Last Thursday, Google put up a special Roald Dahl logo on its main page google.com to celebrate the birthday of the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
“Google has decided to remove its Doodle of Roald Dahl based on user concerns,” a spokeswoman for Google said in a statement.
There was no explanation as to what the user concerns actually were, but the New York Sun speculates that it might have been due to allegations that Roald Dahl was anti-semitic, and that the timing of the logo also coincided with Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah which started at sundown the day before.
Roald Dahl, who died in 1990, was accused of anti-Semitism in the 1980s after he wrote a book review in which he was highly critical of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, saying he was “anti-Israel,” according to press reports.
Reports have come in that the logo was apparently removed from the US version of the website while google.co.uk continued to display the image for sometime, even I remember seeing the image on the Pakistan version of Google search engine google.com.pk, with no idea if it was actually removed on this side of the world.
Comments
5 responses to “Google Criticized for Honoring Anti-Israel’ Author”
Todays world is so paranoid about antisemitism . Dahl was not anti antisemitism . We need to distinguish between criticizing Israeli policies and antisemitism . I find it US and Pro-Israeli countries strategy of labeling people “anti-semite” to counter their criticisms of Israeli policy .
Sergey Brin is jew too.
laa la lala laaa
Hey where are those HUMAN RIGHT activist now who never tire lecturing on free speech and all that ?
Shame on you google.
Awab! You just proved yourself to be anti-semitic by reporting this incident. The West is now going to attack you and demand apologies.
/sarcasm
Criticizing Israeli foreign policy renders you as an antisemitic? Great!