Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org’s explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it’s not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] “antisemitic” language, or they might get in trouble.
- Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu’s genocidal fascist regime. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for “Death to Israel” or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I’ve also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all… mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It’s apparently “xenophobic” to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you’d prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that’s the better option, then we’ll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don’t really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
I think this will raise the chances of an echo chamber happening here, and I have not seen the Zionism that you are claiming it is be as widespread as you are claiming to be. I oppose until you can convince me otherwise.
I mean look here https://feddit.org/post/25654634 posting shit like
CW zionist shit
or general xenophobia like https://feddit.org/post/25654634/11476458
Hey, that one might be about me :3
Everything it’s in German so I have to get the translator, but it seems quite strange indeed. It’s a very heterogeneous group, people criticizing dbzero for supporting piracy, people not taking sides, but I didn’t see many people in favor of dbzero in that post.
Man, going into a German language thread to look for zionist apologia. What a way to start the day!
I do know a bit of the language, but using deepl, all I could find was that one dude who equated being pro-palestinian with being antisemitic. I know this is a tactic to silence the discussion, but aren’t we becoming the intolerants here?
The post has people being morose about the further fragmentation of the fediverse, the same as all the nays in this comment section. And the xenophobic comment you linked was at a -2 vote when I checked on it (but that could’ve been the extra attention it got from this thread, I don’t have the savvy to check who voted).
I have no doubt that they have a zero-tolerance policy for being anti-zionist. But it just makes me wonder, what if you are just pro-palestinian? Are these two the same? Can one advocate for the freedom and well-being of Palestine without calling for the dissolution of the jewish state? Or just without using hateful speech (pissrael, isn’trael)?
The world is hard place to navigate, but we are already in bubbles. I don’t see how shutting our access to their content brings anyone joy. Lemmy doesn’t come with autosubscriptions, so people have to actively seek out to join that community.
If this decision goes through, it harms me. I lose my access to discuss european topics with fellow lemmites. Their policies might be on the darker side of neutral, but that is why I found a home on dbzer0, not there. This feels like an attempt to remove access to a community that doesn’t totally agree with us. Feels a bit fascist, even through the guise of democracy.
They don’t to be clear, at least in name they will even proclaim to be anti-zionist. But they will censor anything they think the german government deems antisemitic, while simultaneously allowing zionists unless they become too hateful. They keep arguing about german law but there are a couple reasons why this makes me doubt their intention more and not less:
a) they don’t know that’s what the law says, it’s their interpretation of it. Maybe don’t pre-emptively comply with cops?
b) if the cops want you gone, you’re gone anyway. Doesnt matter how clean their boots got licked.
c) host in a better country if you actually disagree with that law
d) the law doesn’t mandate you allow zionists on your instance. So why aren’t they getting banned on sight but only if they take things “too far”?
They will censor almost anything past “I’m willing to call it a genocide”, that is anything that can be done to stop the palestinian genocide. For example, an armed resistance of palestinians is the absolute minimum. You’re not gonna get liberation from colonialism without armed resistance history is rife with proof of this. But the only faction putting up any such resistance is of course Hamas, which is banned in Germany and so any calls to help the armed resistance is subject to censorship. (As a side, I don’t think anyone in the west knows anything about Hamas. All we are fed is hasbara about them and we know most of it is false from how the hostages got treated by members of the resistance and how they got treated by “their own”)
Just as a showcase to where the focus of these “antizionists” are, go back to the page and:
Ctrl+F “pal”: 15 hits
Ctrl+F “israel”: 47 hits
Ctrl+F “arab”: Phrase not found
They are very very concerned with what will happen to the settlers, and much less so with what happens to the indigenous people. Some people still won’t call it genocide, others are talking about how settlers should be allowed to live there if they have moved there more than 30 years ago, even if illegaly, while simultaneously being worried about the palestinian joining “terror” (aka armed resistance) organisations and want to limit influence from neighboring countries (aka cut off aid!). These people very much do not understand that the palestinians are in a fight for their life, that no colonial oppression was overthrown by peaceful means, that only armed palestinians can guarantee peace and safety from pissrahelli right-wing death squads like the IOF. Their racism, worrying about armed arabs and merely wanting to curb the worst excesses of the apartheid regime, is so deep ingrained it does not get questioned.
And why isn’t that xenophobic comment not subject to mod action? Does no one of the downvoters think it worth reporting, or do the mods not think it actionable?
I think this very much is like all the other settler projects. You can’t be pro-jewish and not anti-nazi, you can’t be anti-apartheid without being anti-boer. The right to return is a minimum of the demands that pro-palestinian voices should demand imo but I don’t think this is possible while pissrael as an entity still exists. I shared this video on pissraeli-apartheid before, I think it’s very illuminating and a good showcase in how the discrimination of arabs is very much baked into israeli society. It’s not an aberration, it’s the norm. It is an ethnostate, it’s name alone is testament to this. You will not find equal treatment of jews in “the aryan reich” and you won’t find equal treatment of arabs in “Israel”.
Edit: as an aside, if I were on dbzer0 I’d also not vote for a complete defederation but the original proposal, blocking of the communities that censor antizionist views. This way the discussion about zionism can involve fedditors, potentially radicalising a few, without having it subject to zionist moderation. But I’m not so it doesn’t matter as much what I think.
This is the best and only way to put it.
I’d like to add that the people who say dumb Zionist crap are usually people who are privileged and have never had to fight for their own lives in the way that Palestinians need to. That’s a good thing, no one should have to. But it does admittedly mean that a lot of people lack perspective on that issue in a way that allows people to trivialize it to themselves or not care as much as they probably should.