Although personally in favor of Palestinian independence and critical of war crimes committed by Israel in its siege of Gaza, I attempted to explain in a back-and-forth discussion with a user (only afterwards learning was one of the community’s two moderators) why protest voting in the 2024 election to “punish” the democrats in favor of the republicans harmed the ultimate interest of reigning in Israeli violence in Palestine.
To further emphasize the damage caused by such a protest vote, I argued that not only is Palestine worse off with Trump elected instead of Harris, but as are a myriad of other social issues. The other user disagreed, arguing that Trump’s return to office facilitated the ceasefire, rather than my argument that Netanyahu deliberately delayed it to help Trump get elected.
After my fourth reply post in a reply chain that stemmed from my initial reply to the moderator’s comment, I was banned from !palestine@lemm.ee. Having at no point advocated in favor of the violence perpetuated by Israel in Gaza, I think the ban was unjustified, and demonstrates a bad precedent for maintaining echo chambers of moderator opinions, rather than communities that foster discussion.
If that was indeed the reason, then that only serves to support the notion that general disagreement, rather than just extremism, is what is being banned from that community. They have every right to ban advocates of genocide for extremism, but in no way do I think that supporting Palestine without supporting Hamas is a position worthy of a ban.
Well… you might have a point. Supporting Palestine without supporting Hamas isn’t precisely what you said, though. You said “terrorism” from the Palestinian side. I think without carefully qualifying that to mean that you’re only talking about events like October 7th, it’s easy for someone to assume you’re using the Israeli definition, where any type of resistance at all is “terrorism.”
Like I say, I agree with you on this. In any other community I think it would be a clear-cut PTB case of censorship. I’m just saying that when dead family members are involved you have to be extremely careful what you present and how, because it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world for people to get heated at you for it.