US media is reporting that an Israeli legal group is putting pressure on Cloudflare, a US website security firm, to stop doing business with Hamas. According to the Washington Times report:
August 30, 2017 An Israeli legal group is putting pressure on Cloudflare to stop doing business with terrorist groups, questioning why the web company was quick to oust a white supremacist website but still hosts accounts linked to Hamas.
Cloudflare cut ties with the Daily Stormer earlier this month, saying the website violated company policy by claiming to have support of Cloudflare.
Company CEO Matthew Prince said at the time that he was afraid of the standard he was setting, and promised to work through the issues.
Now he’s getting his first test as Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, president of the Israeli legal center Shurat HaDin, says Cloudflare is still serving many websites linked to Hamas and other designated terrorist organizations, which have amassed higher body counts than American neo-Nazi sympathizers.
She said while Cloudflare’s decision to cut off Daily Stormer was a choice, the company has legal obligations — which it might be violating — to stop providing assistance to U.S.-designated terrorist groups.
‘This is not a matter of free speech. We are urging the company to comply with U.S. law,’ she said in a letter to Mr. Prince. ‘By providing Hamas support, Cloudflare aids and abets terrorist attacks and makes itself liable for the dangerous violence being perpetrated.’
She said her group is considering taking legal action against Cloudflare if it doesn’t satisfy her request.”
Read the rest here.
In March 2015, GMBDW reported that Hamas had launched a new website that according to our own research was operating on an IP address that although registered in Singapore, belonged to a block of IP addresses registered to CloudFlare, Inc., a US-based company that provides technology designed to provide websites with enhanced protection, speed, and availability and is perhaps best known for its technological defense against so-called “denial of service attacks.” Although CloudFlare has claimed that it does not actually host sites for Hamas, US federal law states:
Whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both…
However, the CloudFlare CEO has denied in the past that his company is providing such material support to Hamas, stating:
Both sides have an absolute right to tell their story,” said Prince, a 38-year old former lawyer. “We’re not providing material support for anybody. We’re not sending money, or helping people arm themselves.” Prince noted that his company only provides defensive capabilities that enable websites to stay online. “We can’t be sitting in a role where we decide what is good or what is bad based on our own personal biases,” he said. “That’s a huge slippery slope.”
This is not the first time that the GMBDW has discovered Hamas or Hamas-related servers located in the US. Unpublished GMBDW research some years back determined that the Union of Good, a Hamas fund-raising network headed by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi, was also operating from servers located in the US. In 2004, an Israeli military intelligence website reported that ThePlanet.com, a company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, was hosting a Hamas magazine being published from London.
The Hamas charter says that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and soon after Hamas took over the Gaza strip.
For more on Hamas, go here.