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.
id rather get into arguments with zionists than stick my head in the sand and hope they change on their own.
Personally, the problem is the use of the tools of authority in those communities (moderation powers) and server (administration powers) to de facto suppress any criticism of a modern day ethno-Fascist ideology second only to Nazism in the depravity of the Violent Racism it spreads and the nation that follows it and has, inspired by it, has engaged in a Genocide along ethnic lines whose level of state-sanction depravation (for example, the active targetting children for murder in Gaza and widespread use of rape against political prisioners) are second only to the Holocaust itself in the treatment of actual human beings of the races they deem "vermin" as subhuman.
I for one would be perfectly fine with the "arguments" stage, my problem is that in feddit they have systematically leveraged the natural control powers of communities and servers in this system into a form of ideological authoritarism, worse, one in the service of a depraved ideology and the nation that follows such depraved ideals.
The active support through the use of the authority-tools of moderation and administration in that server for zionists and suppression of points of view critical to the zionists and their ideals means that this discussion here is not about "arguments" but rather it's about "abuse of authority" and in the latter domain it's logical to respond with tools in the same domain, namelly banning and defederation.
i see. still, i think this post doesnt show strong enough evidence of this abuse of authority actually happening. as others in this thread have also criticized, most of the modlogs shown here can be explained with "uncivil language/death threats" lead to bans, with likely some zionist tendencies exacerbating the issue (its a german instance after all). dont get me wrong, i understand the issue with civility politics, but a mod who bans someone for making a death threat is not necessarily an ideologically convinced zionist who abuses their power to suppress any anti-zionist sentiment whatsoever. and if the abuse of power is real, it should be trivial to show more "civil" anti-zionist comments that were banned instead of the ones that were calling for someones suicide.
if it could be shown more convincingly that feddit mods will ban any pro-palestinian sentiment outright, i might actually agree to ban communities or defederate
Frankly I don't really know if what's shown here amounts to widespread abuse of authority or at least enough to justify the measures requested, which I why I haven't voted for or against it.
My point was about your "argument" angle - when it's about moderation and administrative actions, things are well beyond being about merelly "arguments". Also I think the Paradox of Intolerance applies here: we cannot be tolerant of an instance under the control of people who use their powers in intolerant ways.
That said, I myself have crossed paths more than once in forums hosted in feddit.org with moderation actions which were suppressing criticism of Israel, Zionism and their actions whilst claiming that the critics were being racist (which is ironic in a mainly German server considering that the NAZIs used to use the very same technique of claiming that criticism of NAZISM and Germany was "against the Arian Race").
If you read other posts here, you'll see that this experience of mine is far from an uncommon experience - Germany in general is weird in that viewing people as "members of an ethnicity" and ethnic-discrimination are widespread, taken to extreme levels (when the Bundeskanzeler openly justifies giving weapons to a nation that's commiting a genocide, after they already killed tens of thousands of children, with the need to support a specific ethnicity, that's clearly ethnic-discrimination and to a pretty extreme level since the ethnicity of the aggressors is used to justify helping the mass murder children) and normalized to an extreme level there (after all, Bundeskanzeler though that the ethnicity of the aggressor was enough to justify to the public supporting a nation comitting Genocide), all of which far, far beyond the rest of Europe, so it's natural that many moderators in a mainly German server use their powers in a way they fell "protects the nation that represents a 'good' ethnicity" without noticing the profound racism in both the idea of good and not-good ethnicities and the idea that any person or nation can represent a whole ethnicity (and idea that logically can only be anchored in a "people of that ethnicity are all the same" presumption).
Personally, given my repeated experience with them I have a mental expectation that feddit.org moderators and admins are "Pro-Genocide Racists" until proven otherwise, but that doesn't mean I think we should deny other people the chance to make up their own minds on this or that those moderators and admins cannot change as persons over time and evolve to embrace Humanist Ideals instead of extreme ethnic discrimination.
As an European I'm really not used to the normalized Extreme Racism from Germany: even if all countries in Europe have Racists, it's seldom normalized amongst the public, much less such an extreme form of it that the ethnicity of the agressor is seen by the top politician of the land as a good argument to give to the public to justify supporting Genocide.
I respect that sentiment but the problem is that these communities actively suppress dissent while not suppressing Zionists. So the end result is that it means Zionists can argue with you, and they'll ban you if you argue back so you can't argue with them. Ultimately the result isn't much different than if we ban them but the benefit is that they can't argue with us.
No matter how much evidence you provide to zionists they are still defending their supermasist genocidal ideology. So no just censor them and move on