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.
Just from a linguistic point of view: Death to X primarily associates with living beings, making me (a German, incidentally) automatically feel threatened if an angry mob would chant "Death to Germany" on my doorstep.
If I'd say "Death to @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com" and then later tried to explain that of course I was only speaking of that account, not the person, that would be a weak justification too.
You're just further making my point that Nationalists confuse Nation with People.
"Death to the avatar I personally chose in a forum were I present myself as it" is incomparably more targetted and personal that "Death to the power structure in a geographical area I did not chose to be born in along with millions of other people".
Somebody shouting "Death To Portugal" wouldn't feel personally threathening even though I'm Portuguese, I would just wonder what the fuck had the politions in Government in Portugal done whilst hiding behind the Nation to cause people to hate the country itself and want its destruction as a country.
This being a forum in an anarchist server, I advise you to ponder why you're mentally and emotionally merging you the person with some arbitrary power structures you do not control in a geographical boundary you did not define and within which you were born by no choice of yours. Logically Nationalism makes very little sense unless one is part of the elites that control a nation.
(Whatever "The Nation" is made to look as doing - the nation does nothing since nations have no agency and it's always a human being making the choices in the name of the nation - is neither your merit nor your fault)
From living in a couple of countries in Europe I get the impression that people from smaller nations have a lot less tendency for the irrationality which is Nationalism and tend to instead look at the actions done in the name of their country (and the consequences of said actions, such as the hate of others towards the nation) with a more critical eye rather than treat other people's choices (and the reactions the them) as one's own if those choices are done hiding behind "the Nation".
I mean, if people are shouting "Death to Germany" whilst before they weren't, the rational way of looking at it is to try and find out why is that and who has used the powers of the nation to make others hate the nation when before they didn't. It doesn't take much analysis to figure out that maybe things like the members of the German Government chosing to have the federal structures they control provide weapons and ammo in the name of Germany to an ethno-Fascist government engaged in a genocide along ethnic lines, weapons and ammo which likely ended up murdering thousands of children, will have naturally caused some people whose morals are such that they abhor such mass murdering to hate the nation of Germany and want to see it dismantled, from which follows the logical conclusion (unless you support the whole arming of child murderers with the weapons and ammo to kill more children) that in Germany power is in the wrong hands and if there is no way to change that then maybe Germany in its current form needs to be brought down and rebuilt as a nation, same as it was when the last bunch of of Germans who loved murdering children along ethnic lines - the NAZIs - were defeated.