Athletes and Artists are urging fans to show their short-lived heartache with a two minute tweet of the hashtag #FreePalestine. Fans are then instructed to delete those gut reaction tweets, and then either replace them with meaningless tweets, or ones that are more Israel-friendly.
The drive for ephemeral sympathy was triggered by NBA player Dwight Howard when he tweeted #FreePalestine over the weekend. Howard almost immediately deleted the tweet and replaced it by the following:
I apologize if I offended anyone with my previous tweet, it was a mistake!
— Dwight Howard (@DwightHoward) July 12, 2014
“At first, I saw images of small children blown up to bits, and I was like – ‘That’s messed up!’ So I tweeted #FreePalestine,” said the 28-year-old center for the Houston Rockets.
“Then one of my teammates calls me, and then some exec. I guess I didn’t know all those babies were Hamas militants. I guess I didn’t know the facts.”
Howard urges people to do the same thing he did, which per Howard, is to tweet a call for more humane treatment of a civilian population, wait for an executive or fan-base to tell you how crazy you are for feeling that way, and then replace the original tweet with an apology.
At the time, Howard’s testicles were being squeezed by two men in suits.
Rihanna, who also participated in the ‘Tweet then Delete’ campaign, outlined the strategy.
“There’s a moment between feeling deeply saddened by the horrific scenes of women and children being killed… and your agent telling you to shut the f$%^ up. It’s in that moment that we all can ‘Tweet then Delete.'” said the Grammy award winning artist from Barbados.
She then walked away saying “ella, ella, ella.”
Numerous celebrities are expected to participate in ‘Tweet then Delete’ over the next few days.
