You folks are real bitches for this.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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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?
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.
Israel is a religious ethno supremacist state, not calling to fix that IS UNJUST.
DEFENDERS OF fascism are fascists.
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
Criticism of it is explicitly allowed as by the above mentioned rules π
Insulting Israel isnβt 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 donβt 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. Didnβt make it racism or anything like that, just sanctions to what the country had done.
Fuck censorship
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 youβre that worried.
Did you even read the post?
Yes.
Sad to see this. This effectively muzzles Israeli and Jewish anti-Zionist voices to make Germans feel good about themselves. This is antisemitic.
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?
Ah yes, "just following orders".
Are you also going to enforce the rest of the German criminal code for other kinds of speech? Beleidigung (Β§ 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.
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?
It would be great if you could also support that with some credible sources instead of just saying so to fish for responses, aka trolling.
The founder of Israel David Ben Gurion was a self described Bolshevik (source) and said "I am a Bolshevik.". He was also an extreme Jewish nationalist, therefore he was a Jewish national Bolshevik. He was the founder of the Israeli left and they would follow his example.
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.
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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
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