We, the admin team, decry all forms of settler-colonialism, and we recognize that Zionism is a pro-settler-colonialist position.
Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.
Please upvote for agree, downvote for disagree.
Note: we only count votes by instance members of dbzer0 and anarchist.nexus, plus a few vouched-for external users.
Hi mateys, I've kept things simple in the above text, for brevity, but in fact it took the admin team quite a while to get to this stage. We have discussed the policy change extensively, and a variety of different perspectives emerged. I will attempt to sum them up below as best I can:
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The "this isn't that complicated" school of thought goes something like this: If someone is consistently posting comments that mirror Hasbara talking points (e.g. justifying the genocide in Gaza, consistently painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim), then they should be instance banned. It's just not acceptable for Zionists to be allowed on our instances.
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The "slippery slope" / "purity test" school of thought is that banning people for having an "unpopular" political opinion would potentially mean banning half the fediverse, if more and more of these policies were enacted over time. To attempt to mitigate this we are keeping the scope of this rule as narrow as possible, and I also don't think many of our users will be affected. Also, we typically don't have frequent policy changes, and I have no reason to expect that to change moving forward.
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Another important discussion point was "how do we decide whether someone is pro-Zionist or not?" We can't always be 100% sure of someone's true intentions, we can only go on what they have posted and that is subject to interpretation. I don't feel there is an easy answer to this one, except to say that we would have to be pretty certain before issuing a perma-ban.
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The "geopolitics don't matter" school of thought is that trying to be on the "correct" side of every issue is kind of pointless because nothing that happens in lemmy chat forums will ever make an ounce of difference in the real world. Don't bother moderating users over political/ideological differences, just let people argue if they want. While I can totally empathize with this sentiment, I can also see the case for taking a clear stance on this topic in accordance with our values and the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among our users. Personally, I am advocating in favor of the resolution.
Please add your comments below if you want to provide your own thoughts on the topic, or have any questions.
expiry: 7
"Israel" is an apartheid state that has been genociding palestinians for almost a century now. Putting them both on equal footing is zionist, but I don't know if the db0 moderation sees it this way as well obviously. The land "Israel" occupies is palestinian land. It was stolen from them, it needs to be returned.
More than land, you have to ask what "Israeli" is, and there's no substance there but atrocities. They don't have their own cuisine, not even a conquisine like Thailand, they don't have a real language, they don't have a big sports culture, their music is all about exterminating the brutes, their art is all about atrocities² and how they're cool to do/justified, and all their unique cultural practices are around atrocities. More than giving the land back, even if everyone it could plausibly be given to was dead, the very concept of an "Israeli" would need to go-like their forebears in the confederate States of America and Germany's third Reich, or their brothers in Rhodesia before them³.
³the Confederates and Nazis at least emerged from and were attached to actual cultures, had associated cuisine at the very least. Fried chicken and sweet tea, sausages and beer. Rhodesians and Zionists lack even that.
²seriously I've looked at a lot of art by seriously fucked up monsters, and none of it was as fucked or unable to stay off themes of murder as literally every Zionist artist I've ever seen the work of
¹bullshit conlang bastardizations do not count
Yeah, at least the Nazis had a national cuisine... This is exactly why this suggestion should never had happened.
wtf dbzer0 what kind of bigots do you want to attract?
Very transparent, Nazi scum
yeah? that‘s weird, cause it‘s not apparent to me, maybe you wanna go there and explain how this crazy hate against a whole populace (even steeping as low as accusing them of not having a proper language or fucking cuisine!) is cool and questioning it makes me the Nazi.
Bring it on