[News] Google Sparks Outrage by Abolishing Palestine on Maps

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Google-Sparks-Outrage-by-Abolishing-Palestine-on-Maps-20160808-0008.html 



  Google Sparks Outrage by Abolishing Palestine on Maps

August 8, 2016

Journalists and activists have excoriated Google for wiping Palestine 
completely off its map app, depicting the entire occupied Palestinian 
territories as part of the state of Israel.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Forum initiated an online campaign to 
pressure the internet giant to reconsider its stance. The organization 
accused Google of being “part of the Israeli scheme to establish its 
name as a legitimate state for generations to come and abolish Palestine 
once and for all.”

“The move is also designed to falsify history, and geography as well as 
the Palestinian people’s right to their homeland, and a failed attempt 
to tamper with the memory of Palestinians and Arabs as well as the 
world,” the statement continued.

In response, critics on Twitter have used the hashtag #BoycottGoogle to 
condemn the company. A petition on Change.org urging Google to put 
Palestine back on the map has garnered 147,402 signatures as of Monday, 
just shy of its 150,000 goal.

“The omission of Palestine is a grievous insult to the people of 
Palestine and undermines the efforts of the millions of people who are 
involved in the campaign to secure Palestinian independence and freedom 
from Israeli occupation and oppression,” reads the petition.

“Whether intentionally or otherwise, Google is making itself complicit 
in the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” it continues.

In 2013, hackers replaced the homepage on Google’s local domain in 
Palestine with a message calling for the company to remove the name 
Israel from its map app and replace it with Palestine, arguing that the 
state of Israel is illegal.

Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, which forcibly 
displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians, Israel has further shrunk 
Palestinian territories by seizing vast swaths of land. Israel has 
expanded illegal settlements on tens of thousands of hectares since 
occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

The United Nations recognizes the state of Palestine with the status of 
a non-member observer state.

-- 
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