Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Is Yahoo! Inc. anti-Semitic?



Shares in Force Protection Inc. (FRPT-$6.82) fell steadily in Tuesday's trading, closing down 66 cents, or almost 9 percent in value.

Tuesday's slide in the stock of the armored vehicle maker added to the sell off that started in late November after the U.S. Marine Corps announced that it
would cut its orders of bomb-resistant transports.

The 'patriotic' bulls who remain long the stock first blamed short-sellers, ‘Mad-Money’ Jim Cramer, and the
10Q Detective for the decline in Force Protection’s market value—as if we were conspiring to drive the share price down.

As that aspersion to our honesty failed to win a following—some bullish investors have taken to blaming the Jews. To quote from a posting on a Yahoo! Finance message board: "The @#$%en Jews did this to FPI…. Bring back the NAZIS to finish the job."

Granted, the same buffoons probably take the forged
Protocols of the Elders of Zion as gospel.

Nonetheless, the 10Q Detective fired off a complaint to the customer service division of the Internet Service Provider, reporting a violation of Yahoo’s obscenity policy.

The response received from Yahoo! Customer Care: take advantage of the Profanity Filter to remove the [offending] language from [your] viewing environment?

Sadly, Yahoo’s enforcement of 'censorship' applies only in selective cases that might adversely impact its profitability.

In April 2005, Shi Tao, 37, working for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

I see a world where Yahoo is a place that consumers love. ~ Yahoo! Inc. CEO Jerry Yang (July 2007)

His crime? Tao was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites an e-mail text of an internal Communist Party message (about Chinese government initiatives to prevent commemorations of the 15th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square), according to
Amnesty International.

You must treat all Yahoo! people, customers, suppliers and others with respect and dignity. ~
Yahoo! Guide to Business Conduct & Ethics

The evidence that led to Shi Tao's sentencing? Yahoo! freely provided Chinese investigators with information that helped link Shi Tao's personal e-mail account and the text of the message to his computer.

A free man sold out for speaking the truth and the expressed tolerance of hate speech—Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO-$24.47) only feigns the respect and dignity of its people, customers, and others. This indifference suggests the Internet company’s business conduct is greed—not ethics.
Editor David J. Phillips does not hold a financial interest in any stocks mentioned in this article. The 10Q Detective has a Full Disclosure Policy.

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