Every now and then we can just kick back and enjoy a good laugh at ??level news reporting by an absolute joke of a journalist, but this time I have found one who's incompetence will leave you in awe, or who's shameless attempts at distortion will make you puke??. You be the judge which of the two it is, just take a look at this headline "Israel Seizes Nearly 200 ISIS and Hamas-Linked BINANCE Accounts
What actually happened is so far off with this almost demented warped level of reality this "reporter" has, I suspected her to be one of those "social media fact checkers" before taking up journalism. But no, before all this she was just spreading brain dead level propaganda at the Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, Washington Post and NBC. Chapeau mainstream media, you sure know how to pick em.
Wow, the terrorist group isis/daesh are still at it huh? Good thing Israel is there to save the day and "confiscate Binance accounts", or whatever that means. Only a madman or terrorist sympathizer would not applaud this headline right? Except for the fact that the accounts Binance cooperated with and voluntarily locked on Israel's request had literally isis/daesh linked accounts, the other 99% were either completely irrelevant to isis/daesh, in no way funding "terrorism" or were basically just Palestinian. The joke article in question mumbled something about how Israel is labeling the Palestinian firms which were associated with the Binance accounts as terrorists, but that's like the pot calling the kettle black.
Now to make matters more complicated and confusing, this ??post is based on the Reuters article which at least did accurately state how two of the almost 200 accounts were isis/daesh affiliated, but even that Reuters article was so vastly distorted it prompted Binance to write a response as they felt a need to rectify it's false claims: "Once again, the same reporter at Reuters is deliberately leaving out critical facts to fit their narrative. This time, they’ve raised questions about our compliance policies for preventing and tackling cryptocurrency-based financing of terrorism....The bottom-line is that we are not aware of any exchange – or other financial institution for that matter – that does more today to keep bad actors off their platform than Binance....We even have specialists on our team who have focused their entire careers on counter-terrorism."
So there you have it, journalism 2023 is like that repeating circle/Chinese whisper game where a statement is written on a piece of paper which you whisper in the ear of the person sitting next to you, who repeats to the next person it till everyone in the circle passed the info on and by the end, everyone changed it so much it sometimes has 0.0 relevance to the initial statement.
But Binance also said something in their response that didn't sit well with me: "it's important to clarify that bad actors don't register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises. This is why our team collaborates with law enforcement, and leverages information that is only available to them in order to identify individuals operating accounts for illicit organizations." I remember this quote from way back when I was just a kid, at the time we only took it literal and thought it meant we had to get physically more fit and strong to keep the older kids from taking things from us, but the older I got the more I realized how profound and relevant it was on numerous levels. I'm just paraphrasing it to the best of my recollection, but it was something like "Even if you only want what is rightfully yours, it's important to have more power than rights." If you know the exact saying or who initially said it then please do share.
But getting back OT, who is Binance to decide in an almost century old war who the "bad actors" are? It doesn't even qualify as a war since Palestine has no army, no air force nor single plane, no military hardware, no navy and not even in control of their own shores. Does Binance consider the pilots and soldiers who bombed and shot almost a dozen children to death these past few weeks alone "good actors"? Is CZ also making sure the accounts of these war criminals are locked and they are not to hodling any crypto on Binance, or is it just the Palestinians who are being excluded due to the ongoing carnage in that particular region? I'm going to take a wild guess and say no and that Binance is just adhering to the will of the bigger power between the two, not who is right or wrong, which is why IMO centralized exchanges are a major liability.
OK that's getting a bit too far down the rabbit hole, I didn't start this topic to discuss the entire Israel/Palestine issue. All I can say on that is if you this year alone, in less than five months, mass murdered over 200 innocent civilians, most of which in their sleep by indiscriminately bombing entire buildings at night because two "suspected Islamic Jihadist" were in said building, you're in no position to label others "terrorists".
