Yahoo Wipes 'Ariel, Israel' Off The Map, Replaces It With 'Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories'
Apparently someone has convinced Yahoo to go into their News Weather data, erase "Ariel, Israel" as a valid location, and replace it "Jenin, Occupied Territories".

by Omri Ceren, MereRhetoric.com
January 31, 2010

Ariel, Israel
 

Kudos to whatever seething, obsessive anti-Israel organization managed to sneak this in under the radar. Drip drip drip delegitimization of the Jewish State is after all the strategy du jour. But seriously? This is what we're doing now?

Apparently someone has convinced Yahoo to go into their News Weather data, erase "Ariel, Israel" as a valid location, and replace it "Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories." The 20,000 residents from Ariel, where the relevant weather station is built, apparently don't deserve their own weather. Yahoo has decreed that it belongs to the residents of Jenin, which is 25 miles north and 850 feet lower. It's absurd that this kind of petty crap even has to be addressed, but inasmuch as it's part and parcel of a broad-based replacement geography campaign it's unfortunately not trivial.

Someone should ask Yahoo if there's a list somewhere: which Israeli cities are Israelis allowed to keep, which do the Palestinians deign to let them share, which are entirely Palestinian, and which are simply unworthy of existing? Because given how they've gone out of their way to divide up Weather Channel data - more on that in a sec - apparently Israel's capital, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, and the city of Ariel are all in play.

As near as I can tell it was Reut Cohen who first reported that something was up. I've put the screencaps I reference at the end of this post for readability purposes:

Last night he called me to tell me that Ariel, Israel, which is an Israeli town near Jordan's west border, had been renamed... Rather than seeing the weather for Ariel [on Yahoo's weather widget], he saw "Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories" listed in its stead... It is unclear why the change was made, but it is clear that those who deny the right of Israel to exist consistently refer to all of Israel -- not just Ariel, Israel -- as occupied territories... It's this sort of blatant political revisionism of renaming Israeli cities that we are up against... When it comes to historic revisionism, the so-called myth of tolerance and acceptance of Middle Eastern Jewry is a perfect example of history re-written to suit the agenda of Arab Nationalists and/or Islamic Totalitarian organizations.

Here's where things get weird. Yahoo's weather widget just takes data from Yahoo's Weather site, which in turn gets its information from The Weather Channel. If you use The Weather Channel's weather.com to check what's going on in "Ariel, Israel" you get data from the weather station that - not coincidentally - is in Ariel. The Weather Channel doesn't have any data for "Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories," which makes sense since Jenin doesn't have a weather station.

The results are exactly the opposite on Yahoo Weather. There's nothing available for "Ariel, Israel." So if you're one of the 20,000 Israelis who live there, sorry. But there is a location named "Jenin, Occupied Palestinian Territories," which is what they're calling the data that is actually coming from Ariel.

Again: "Ariel, Israel" has been delisted as a real place and replaced by "Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories." That would be bad enough. But it's particularly absurd when the "Jenin" data is coming from a station that's in a city Yahoo refuses to provide the weather for. They're just intercepting the data and retagging the "name" field, so the Palestinians can feel included or justified or something.

Is this Yahoo's answer to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's declaration that the City of Ariel, Israel, is and always will be the ‘Jewish Capital of Samaria’, forever. Read the entire story here.