USA Today reports that a Philadelphia man was arrested and charged with several crimes, including “making terroristic threats” and “corrupting the morals of a minor” after he appeared in a YouTube video encouraging viewers to kill cops.

The Daily News says members of a gun taskforce responded to Andre Moore’s appearance in the Dissin’ Philly Cops clip “by smashing a battering ram through the door of his West Philadelphia apartment.”

The Inquirer reports:

The video allegedly shows a man brandishing a large, silver semiautomatic pistol and calling Philadelphia police “nothing but a bunch of liars, especially the 18th District. . . . That’s why I rejoice whenever they shoot a cop in Philadelphia ’cause I hate them.”
According to a probable-cause affidavit, the man then removes the ammunition magazine from the gun, racks the slide, points the pistol at the camera, and pulls the trigger as he speaks.

“Look, it’s easy. . . . Get one in the chamber,” the affidavit quotes him as saying. “Boom. . . . When you shoot the cops you shoot them dead. OK? Anywhere in the head or heart.”

[...]YouTube yanked the video after Moore was arrested. A cached version of the page shows that 1,152 people watched the diatribe after it was posted on June 7.

And I think most people would agree that YouTube did the right thing — it’s just plain common sense not to allow videos encouraging people to commit murder to remain on YouTube.

Yet YouTube — or more accurately Google, which owns YouTube — doesn’t exactly have a consistent policy about videos that encourage violence.

In fact, Google recently rejected a call by U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to remove videos posted to YouTube by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations which he said “encouraged violence” and disseminated terrorist propaganda. Lieberman sent the letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt after a Senate report that showed terrorists’ increasing usage of the Internet to attract recruits.

From Lieberman’s letter:

In other words, Islamist terrorist organizations use YouTube to disseminate their propaganda, enlist followers, and provide weapons training – activities that are all essential to terrorist activity. According to testimony received by our Committee, the online content produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations can play a significant role in the process of radicalization, the end point of which is the planning and execution of a terrorist attack. YouTube also, unwittingly, permits Islamist terrorist groups to maintain an active, pervasive, and amplified voice, despite military setbacks or successful operations by the law enforcement and intelligence communities.

Google announced it had removed some videos which it said ”depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech,” but insisted that “most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.”

“While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view,” the site said of Lieberman.

“We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views.”

The problem with that, of course, is pretty cogently explained by Gabriel Weimann, of the University of Haifa, as he noted:

“One of the most alarming trends we found on the Internet recently is what we call ‘narrowcasting’,” said Weimann. “Terrorists are using the Internet to focus on children, very young children to attract young people to the ideology, and then later to the way of terrorism.”

The New York Times ran an editorial ripping Lieberman for his request, somewhat unbelievably arguing that it was “ludicrous” to “claim that the Internet promotes terrorism.”

Lieberman responded with a letter to the editor in which he hit back:

What is ludicrous is the claim that YouTube has been pressured to pull down videos just because I don’t like them. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are engaged in a wartime communications strategy to recruit, amass funds and inspire savage attacks against American troops and civilians. Their Internet videos are branded with logos, authenticating them as enemy communications. They are patent incitements to violence, not First Amendment-protected speech.

That seemed to be a good enough reason for YouTube to pull Moore’s cop-killing rant. But most al-Qaeda videos apparently don’t rise to that standard in the minds of YouTube’s censors.

This isn’t an isolated case. Google’s policy when it comes to censorship and removal of so-called “offensive” material is completely incoherent, as this list of actions indicates:

Michelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.
BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.
Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.
This Pornography Advertisement Uncensored. It doesn’t show actual full nudity or sex acts, but you definitely get the idea.
A Breast-Feeding Mother Censored over obscenity claims.
This Strip Tease Censored. A small area over the genitals remains covered for the duration of the minute and a half long strip tease. This video was removed the day after our editorial went live on the site. There are still hundreds more like it on the site, however.
An Egyptian Fellow Censored (then uncensored) for showing video evidence of local police brutality.
This GTA IV Ad Uncensored, despite depicting a police officer firing a gun into a crowd of civilians.

I would also add that in October of 2006, YouTube voluntarily censored videos containing depictions of Muhammed, as has continually censored many videos that are critical of Islam or speak negatively of Islamic-inspired terrorism on the grounds that they “offended” Muslim viewers.

Perhaps incredibly, the videos YouTube decided were “inflammatory” enough to be pulled mainly showed violent quotations cherry-picked from the Qur’an that critics said instructed Muslims to kill non-believers — the very same verses cited by al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremists in their propaganda videos that YouTube chose not to ban.

Yet on the flip side of that coin, Google refuses to censor anti-Semetic content except in countries where it falls under anti-Nazi laws such as in Germany and Austria.

“At Google, we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression,” Brand said. “Google is not and should not become the central arbiter of what does and does not appear on the Web. That’s for elected governments and courts to decide.”

But of course, Google is fine with enforcing the web censorship policies of non-elected governments, too — such as their well-known cooperation with Chinese authorities to censor sites on “sensitive” political topics like Taiwan and the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre.