Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments.

I think the post in itself is informational, many of the comments are not.
Post stays, comments get locked.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
- Fuck the zionist genocidal bastards.

I hadn't noticed how pro-cop some feddit.org users are but a cursory glance at people taking police reporting at face value and then openly defending cops punching people in the face with "it's out of context" reasoning is just surreal.
It reeks to me of living in a bubble your whole life and never having experienced police repression - so your only response is "it can't be the police, they've never done anything against me, it must be the protestors that are wrong"
Usually I'm one that hates leftist infighting but defacto trying to suppress a genocide because the "law says so" is rather weak. Still I totally understand wanting to protect yourself from repression but surely if you cared about both justice and your well being you would just hand over the community to someone else? Unless of course you actually agree with the "law"...

Elad Barashi, who has worked in the Israeli entertainment industry for several years, sparked outrage after posting on X: "Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza."
In another post, he wrote, "I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers... or train cars... and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

Calls to end Zionism
This one is egregious. I mean come on.

I get their concerns but we shouldn't be bullied into silence. The Israeli government is a piece of shit and we should all be allowed to say that until they've proven otherwise.
- From the text of their original post it sounds like you're still allowed to say that. It's worth reading the post text itself (not saying that to change your stance, I have complicated feelings about this choice by them, but knowing what they're actually saying is worthwhile)
  
  You can do anything except demand things which could meaningfully resolve the issue.
  People are not being allowed to call for the dissolution of the Israeli Apartheid government.
  Or compare its genocidal deeds to those for which the Germans say "never again".
  Because "never again" in Germany does not count for brown people.
  People are only allowed to voice slight discontent with Israel. Forcing people to call a major crime a minor crime is a massive form of repression in itself and it serves to downplay reality, while pretending there is no censorship.
- I disagree with Feddit s decision, but you're still allowed to say that.

Y'all should actually read the post. They're clear that they don't want to do this but fear extreme repression by the German government, and they even listed examples of what exactly they're trying to avoid. I'm no Israel apologist, but I'm convinced.
- I've read the post, and I'm still unhappy with their decision. Capitulation only accelerates fascism.
  
  That's true, but it's still up to them whether they want to get arrested over social media comments somebody else made.
  
  Sounds like you need to just make sure you're specifying the current government of Israel and their actions, rather than the state of Israel in general terms or as a overall concept.
  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".
- I agree. Nobody should be risking their safety / livelihood / whatever to host a random internet discussion site. That doesn't mean we should leave the situation as it is. I believe the main concern is to move off the !europe comm there and onto the new one at !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
  
  This is the best solution.
  Zionism is a fascist ideology. There is nothing to gain from hosting in a country where people feel compelled to suppress opposition to and liberation against that fascist ideology out of fear of incarceration and police brutality
  Free Palestine
  ACAB
- Feddit users commenting beneath it support this. One of them made this "meme":
  Feddit.org has also been banning users for things such as comparing Israel to the Nazis before they made this post. Then they owned up to it as their personal views. This is why they do not say they disagree with the German laws but they "do not wish to discuss it."
  
  Yeah fair enough.

I got banned from that community for saying zionism is antisemitic. The mods called it "rage bait".
I was actually testing whether the mods are zionists, and since they were enraged by my post, I think they are.
- literally ragebaits Gets banned for ragebaiting Mods are zionists
  Lmao

Hahaha YES DEFEDERATE THE FEDIVERSE

Gonna mention that !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com has been set up as an alternative for Europe-centric discussions
- With communities vulnerable to getting 86'd, I think hosting them on the incredibly strong dbzer instance is best. If it is leftist/non political and non tankie, it is very unlikely to be removed. dbzer FTW!
- Thank you for linking!

Germany looking 80 years in the past like "let's do that again."
Israel is NOT a Jewish state, it's a Neo-Nazi regime. If I wanted to kill as many jews as possible, I'd convince them that they "belong" in a tiny country surrounded by neighbours who want to destroy them.

The title of this post is sensationalized, click-baitey, and factually incorrect according to the posted text. It's as if OP either didn't read the text they copy/pasted or they are trying to intentionally stir up shit...
- Nothing in the post is incorrect or sensationalized. You did not read it.
  
  "they will ban criticism of Israel" : they will only ban calls for end of Israel and equating Nazis and Israel. You can still criticize Israel. Its like saying "They ban fruits" when they only ban oranges. It's still a problem, but you're making it larger than it seems, that's on the path of clickbait/sensationalism (i do not think that this was intended of you though, it's just what comes out of the way you wrote it).
- 50% of the post here are. Echo chambers rely on most users never reading the article.
- Two out of three. I read the post and that's exactly what the admins of F.O say will do. It's them who are stirring up shit.

Ezpz. Just added feddit.org to my instance block. Freedom of the fediverse at work.
- I did that already. Can't read German and the apps don't translate yet.

germany making laws suppressing speech and criminalising free thought? never seen that before
- EU is not America. Free speech has limits, that's why we don't end up with people like Trump
  
  And Germany is not all of EU.
  
  Hungary would like a word
  
  i was referring to germany in the 30s and 40s... but yeah, look at the governments of italy and hungary (and previously poland)
  
  Nah this entire thread is a perfect illustration why US First Amendment standards for free speech are (roughly) good and should be adopted in all countries. This is where it ends when you start to think it's ok to criminalize "hate speech" or "terrorist propaganda" or "approval of criminal acts".
- Please read the post. Those laws are in place to stop neonazis and other idiots from making the holocaust seem like it wasn't as terrible as it was.
  
  The best way to prevent another Holocaust is to make it illegal for anyone to ever warn that anything happening is similar to the Holocaust or to the Nazis and should be stopped before it goes further. Brilliant. Genius.
  
  These laws We are made to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Because Germany is weaponizing their previous genocide to justify their current one.

Can we, as users, prevent our own posts and comments from federating to a given server?
They're not banning me for my accusations of genocide; I'm Banning Them
- You can block the instance, which I’ve just done. Fuck these Nazis

Just FYI. There’s truth to this, but this post headline is very clickbait.
You’re still allowed to do things like call out the genocide, call the Israeli government facist etc.
What you can’t do is stuff like call for a violent overthrow of the state of Israel.
(Which I disagree with because since the status quo is violence I think violence is justified in overturning it)
But anyways. It’s less extreme than the headline suggests.
And also it’s in an effort to comply with German laws. (Which again, I disagree with, but I’m not the one at risk of getting raided here so yeah).
- Banning the call to dissolve the genocidal Israeli Apartheid would be akin to saying you can disagree with Donald Trump, but you are not allowed to say that he should be impeached.
  Germans are not allowing the problem nor the solution to be named. Thus they live in a vague haze where both sides are guilty and there is seemingly no solution possible except the full genocide of all Palestinians.
- Huh, the rules amendment in OP says that they can't say the Israeli government is "expansionist" or "far-right", why would "fascist" be okay?
  
  Is you want to understand the spirit of the rules, look no further past the first one:
  Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
  Why Jewish in particular? How is "equal rights for all people" compatible with "one group of people in particular"?
  Jewish supremacism, Israel and Zionism is Jewish ISIS, and trying to hide that part of Israel and punish any discourse around that problem is fascism.
  They may let you call Israel fascist in passing, but they won't let you describe its fascism, that is the bannable offense.
- Inaccurate. They also prohibit questioning the right to exist of Israel. It doesn't need to be violent.
  That's where the dishonesty lies. They are pushing the narrative according to which saying "Israel shouldn't exist" = "Jews should die".
  It's a form of genocide denialism really. They can't realy deny the reality, but they can say the genocidee would be the genociders if they had the chance. "It was self defense"

Hand over control of the instance to someone else or shut it down completely.

They should just shut it down rather than comply with laws which punish antipathy towards a genocidal state.
- It does not strictly punish antipathy towards a genocidal state, but rather antipathy towards a genocidal stage when they take the forms of call for an end of this state or equating this state with Nazis. It's a problem, it's bad, but please stop saying 'they won't let me say Israel is bad' cuz that's not the case (for the instance, don't know about actual german state itself)

It amuses me that expressing understanding with the retaliation is forbidden. I definitely understand why a militant extremist group has arisen after decades of oppression and genocide.
Like, how do you negotiate your way out of that peacefully? Where in history has oppression on that level been defeated through diplomacy?
I seem to have forgotten the part where the allies defeated Nazi Germany by asking nicely. Surely no war was fought for recognising black people as humans in the U.S.
Perhaps Ukraine should put down their weapons and ask Russia to pretty please stop invading their country and killing their people.
Ugh.
- This one here, right?
  Endorsement of or justifications for Hamas or Hezbollah, or slogans or graphics positively referring to these organizations. These are considered terrorist organizations in Germany.
  I don't think expressing understanding is either endorsement or justification. So as written, it should be fine, but since it comes down to the mods interpretation, who knows what the outcome would actually be.
- Retaliation? i think you got it backwards.

It is because their admins are in Germany and they fear the extreme repercussion that the German State has done recently. Did you even read the post you pasted? Are are you intentionally trying to stir up drama?
Not everyone lives in safety these days. Fascism has made it hard to do things like host a volunteer run online forum safely. There are cases where the heavily armed anti-terrorism unit SEK search peoples houses at gun point for this. Do you think online moderators should be required to catch a bullet for your posts?
- You don't solve fascism by bowing down. But of course one can wait for another population to solve it for them.
  
  Just curious, who do you accuse of fascism?

~~Not being able to criticize leaders that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against is bonkers and simple censorship.~~
EDIT: After reading the official announcement thoroughly, I have to say the title seems... wrong? There are very specific things that are not allowed, some of which I can agree with. Others however, I do not.
- You are allowed to criticise the leaders of israel, its not banned.
  
  I read it more carefully and you are right. The title is actually wrong as I have mentioned in the edit. Thank you anyway.

I bet they think they're just "following orders" like their forefathers...

Despite all the culture of remembrance, despite all the memorials and despite all the history lessons, the general public is simply not aware of how efficiently, ruthlessly and industrially the Nazis carried out the Holocaust.
At its peak, in Operation Reinhard, from April to November 1942, 2.5 million Jews were murdered. 10,000 every day. In specially built camps to which people were transported by rail and sent directly to the gas chambers, where there was practically no chance of survival. In Majdanek, over 18,000 people were murdered in 9 hours. By 1945, two thirds of European Jews had been murdered and in the end only the advance of the Allies prevented the rest from being murdered as well.
This is the much-vaunted singularity of the Holocaust, namely the systematic, industrial murder in special murder factories. This industrial rate of murder is unique in the long history of genocides. Stalin's camps were cruel, but they were not extermination camps with gas chambers. This also applies to other genocides.
So if you honestly compare the Gaza War with the Holocaust, you quickly realize that it is something completely different. And anyone who seriously equates the two is trivializing the Holocaust to an extent that almost borders on Holocaust denial. This is guaranteed to lead someone here to call me a “genocide denier”, but: if Israel acted like the Nazis in the Gaza Strip, all the women and children would be dead by now and a few last surviving men would be maltreated to death as work slaves. And yes, we all know why Israel of all places is constantly compared to the Holocaust, even though there is no factual basis.
*automatically translated from a feddit.org user I very much agree with. Not citing the account to not disclose them to save them from brigading.
- Saying "the Israeli government is acting like Nazis" is not the same thing as saying that "the current genocide being perpertrated against the Palestinians is equivalent to the Holocaust". The former sentence can be true regardless of the truth or falsity of the latter sentence.
  
  While I think calling the Israeli government "Nazis" is a simplification and kind of weakens the meaning of the word Nazi, I absolutely agree with you.
- When somebody calls it the "Gaza WAR", they are a Zionist and support the genocide in Gaza.
- They never said it's not a genocide. They said its not the Holocaust. We all agree there is a genocide in Gaza carried out by a far-right Israeli government.
  They never said it's a matter of number. They halfly imply it though, i agree, but what they actually explicitly said is it's a matter of it being systemic or not. It's debatable, the use of daily bombing is both quite industrial and not as efficient as death camps, so it's perfectly fine to target on that point. But do not hide behind the number things, which we all agree to be dumb, as a way to avoid considering the potential gaps in a comparison between Nazis and Israeli government.
  I think it's okay to say both have huge similarities that they never should have, but you don't need them to be 100% the same for the point to be pertinent, so you can accept it when someone points out differences.

This kind of seems... reasonable? Like, they have and convey a compelling legal reason for needing to do this. There's plenty of other Lemmy instances where these opinions and statements can be freely expressed. Further, they're explicitly allowing discourse that conveys similar sentiment but doesn't go against German law.
I guess my question is, what's the objection here?
- Mostly that they host the main Europe-centric comm, !Europe@feddit.org. You can see the problem when criticism of Europe's most powerful country is censored in said comm, and users banned, for relatively innocuous comments.
  
  That's a fair concern; maybe the recourse is just to move the community to a different instance? If the community as a whole is largely in agreement, this shouldn't be a difficult task. Even less of one if the mods agree.
  
  which country, and what kind of criticism?
- They do not. Their servers are not hosted in Germany. If their moderators feel like they would be endangered for not following German law they should step down instead of applying their German censorship to a European server.
  Their moderators and German users appear to proudly agree with these German censorship laws in the comments beneath their post. So the legal part looks more like a convenient excuse.
  
  Agreed. They support the genocide and are hiding behind the law to save face.
  
  The admins are also German, though, and seem to suggest that they feel at risk by this, as well. Maybe it's just time for another European instance to start up, with admins not in Germany, who feel comfortable hosting this discourse?
- To all you folks who're downvoting this comment: Are you basing your opinion on OP's biased, slanted account of this policy, or did you read the actual post from the Feddit admins? You don't have to answer me, but if it's the former, maybe self-reflect that you're here complaining about censorship and propaganda, yet you're doing so in response to a very propaganda-laden post that misrepresents the actual situation.

The videos and stills show soldiers forcing Palestinian men to parade in their underwear, abusing captives, looting and vandalising homes and even dressing up in women’s clothing they ransacked.
[…]
HRF lawyers and online activists trawl through mountains of images and videos submitted to them online to verify and geolocate each one, check its metadata and verify its chain of custody, from the soldier filming it through to HRF, Abou Jahjah explained.
Where the perpetrator is a dual national, HRF seeks prosecution under the second country’s existing laws on war crimes and in the case of sole Israeli citizens, collate legal files, which are then filed as evidence with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Abou Jahjah has also been personally threatened by Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli, who – alluding to the attacks on Hezbollah’s members’ communication systems in September 2024 – told him to “watch your pager”.

- feddit.de went offline and feddit.org was built as an alternative not so long ago. So 11 month is probably as old as an account can get on feddit.org.
  
  Yeah, my bad. Deleting my comment.

I don't think they are actually zionist or pro-genocide. But they are definitely not good mods, and they just didn't handle it in a good way. It's not the first time I've seen problems with that community moderation team, they tend inho to powertrip. I suppose they are friends or the same people as feddit.org admins and that's why they defend them so much. But I don't think that moderation team is up to the task of moderating a big community.
Nothing wrong with it, moderation is hard, very hard. And not everyone is qualified for it. They should just step back. Or just close the community if they are so heavy censored by their country legislation.

really reminds me of the leftie vs leftie thing lol
- They have demonstrated that they are not "leftists" by defending the cruelties of Israel. There is no "infighting" here.
- Germany (and here the feddit.org admins) are criminalizing any questionning of Israel eXistEnRecHt (right to exist) as if it was hate speech.
  Afaik (i don't want to deal with tiny leftie vs leftie problems that are hugely blown out of proportions like saying germany is fucking genociding again) people get banned for saying that Israeli people have no right to live where they are rn. Already established people who have lived there for their entire life or similar should just what, move away? Afaik this is the stance Germany is trying to have, what's wrong with that?

From the river to the sea is literally calling for genocide, the death of everyone who lives in Israel. It's good that they're banning it
Edit: this fucking site. Not sure if trolls, or they legitimately don't know
- Nuh-uh. Just because Israel kills people in order to expand their territory, doesn't mean people have to die in order for Israel to give it back.
- No it isn't
  
  If you believe that, you're supporting terrorists instead of the citizens of Gaza.