-----Original Message----- From: ei [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 8:18 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ei] Action Item: Yahoo! Sports makes Palestine's Olympians disappear
_______________________________ UPDATE FROM THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA http://electronicIntifada.net 26 August 2004 -- 6:15PM CST _______________________________ YAHOO! SPORTS MAKES PALESTINE'S OLYMPIANS DISAPPEAR Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry The Electronic Intifada, 26 August 2004 The Internet information service Yahoo! has omitted information about Palestine's athletes competing in the 2004 Olympics at Athens. Yahoo! has extensive Olympics coverage, one of the features of which is a search engine that allows users to look up any athlete by name or to look up all the athletes representing a country - except that the athletes from Palestine are mysteriously missing. Although "Palestine" is listed in the menu of competing countries, selecting it to search for the names of its athletes produces "No Results." Picking any other country returns a list of athletes from that country. Searching for the Palestinian athletes by last name also yields "No Results." According to the official website of the Athens 2004 Olympics, there are four athletes representing Palestine at the games, and Palestine is listed along with all the other National Olympic Committees. They are, Sanna Abubkheet (Athletics), the flag-bearer for Palestine in the opening ceremony, who lives in Gaza and competed in the women's 800 metre race; Abdalsalam Aldabaji (Athletics); Sofia Sakorafa, originally of Greece (Athletics); and Ra'ad Aweisat of Jerusalem (Swimming). List of Palestinian athletes: <http://www.athens2004.com/en/ParticipantsAthletes/newParticipants?disciplin e=&noc=PLE&name=> Palestinian Olympic Committee information: <http://www.athens2004.com/en/ParticipantsCommittees/newParticipants?pid=PLE > Aweisat, who was the first swimmer to represent Palestine in the Olympics, did not do as well as he wanted to, but he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio after his race, "I swam for myself and for my country, not just for myself. Maybe in Beijing I can do something if I have got facility [sic] and very good coach and everybody, everybody help me." Aweisat also described the considerable challenges he faces training with poor facilities under foreign military occupation. Yet on the Yahoo! results page for the 19 August 100 metre mens butterfly in which he competed, Aweisat is the only athlete listed with no country next to his name: http://sports.yahoo.com/oly/swimming/results?day=19 Unlike keyword-based search engines such as Google, Internet search directories such as Yahoo! bear special responsibility for accuracy as they seek to guide users to information via a proprietary indexing system. For several years, until the intervention of then-Birzeit University Public Relations Office employee Nigel Parry in the 1990s, there was no Yahoo! regional category for Palestine, and Palestinian sites were listed under "Israel". Yahoo!'s compromise at the time was to create a "Palestinian Authority" regional category, clearly still problematic as this avoided associating any actual geographic area with the Palestinian national identity. The Yahoo! Sports exclusion of Palestine is either a simple oversight or a more sinister commentary on the 'appropriateness' of Palestinian Olympic inclusion by Yahoo!'s editors. Either way it is unacceptable. EI invites visitors to contact Yahoo! Sports at http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/sports/cgi_feedback citing the lack of information about Palestine's Olympic Team on Yahoo! Sports and noting that the Official Olympic website offers this information at http://www.athens2004.com/en/ParticipantsCommittees/newParticipants?pid=PLE. Please keep your letters polite and brief. 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