Last Friday, PayPal suspended Pamela Gellar's Atlas Shrugs blog because it supposedly violated PayPal's terms of use: "PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime."
Gellar's crime? Apparently, it was soliciting donations to fund bus ads offering protection and support for people seeking to leave Islam. The punishment for "apostates" from Islam is death, and it's been meted out to many such apostates, including some in the U.S. There is a very legitimate need for such a service on basic humanitarian grounds.
PayPal's criteria for enforcing its terms of use seem to be rather lacking in coherence and consistency, as noted by PajamasMedia's Patrick Richardson:
In the meantime, as PJM’s Richard Fernandez reported earlier, Revolution Muslim was still being served by PayPal. Revolution Muslim is a site which, among other things, called for the murder of South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit and has a picture of President Barak Obama as Adolf Hitler.
“I got called a hate site and yet Revolution Muslim threatens death to the Comedy Central producers and they still take PayPal,” she said. Geller added that the DVDs of Imam Anwar al Awlaki, a jihadist cleric who has been linked to Major Nidal Hasan, the alleged Ft. Hood shooter, are for sale on eBay and can be purchased using PayPal.
“If the real killers can take PayPal then what’s the point of the hate site designation?” Geller asked. Her two other sites were likewise restricted and faced termination of their PayPal accounts. Those sites are for her two nonprofit organizations, Stop the Islamization of America and the Freedom Defense Initiative.
On Monday, someone from PayPal called Gellar and told her it was all just a "misunderstanding," and that she was OK with them. But by then, she'd already decided that PayPal wasn't OK by her. She's now using the alternative GPal service, which "does not discriminate based on the nature of your transaction," donates a portion of your transactions to the charity of your choice, and apparently was started by 2nd Amendment supporters.
Good for you, Pam! I have a PayPal account (don't use it all that much; mainly for online donations), but I'll open a GPal account and look for opportunities to use it instead of PayPal.