By Mohsin Khan
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, can be outrageously unpredictable. He has shown it on numerous occasions in recent weeks, cunningly invoking words such as “genocide.”
“At risk of stating the obvious, anyone advocating the genocide of *any* group will be suspended from this platform,” the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who bought X last year, wrote on Saturday.
In response, social media users interrogated him and reminded him of many Zionists who have been openly calling for the genocide of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip on X.
“If that’s true, why didn’t you suspend this GENOCIDAL ZIONIST,” asked Jackson Hinkle, a social media influencer who has been fervently tweeting in support of Palestinians in recent weeks.
Hinkle was referring to an X user named Yakavolf, who made a deeply provocative post on X.
“Flatten everything. Spare no school, no children’s hospital, no old-age home. Delete their entire gene pool off the face of the earth,” wrote the Zionist hate-monger.
Musk had no answer to Hinkle or other X users who replied to his tweet.
The X boss was echoing what he tweeted earlier on Saturday amid the controversy he generated with another tweet that was deemed “anti-Semitic” by pro-Israel lobbies in Washington.
“As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide,” Musk tweeted, in a clear attempt to appease the Zionist lobby.
“Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.”
These tweets came after the European Union, Apple, Disney, IBM, Lionsgate and others announced that they were stopping advertisements on X over Musk’s “anti-Semitic” posts.
It came as a rude shock to Musk as his social media network has reportedly seen a 54 percent drop in advertising revenue since he took over, as advertisement revenue previously accounted for 90 percent of the social media giant’s total revenue.
Earlier this week, Musk endorsed a post by user @breakingbaht that said “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
“The actual truth,” the world’s richest person in response to the tweet.
Apart from advertisers running away from Musk, the White House also issued a strongly-worded statement, clearly under the pressure of pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States.
“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” a White House spokesman said on Friday.
The European Commission, in a statement on Friday, also announced that it was halting advertisements over the “alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech.”
“This is about advertisement campaigns — for these, we continuously assess and evaluate the media environment for our campaigns in view of our communication objectives,” the spokesman said.
Stung by the growing criticism, Musk took a step back and warned that pro-Palestine content will be suspended, or in other words, those calling for an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza will face the axe.
While genocide cheerleaders such as those calling for “flattening schools, children’s hospitals and age-old homes” in the besieged coastal strip have their accounts running without any restrictions, those calling for a halt to bloodletting and occupation are going to be suspended by Musk.
The first voices that should be censored are those calling for the genocide of Palestinians, cheering the Zionist killing machine as it continues its murderous campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Musk, who has projected himself as an advocate of free speech, must stand on the right side of history.
Mohsin Khan is a Pakistani journalist and activist based in Karachi.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
