Facebook has taken down the Jerusalem Prayer Team (JPT) page, which was founded in 2002 and has over 75 million followers.
According to Michael "Mike" Evans Jr., who has been leading thousands to pray for Israel amid the conflict with Hamas, the FB page has been a target of radical Islamists.
"There was an organized attempt by radical Islamic organizations to achieve this objective. They posted over a million comments on our site, and then had people contact Facebook saying that they never posted to the site. That was a complete scam and fraud. It was a very clever, deceptive plan by Islamic radicals," he told CBN News.
The blow came in the heat of an ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas and other Islamic factions.
Evans has been leading tens of thousands of people in daily prayer for Israel and the present Middle East turmoil.
There were two types of assault, CBN noted.
The first step was to launch a direct effort to get the page removed from the internet.
Many postings on Facebook and YouTube urged people to report the JPT Facebook page to Facebook and put pressure on the social network to ban JPT"s page from its platform.
The second assault came in the form of a misinformation campaign claiming that Facebook established the JPT Page amid the present crisis and is pushing people to like it even if they do not want to.
Several videos with thousands of views, as well as Twitter posts, lauded the takedown of the JPT Facebook page.
The Jordanian hacker Ahmed Sale, dubbed "Bani Hashem Electronic Sagr," was reportedly able to shut down the "Jerusalem Prayer Team," a Facebook group with 76 million users supporting the Zionist movement.
One post stated: #Congratulations to all viewers. "This Jerusalem prayer Team of Yahodi (Jewish) page has been disabled/removed successfully from facebook."
In addition, a YouTube video questions JPT"s big Facebook following, implying that the number of likes was falsified.
According to JPT, they have requested that Facebook reinstate their page.
Facebook said that the process was "Complete" and that "These Pages were deleted by our system due to being not Policy Compliant. Sadly, we can't review appeals at this time due to a shortage in reviewers caused by the Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Since you are unable to access the Page, this means that the appealing is no longer an option. There"s no further action that we can take for these Pages. Please consider this decision final."
JPT hopes that this is merely a scripted response and not an official decision. The website still states that it is being reviewed.
CBN News has also contacted Facebook about the incident and inquired as to why the page was removed.
"Facebook got caught with its pants down," Evans said. "Facebook has been accused of being biased towards conservative media sources. This is a prime example of bias on steroids. It's, in my opinion, cyber terrorism based upon racism."
"I've contacted Senator friends, such as Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, my dear friend, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner, and dozens of other political leaders to assist me with this fraudulent scheme to damage our good work."
Evans flew to Israel this week to host a televised program at the Friends of Zion Museum media center in Jerusalem.
Several notable guests will make appearances on the televised program.
Actors Jon Voight and Pat Boone, Pastor Robert Jeffress, Pastor Jack Graham, Franklin Graham, Gov. Mike Huckabee, Paula White-Cain, former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and others are among the participants.
"The event that I"m hosting in Jerusalem will be released to the global media to counter the lies at are being told about the war. Israel is indeed winning the war, but Israel is also losing the media war through secular leftist media that is believing the lies of radical Islam."
Evans headed to the Gaza border to see firsthand the war in which Hamas and other Islamic factions have launched roughly 4,000 rockets into southern and central Israel, as well as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
