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).
To help you understand why, I'll leave an assortment of sources here (translations via DeepL).
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Berlin in mid-May [2024] around 6 o’clock in the morning. A loud, continuous “banging” against the apartment door wakes student Alina T. from her sleep. […] When her husband opens the door, several LKA officers, two employees of the district office and the SEK “storm” past him into the apartment. Puzzled, he looks at the search warrant. […] The background to this was a Facebook entry in the student’s profile: "From the river […]
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In November 2023, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs also issued a prohibition order against Hamas.[60] According to the order, “the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea’ (in German or other languages)” is a distinguishing mark of Hamas[61]. […] the current legal situation [regarding “Denial of Israel’s right to exist”] is - contrary to what the statements of the Federal Ministry of Justice suggest[63] - anything but clear. Whether incitements to eliminate the State of Israel are prosecuted depends on the respective legal opinion and the prosecution will of the respective public prosecutor’s office.
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Press release from the previous government:
In this context, Section 111 StGB, which covers public incitement to commit crimes, may also be relevant. Incitement to extinguish Israel’s existence by force may be punishable under this provision. The same applies to calls to publicly display the Hamas flag. If Hamas attacks are publicly cheered and celebrated, this may also be punishable. This means that people who cheer on Hamas’s actions or publicly express their sympathy with the attacks may constitute the criminal offence of “approval of criminal acts” under Section 140 of the German Criminal Code (StGB).
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In connection with the controversial Palestine Congress in Berlin, the German authorities have also imposed an entry ban on former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. “In order to prevent antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda at the event”, several entry bans have been issued, the news agency AFP learned from security sources on Sunday. One of these concerned Varoufakis. (Notably, Varoufakis would have spoken about one-state solutions …)
federal reverse (on behalf of the mods of !europe)
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Israel is a religious ethno supremacist state, not calling to fix that IS UNJUST.
DEFENDERS OF fascism are fascists.
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. 👏
Pov: you assist in helping genocide
You should be ashamed
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?
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.
Ah yes, “just following orders”.
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.
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?
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.
- 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
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.
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.
Where did I say posts about the middle-east are not allowed here if they are in relation to Europe? They are allowed and we do not remove them as off-topic.
But this topic is only a very minor topic for this community which is primarily about EU domestic news and such topics, so when creating this community there was absolutly no reason to avoid feddit.org as the hosting instance over legal concerns specifically related to the state of Israel.
Where did I say posts about the middle-east are not allowed here if they are in relation to Europe?
Literally this whole discussion is happening under the premise that discussion on Palestine is restricted.
when creating this community there was absolutly no reason to avoid feddit.org as the hosting instance over legal concerns specifically related to the state of Israel.
Yes, and I’ve stated, if legal concerns are so troubling there needs to be censorship on the topic, moving to a different instance outside of Germany would make more sense, assuming the moderation and administration team cared about the censorship about an ongoing genocide of which multiple European countries’ governments are partaking in. Other large communities have changed instances as well successfully.
I, and I imagine many others, would have also understood if such restrictions were in place until such a move could occur. Instead, it’s clear the decision was made to defer to an unjust and unethical law.
I see no reason to move instances as it is absolutely allowed to discuss what is happening in Gaza and Israel here (in so far as there is a direct relation to Europe). The restrictions are basically that two wrongs don’t make a right (or many more wrongs in this case), and it is a bit sad that we were forced to explicitly spell it out to make people aware that any genocide is wrong, not only the one that is currently happening.
If we can’t say our opinion because the mods have to remove content or face the threat of being raided by some gestapo squads for saying what’s perfectly normal to say outside of Germany I think we should honestly just move. Then we could speak our minds and the mods / server hosts can sleep at night. We don’t need to have the same opinion, but no one should get anyone in trouble for saying theirs. I think this is a huge advantage of the fediverse and we could just use that to make everyone’s life easier.
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.
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.
Literally who on lemmy is calling for another genocide???
Great, so why the big ruckus if you think so?
Nothing stops people from participating on feddit.org communities if they don’t use thinly veiled dogwistles for such or endorse organisations that call for ethnic clensing like Hamas and use slogans popularized by them.
Not relativising or denying the holocaust is hopefully a given, but it seems some people from other instances are also not so clear on that.
But if i say “from the river to the sea there will only be Jewish sovereignty” I am dandy, right? It’s only the proscribed polarity that matters. Right?
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.
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?
A one state solution can be many things, including a significantly reformed Israel. Sadly a two-state solution with the borders similar to the ones today is about as unrealistic as a one-state solution, as the Palestinian territories alone are not a viable state (and that doesn’t even touch the issue of the many Israeli settlers in those territories).
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.
That’s what I thought too, but then again depending on where you put the comma it could be read as it being okay to talk about a one-state solution if you explicitly state that Jews should have equal rights in that one state unless you call for the dissolution of Israel, which to be fair isn’t impossible but… yeah.
Ah. So it would be useful is @federalreverse@feddit.org could clarify. Cheers!
Though it seems unintuitive to me that a solution that explicitly guarantees equal rights for jews would be against the rules because it doesn’t include continuity of the Israeli state.
Most specifically, legal issues arise when it can be concluded that you support a violent overthrow or eradication of the Jewish state of Israel. If you make it clear specifically that you do not support violence, I think it should be fine.
In that sense, the way I laid out the rules may lead to some overblocking.
Under international law, that Germany is ostensibly fully recognizing, Palestinians have the right to armed violent resistance by virtue of being an occupied people. Is mentioning that simple factoid an offence under these rules?
Equating Hamas and Palestinians is very troublesome. While they are the group democratically elected to run Gaza, they are also a group that perversely uses Gazan civilians as human shields.
Equating Hamas and legitimate Palestinian resistance is also very troublesome. A propos nothing in particular, they performed the Oct 7 attack, largely against Israeli civilians. They can’t be much of a resistance group if they’re killing civilians and taking civilian hostages rather than actually resisting against an aggressor.
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.
