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).
-
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 […]
-
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.
-
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).
-
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)
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
Pov: you assist in helping genocide
You should be ashamed
Removed by mod
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.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
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
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.
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.
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.
Restricted, as in “please don’t voice certain opinions here (some of them at closer inspection trollish/unsavory anyway)” but not restricted as in “don’t mention this particular topic”.
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
It’s not hard to start a community here. There are several !europe communities with non-German mods on non-German servers already, too.
But there’s no point in me, as a German, modding the kind of community you want.
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.
I find the restrictions relatively reasonable, and in my circle of radical leftists outside of Germany (I don’t live in Germany), it is really rare that anyone would run into issues with those rules. Of course I am highly against the police raiding homes in reaction to such kind of speech, but this is the reality in Germany that I can’t change.
If it is normal in your personal circle to advocate for the expulsion of an entire group of people from a territory they have lived on all their life or to make comments relativising the holocaust, I strongly recommend you look for less shitty friends. And if you don’t see how that relates to the rules in question you need to seriously educate yourself about the fucked up situation in the middle-east.
Israel is a religious ethno supremacist state, not calling to fix that IS UNJUST.
DEFENDERS OF fascism are fascists.
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)
No one of the moderation team or the feddit.org admins are defending the actions of the Israeli government in any shape or form.
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.
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?
On this account, sure.
Ah yes, “just following orders”.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
