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U.S. Terror Victims File Suit Against Facebook for Failing to Block Palestinian Incitement

The families of five Americans recently killed or injured by Palestinian terrorists have filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing the terrorist group Hamas to incite violence on its network, the Times of Israel reported Monday.

The plaintiffs are seeking $1 billion in punitive damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows American citizens who are victims of overseas terrorist attacks to sue in U.S. federal courts.

Photo: Chaya Zissel BraunThe lead plaintiffs are the parents of 29-year-old U.S. Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student Taylor Force, who was stabbed to death by a Hamas terrorist while visiting Jaffa in March. Other plaintiffs include the parents of 16-year-old Naftali Fraenkel, who was among the three boys kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank in June 2014; the parents of three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun, who was killed during a car-ramming attack in Jerusalem in October 2014; the son of 76-year-old peace activist Richard Lakin, who was murdered during a shooting and stabbing attack in Jerusalem in October 2015; and Menachem Mendel Rivkin, who sustained serious injuries during a stabbing attack in the West Bank in January.

“Facebook has knowingly provided material support and resources to Hamas in the form of Facebook’s online social media network platform and communication services,” the plaintiffs said in a statement. “Hamas has used and relied on Facebook’s online social network platform and communications services as among its most important tools to facilitate and carry out its terrorist activity.”

Representing the plaintiffs are civil rights lawyer Robert Tolchin of New York and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of the Israel Law Center, who together filed a class-action lawsuit last October calling on Facebook to block Palestinian pages that incite violence against Jews.

The Israel Law Center released a video in January called “The big Facebook experiment,” which compared Facebook’s response to posts that incite violence against Palestinians and to those that incite violence against Jews. According to the center, Facebook promptly shut down the page that incited against Palestinians for violating its community standards, while the page inciting against Jews was not taken down.

Israeli officials have levied heavy criticism at Facebook for allowing Hamas-affiliated pages, such as the Shehab News Network, to post inciteful images and calls to violence against Jews. One of the most popular social media sites in the Palestinian territories, Shehab’s Arabic-language Facebook page has nearly 6 million followers.

Songs, videos, and graphics that glorify terrorist attacks often go viral on Palestinian social media. A video re-enacting a Palestinian shooting attack that claimed the lives of four people and wounded 16 others in Tel Aviv last month gained tens of thousands of views a day after the killings.

[Photo: Hasan Abadi / Facebook ]