2mo ago

Regarding Mid-East-related Comments on !europe

Hi.

In the past few days, discontent regarding mod decisions in this community has been brewing, particularly when it comes to comments on Palestine, Israel, and Israeli politics and actions. There are also misunderstandings regarding mod intention and German law. We hope to clear that up with this post.

While the servers of feddit.org are in Austria, most of the mods of this community as well as admins of this server live in Germany. Speaking of, our server admins have also posted a write-up on the same topic.

And with that, let's go:

In Germany, antisemitism is specifically sanctioned in German criminal law, both for speech and as a motivation for other criminal behavior. In addition, Germany seeks to protect the Jewish state of Israel (the so-called "Reason of State" introduced in 2008) and thus verges toward protecting Zionism as well. Certain criticism of Israel/Israelis is also categorized as "Israel-related antisemitism".

Since criminal law is involved, enforcement can mean things like police raids and device confiscations. After such police action, it does not really matter if it was appropriate or if cases are dropped or never charged: The damage is done. All told, it's not that fun.

There is also no point in engaging in discussions about the veracity of statements that could get us into legal trouble. In addition, we believe that you can express most opinions without breaking rules.

If your comment contains the following, it will be removed from this community:

Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
Calling for a destruction, annihilation, an end of all Zionism or the like.
Equating Israeli actions and (historical) Nazism.
The slogan "from the river..."
Endorsement of or justifications for Hamas or Hezbollah, or slogans or graphics positively referring to these organizations. These are considered terrorist organizations in Germany.
... and obviously: Any of the common antisemitic tropes or calls to violence against Jews or Israelis

Comments will not be removed for the following:

Denouncing genocide.
Denouncing Israeli war crimes.
Criticizing Zionism as an ideology or political movement.
Referring to the current Israeli government as "criminal," "expansionist," or "far-right".

If your comment is removed nonetheless, these are not the reason. I'd also like to stress that this community was never a free-speech-absolutist zone: It is a (usually lightly) moderated community. There may also be times when bans go too far. In such cases, please DM the @EuroMod@feddit.org account (which all mods have access to).

federal reverse (on behalf of the mods of !europe)

151 comments

Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
So can I say "screw Israel; dismantle that apartheid state and build a true democracy with equal rights for everyone (including Jews) in its place"? The way this part is worded it could go either way.
Also wow that stuff you listed sounds really dystopian.
- I guess I should have let you do an adversarial review of the post before it went up. Anyhow, "dismantle Israel" sounds like you're intending a violent revolution of some sort. The rest of it reeks of trying to evade the rules as well. I appreciate that this is what people do when you spell out rules but ... that's not really what I posted them for.
  
  The rest of it reeks of trying to evade the rules as well.
  Oh that wasn't my intention. I just wanted clarification because calling for a one-state solution is calling for the dissolution of Israel, so I wasn't sure (and am still not sure) what the difference between the two is intended to be. So my question is: What rhetoric is allowed (and, probably more importantly, not allowed) when talking about a one-state solution?
  
  Anyhow, "dismantle Israel" sounds like you're intending a violent revolution of some sort.
  Really? Is this a language barrier thing?
  Edit: reading this back it could sound rude and that wasn't my intent.
  
  What? But you just said it was only against the rules to talk about dismantling Israel if the person didn’t specify equal rights for Jews.
  And @NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io explicitly did so.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws
Why should it be necessary to specify Israelis as deserving of equal rights in historic Palestine when it is Israel who denies equal rights to Palestinians and not the other way around?
Go ahead and ban me now if that kind of acknowledgment can get you in legal trouble - I have no interest in participating in a community that is comfortable suppressing criticisms against an ethno-religious apartheid state committing genocide. Fuck Israel and fuck the German collaborators.
Free Palestine.
- I have no interest in participating in a community
  This is your first comment here anyway, isn't it?
  
  On this account, sure.
Israel is a religious ethno supremacist state, not calling to fix that IS UNJUST.
DEFENDERS OF fascism are fascists.
- Which is why criticism of Israel is explicitly allowed as per the (legally forced!) guidelines above. Which incidentally includes your comment as well.
  But apparently you cannot be a critic of Israel unless you call for it's eradication.
- According to the rules above we can still compare Israeli actions to Nazism. We are just not allowed to say they are equal (a Israeli action could be said to be worse or better than a Nazi's)
  
  Unfortunately, in this case "comparing" (in the sense of saying they are similar) and "equating" are typically seen as the same, at least by people who support the israeli genocide like the German police.
- No one of the moderation team or the feddit.org admins are defending the actions of the Israeli government in any shape or form.
  
  No, they're just removing any criticism of it, nothing to see here
Sad to see this. This effectively muzzles Israeli and Jewish anti-Zionist voices to make Germans feel good about themselves. This is antisemitic.
- How does this muzzle any anti-zionist voices that are not calling for yet another genocide? If you think that are the only anti-zionist voices worth listening to then yes that is antisemitic.
  
  Because you're proscribing calling for an end to Zionism, proscribing comparisons to the Shoah, proscribing views held by anti-zionist jews, which have been deplatformed and politically persecuted in Germany. People like Nancy Fraser, Masha Gessen, Yuval Abraham, Eyal Abraham.
  Because by doing so, you're picking and choosing good zionist jews and bad antizionist jews. WHICH IS ANTISEMITISM.
  Here is a nice excerpt for you:
  There is, as the Israeli-born architect and academic Eyal Weizman has acidly put it, a certain irony in “being lectured [on how to be properly Jewish] by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic”.
  As for this:
  If you think that are the only anti-zionist voices worth listening to then yes that is antisemitic.
  I never said that. I never called for the banning of pro-zionist views. You're the one enforcing a policy that silences "bad" jewish voices.
  
  Literally who on lemmy is calling for another genocide???
Ah yes, "just following orders".
This still seems like a one sided approach to moderating the issue.
While law demands the censorship of certain criticisms of Israel and Zionism, there are none in regards to Palestinians.
That doesn't mean equal rules shouldn't be applied to the other side.
If you cannot argue for the end of Israel, you should neither be allowed to argue for the end of Palestine. If you cannot defend the actions or existence of Hamas or Hezbollah, neither should you be allowed to defend the actions or existence of the IDF. If you call for a one state solution it should include equal rights not only for Israelis but also Palestinians.
- I have yet to see a comment or post Lemmy that actually argues for the 'end of Palestine'. That would already violate rule 4 if someone did it.
  neither should you be allowed to defend the actions or existence of the IDF
  Isn't the IDF Israel's regular army? Hamas and Hezbollah aren't exactly Palestine's regular armies, they're political organizations that also have military. There's a reason why Hamas isn't really active in the West Bank.
  I haven't seen much defending of the IDF's actions, but fair point, that should probably be prohibited.
  
  Palestine doesn't have a regular army because they're not allowed to be a regular state.
  Why should that matter? At the end of the day an army is an army, whether it is commanded by an official state, the leadership of a political organisation, a terrorist organisation or by itself. And in the case of Israel-Palestine both commit planned out terrorist acts and atrocities.
  
  Isn't the IDF Israel's regular army?
  Nope. Nope. Nope.
  https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/civil-military-relations-in-israel-politics-state-society/
  
  Without going into the Gaza - West Bank schism, Hamas has governed the Gaza strip for nearly 2 decades now and its military is de facto that territory's military forces.
  The argument of 'political militia' only holds water if there is a significant opposition party with a relatively equally large military force. I have yet to see evidence of that.
  It doesn't help that there isn't a currently valid "constitution of Palestina" which could regulate military force and who controls them.
- Please read the text again. All of that is included.
  
  Can you quote the specific part of the text that bans defending the IDF?
calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
Sad that equal rights for every human, and imo all living beings, isn't just given as natural and needs to be specified explicitly.
What's the law's perspective of a global no-state solution?
- You're not wrong but it's an explicit defense against any accusations of supporting violence against humans.
  
  Because some individuals think violence is good, I know.
Are you also going to enforce the rest of the German criminal code for other kinds of speech? Beleidigung (§ 185 StGB) for example is even more vague and dangerous than the other parts of StGB you're worried about. The US president would have a great case against the majority of commenters here.
Don't get me wrong, you should do however you want -- I'm not the one paying for your community's servers... but it's just depressing to see people falling for these kinds of chilling effects.
- To some degree we are going after insults against other participants of the community, obviously. Not primarily because it may be criminal but also because it changes the discourse of the community. The lucky legal bit when it comes to Trump/Vance though is that as far as I am aware, insulting foreign leadership figures is no longer criminalized.
  Calling Trump a "fascist" is simply an accurate descriptor though. Calling him "poo poo orange diaper man" is juvenile bullshit but if it's not 50% of the comment section, it'll probably remain.
When the rules demand silence in the face of atrocity, the mods become archivists of obedience, not arbiters of discourse.
You should transfer ownership of the server to someone with a set if you’re that worried.
- Did you even read the post?
  
  Yes.
Pov: you assist in helping genocide
You should be ashamed
Am I allowed to say Germany is a police state?
- If that is your opinion 🤷
  
  Based on the news articles I’m seeing I’m forced to conclude it is.
Insulting Israel isn’t discrimination or hate speech if motivated by facts, like them doing a genocide. It is when you do because of antisemitism.
It is also not wrong to think that the population of Israel should end up in a less benefiting situation like one state where they don’t get the superiority, because they were illegitimate to the lands and because they lived in this country.
German people were condemned with sanctions to the country after world wars. Didn’t make it racism or anything like that, just sanctions to what the country had done.
Fuck censorship
Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
All people are equal, but some are more equal than others
- More specified, not more equal in this case, really.
  
  Why do they need to be specified? If it's equal rights for all people, then that includes Jews. There is no need to specify if you are promoting equality for all.
- Rather, they wish to prevent the thought that all people indeed are equal, whilst the Jews aren't considered to be humans/humane i.e. people at all to some.
- It's really not helpful for everyone to go around and post misunderstood snippets of books that were released before Israel was even founded. Can you elaborate more what you want to say here?
  
  What I said here: https://feddit.uk/post/29329161/17366266
  If we want equal rights for all (as we should) then that includes Jewish people, we don't then specify that one group "in particular" gets equal rights. I wouldn't have taken issue with the sentence if it simply said Jewish people included, because "all people" does indeed include Jewish people, but "in particular" is picking them out as special.
While calling Israeli fascist isnt allowed, am I allowed to call specific Israeli politicians Kahanist?
- Fascism isn't exclusive to the historical Nazis. The rule is about relativism in regards to the crimes of the historical Nazis, and especially the holocaust.
  Parts of the current Israeli government are obviously fascist, but calling all Israelis fascists would be against the general rules of this community.
  
  Am I allowed to point out that the Kahanist ideology is rapidly gaining popularity among the Israeli populous? Or the fact that Israeli was founded by a literal national Bolshevik? Or how the Israeli left is a mix of national Socialists and national Bolsheviks while the right is a mix of kahanists and religious fundamentalists?
Would it be appropriate for people to share alternative communities which aren’t subject to as strict censorship on this issue?
- I mean ... feel free. (Unless you're linking to really unsavory communities.)
  The thing is, we're not a Mid-East community anyway (thankfully, I would personally say--as I would be really out-of-depth there!). While this is an issue that may flare up occasionally, I don't see it as a permanent hindrance to contribution.
  
  So does this mean Eurovision discussion isn't allowed either, since Israel and Australia aren't in Europe?
  What about the EU? Does everything in the EU count? If so, does that mean South American and Caribbean discussion is allowed because of UK and France for example? Or do you mean only Europe the continent? In that case, are we talking about the 7 continent English model, the 6 continent Greek model, the 6 continent Eastern Europe (/Russian) model, or the geological model? Because some models would include Israel while others would exclude say Azerbaijan.
  If you're going to start restricting discussion on what is and isn't, you'll need to start clarifying what is and isn't too.
I would like to say that i disagree with some of this, but will not argue it because I respect that the people who put effort in maintaining* this community are the ones that make the rules. Thank you for taking the time to write this explanation. edit: small spelling error
- Thank you!
If you're going to act like a standard corporation in terms of what speech is allowed, why should users use this comm over say, reddit, which has the same rules but a MUCH larger community?
You've kinda defeated the purpose of Lemmy by doing this. Corporations forsake ethics for the convenience of law anyway, so from a logical perspective, people might as well use something else.
You could easily just get new mods who are NOT in Germany if you're this terrified of legal action, but instead you've chosen to follow unjust and unethical laws - no different than Reddit and whatever justification they make up as well.
By your own logic and stipulations, if Germany is taken over by the AfD in the future as well and they pass racist laws making it illegal to ban anyone using racist language for example, you'll also comply and allow racist language too. Either because ethics don't matter to you, or because they align with the law passed. Those are the only two logical conclusions.
And before you say "well it's a lot of resources to change things" - it was also a lot of resources to start this whole thing up and grow it in the first place too, yet that didn't stop you either, did it?
- Newsflash: Not every country practices free speech
  
  I didn't mention free speech, and this was about the comm, not the country, in particular.
- If this was a community specifically about the middle-east I would agree with you that it would have been unwise to host it on feddit.org due to the legal situation affecting its admins and some of the moderators here.
  But it is not, and generally speaking Germany is not an autocratic state with severe repression of political activism, so for most topics it is a better place to host communities that might involve such.
  
  The whole post is about how this moderation is happening because of the threat of law, so I'm not sure what you mean by "the legal situation affecting its admins and some of the moderators here".
  It's specifically stating that this is happening because of the changed legal situation in Germany.
  Secondly, Europe is closely tied, topic-wise, to Israel. The creation of Israel itself and the conflict occuring there is due to a major war in Europe, and many European countries still do a lot business with Israel. The double standards with how Europe has dealt with Russia versus Israel are glaringly obvious as well. It's also a political topic in many countries, including as mentioned in the post Germany to the point that there's now censorship laws affecting speech on the matter.
  To pretend it doesn't apply because "it's not in Europe" is extremely disingenuous since plenty of news and topics about other countries outside of Europe that affect Europe are allowed here, such as the US tariffs or China, who are also trading partners.
  If we are to take this comment you made in good faith, then the enforcement would be that only domestic news and topics are allowed strictly, and anything that remotely mentions a different country outside of Europe is not allowed. Not even comparisons.
  But that's not what's happening here, and instead only speech about Israel/Palestine is being targeted.
Question. Would a comment calling Nethanyahu “facist” be removed?
- Not if it had that typo. ^^ On a more serious note: I find these hard to mod and harder to argue against. The guy is in a coalition with outright fascists because this is the only way to save his power; he at the very least tolerates all of Europe's fascists to come to his government's "antisemitism" conferences; he wages a war currently that is officially called a war of self-defense but has morphed into being transparently expansionist and genocidal.
  
  but has morphed into being transparently expansionist and genocidal.
  morphed? It's been transparently expansionist and genocidal way before October 7th. It's a war of self-defense alright, just not Israel's
  
  I stand by the typo because closer to how its spelt in my native dialect lol
You should be fucking ashamed of yourselves.
Zionism is a fascist ideology. Gtfo with this fucking nonsense. This post muddies the water and conflates Judaism with Zionism which is fucking dangerous. This type of conflation breeds antisemitism. Israel does not speak for all jewish people. Zionism does not speak for all jewish people. "Well if Jewish people say that Zionism and Judaism are one in the same, I must hate both!"
You are now a breeding ground for antisemitism. Congratulations. 👏
These kind of posts will, sometime in the future, be referenced in a memorial of some sort as complacency in the face of crimes against humanity.
History will not look kindly at you.
Understandable that you don’t want any police raids and I sincerely hope that this is not representative of your personal opinion but rather a hint for us to maybe host this community somewhere else where free speech is possible without putting the server hosts in danger of being raided by some gestapo squad. It would be great if it’d be possible to migrate whole communities to another instance.
Thank you guys. You make these communities bareable.
Thanks for putting effort into this community. Sorry for all the hate you have to bear.
This is a good summary on the community on comments. Thank you. Is there a good summary on the community on posts? I say because seems that there is very many locked or deleted posts that has the appearance of being arbitrarily.
- Those were locked because of the comments. If it were about the posts they would have not been locked but removed.
- Ftr, I will eventually need to unlock those, I hope to get to that at the end of the day.
This is just sad. The community about Europe makes steps that are against Europe's own Charter of Fundamental Rights.
As a result, Germany has cracked down on legitimate criticism of the actions of the Israeli government, including on Jews and Israelis, academics, civil society and artists, who face restrictions on their rights to expression and protest, alongside funding cuts and bans on organizations.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/11/germanys-muddle-antisemitism
The only recourse here should really be to move the community.
I'm in agreement with this decision. But I don't share the reasoning and context behind the conclusions regarding free speech. I'm non-europe, so the slogan "from the river to the sea" doesn't strike me as an impression that calls for Hamas. I suppose german lawmakers often make contextual decisions centered around their own experiences. That explains their legal stance, and I don't agree with it. I do agree with the decision to avoid the wrath of law enforcement agencies. As I understand it, i think it is reasonable enough since I've had members of my community vanishing without a trace until this day.
Throughout history, governments (WW2 and others) do commit atrocities and human rights violations. I think moderation teams allowing ample space for genocide documentation is good. As I understand it, other social medias such as Instagram don't allow genocide documentation at all. Granted, I think more should be done about it even in smaller communities like this. But that's besides the point, and I'm not an internet regular. And where real or digital spaces don't outright endorse "absolute free speech", I think spaces that allow specifics in their discourse is a good enough space to live in. After all, It is never ideal to let governments run fascist mode without accountability.
- I dunno, a lot of the rules they established sound reasonable, and they don't really want to risk a raid from the German authorities.
- Please read the post first before trying to twist my words into something that isn't there.
- I see you read the APPD party program.
A big thanks to the moderators of c/Europe doing their best to keep this community clean and open to all. I appreciate the work you do.

151 comments