A scheduled Hamas Zoom webinar was canceled by Zoom after it was exposed on Thursday.
The Jerusalem Post alerted the business communication company that the meeting would break company policy. It was to have featured Hossam Badran, a top Hamas official and other terrorists spreading what the newspaper said was propaganda.
This week, Hamas said it would continue to attack in operations like Oct. 7 until there was no longer an Israel.
The webinar was to be multilingual and intended for both US and European audiences. In this case, Zoom has demonstrated its dedication to stopping the use of its platform to promote terrorism, reinforcing the company’s zero-tolerance policy on the encouragement or dissemination of violent extremism, the Post reported.
Zoom’s Trust and Safety department confirmed the cancellation, telling the Post, “We have determined that the webinar featuring Hossam Badran is in violation of our Acceptable Use Guidelines, and as a result, we have shut down this specific meeting.”
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The intended webinar was supposed to give Badran, a former commander of the brutal Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades in Hamas during the Second Intifada, a forum to speak to audiences in different parts of the world. Hamas is officially designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union, among others.
The swift action taken by Zoom is in line with its Terrorism and Violent Extremism Policy, which makes it explicitly illegal for “accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.” The guidelines state that “There is no place for terrorist or violent extremist groups on Zoom, or for those who affiliate with them or promote their activities.”
Zoom previously canceled a 2020 webinar featuring Leila Khaled, a member of a Palestinian terrorist group who took part in two plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice