My removed comment, in its entirety, was:
I don’t support Hamas. They killed all those people; fuck them. I also don’t support the current Israeli government, because they occupy, kill, torture, rape, and systematically dehumanize 5 million people, most of whom didn’t do anything wrong and just want to live. So, fuck the Israeli government too. I was just making a point about how forbidding the flags doesn’t have much to do with solving anything about that situation.
The reason given for removal was rule 1:
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Link to the thread. They also removed my interlocutor’s comment, which while unproductive was genuinely harmless, more so even than mine.
So we’re not allowed to criticize the Israeli government on lemmy.ml? (Or wherever was the mod that removed this)
For real?
I realize that whining about removed posts is probably not productive. It is life. 🥲 However, this type of stuff happened frequently on Reddit and helped to convince me it was fundamentally a cheeseball platform. Just recently I was actually arguing with some people and pointing out that I’d never had my stuff removed on Lemmy even though I have some viewpoints that are way more unpopular than “Israel shouldn’t kill civilians.”
And now, the Reddit mod philosophy has arrived here.
The proverbial they are trying to keep the equivalence of Israel = All Jews. They want more people to criticize Israel to further the racist narrative.
You could be Jewish, you could be Israeli. And you could say you don’t approve of the apartheid or genocide by Israel, and you’d be labeled a racist. Now leave out those last two words, and you’re fine.
It would be similar if an American said they didn’t approve of the genocide against the American first Nations by the US Government. Except you don’t get called racist for it.
I think it has a lot to do with the American election. The Israeli government has put the Biden administration in a real bind now. If they don’t support Israel, they lose the Jewish vote. Now they are losing young people by supporting Israel. Israel greatly benefits from Republicans.