Tim Blair

SHMOGGER SHUTS DOWN

Some people -- perhaps those who’ve confessed to murdering captured, unarmed bus hijackers -- shouldn’t blog. Israelly Cool brings us the story of Likud’s Ehud Yatom, whose blogging career ended after just one post:

Internet surfers quickly discovered [Yatom’s] posting and began to respond with a wide variety of stinging comments, some of which related to Yatom’s role in killing two captured terrorists during the Bus 300 affair. Apparently, Yatom did not consider the fact that surfers can and do respond to blogs at their own will. Some surfers ignored the web's rules of etiquette and phrased their questions very directly. One asked, “I wanted to ask someone with your security experience, from Bus 300, ‘what is the acoustic effect of a human skull being shattered? How much voltage does it take to extract a confession’?”

Yatom isn’t exactly the first guy you’d put forward as the friendly face of Likud. Anyway, the site was quickly removed, and Yatom advisor Boaz Yaakobi took the blame, claiming the post was his own work:

This version is supported by MK Ehud Yatom’s comment, “I don’t even know what a blog-shmog is. When I left the Foreign Affairs Committee meeting today (Monday), my aide told be that he had posted an article that I wrote after the attack to something called ‘Israblog’. I told him, ‘How could you post it without my permission? What’s a blog? Take it down’.” He added that the claim that the article had been removed because of unpleasant response was a total lie.

(Incidentally, the main purpose of this item has been to further popularise the term “blog-shmog.”)

Posted by Tim Blair at February 25, 2004 12:05 AM