carry out and prepare rescue missions for countries struck by natural disasters. The IDF’s Home Front Command Search and Rescue Unit (SAR) has been providing aid to people suffering from natural disasters across the world for more than 20 years.

Created in February 1992, the Search and Rescue Unit has assisted with disaster zones in 14 countries, including Japan, Turkey, Haiti and Armenia. In total, the IDF has sent 15 aid delegations, providing direct medical care to more than 2,300 people and saving a total of 220 lives. Made up of reserve soldiers and physicians from the Home Front Command Search and Rescue Unit, the unit is renowned across the world for its effective emergency response assistance.

The last two IDF resolutions include strengthening cooperation with allies and developing cutting-edge technology.

Reported:

Now the official Twitter account of the Israel Defense Forces’ live-tweeting its assault on Hamas may well be the most meaningful change in our consumption of war in over 20 years. This is something new…

…The other thing that makes this new, besides routing around the traditional media, is that we’re looking at a stream. This is truly war in real time. We’ve watched war “live” before, but not like this: There are no commercial breaks, no talking heads, no ticker tape running at the time. It is as unending and infinite and microsecond by microsecond as the speaker wants it to be, limited only by Twitter’s current technical limits.

Most importantly, though, consider this: A country can declare — via Twitter — that it is at war. If that doesn’t make the Internet real, I don’t know what does.

And there’s Flickr.

Join the battle.

Visit My Right Word.

A Twitter account which alleges itself to be the “The official web site of Al Qassam Brigades in Palestine” is simul-tweeting its military responses to Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense (“Amud Anan”) for its almost 4,000 followers.

Tweeting 8 times in half as many hours, Al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, warned that “Occupation opned (sic) hell gates on itself” following the targeted killing of terror mastermind Ahmad Jabari, and responded to a tweet by the IDF Spokesman “We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead” with “@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)”