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The same way I don’t think we should capitulate to framing “cracker” as a slur, or to framing “black lives matter” as a racist thing to say, I don’t think we should capitulate to framing things like “from the river to the sea” or “zionist” as antisemitic.
But, as a thought experiment, let’s indulge in this doublespeak trash. What is a good alternative? So far I’ve got:
- Israeli colonizers
- Jewish supremacists
- genocidal sacks of shit
- Israeli apartheidists
- Isreal expansionists
- Israeli warmongerers
- people in favor of the genocide and apartheid committed by Israel (in full, every time you need to say zionist)
- modern day nazis
- zionazis (technically not zionist!)
So all of this liberal crybaby nomenclature trash aside, I actually do think “zionist” is in itself a fairly useless term for the Israeli apartheid question (as Norman Finkelstein and Judith Butler do too). While one faction of zionism pursued the nakba and massacres from fairly early on, and while this faction has been quite successful, there are other notions of zionism which do not entail murdering children or colonizing a country. When Netanyahu and Chomsky can both legitimately refer to themselves as zionists, I think it’s clear that zionism is too broad a term to be useful in the current ongoing genocide and the ethnic cleansing that has been going on for the better part of a century.
I wish I could upvote this more.
Edit: a word
Do a lot of slurs have a wikipedia page?
sooo twitch declares the Zionist movement offensive? and should only discussed in sn academic sense? /s
wow twitch, very brave!!
But Zionism isn’t a religion, it’s a nationalist movement.
Never used it and never will, but maybe we can make Twitch become a slur?
TBH people should talk about zionism and zionists much more.
This might be out of context for the article, but once we are in /c/technology get this: GIMP is a slur, and their slogan during startup is “we glitch because we twitch” which makes me want to kick them in the nuts every time I use the fucking software.
How about “genocidal assholes?” Can they still say that?
Good thing I’m an anti-zionist then I suppose.
Calling zionism what it is shouldn’t be discouraged with dog whistles masquerading as conduct policies.
At the same time I’d like to remind folks that not all Jewish people subscribe to Zionism.
There are a couple Jewish lead organizations that fight for the freedom of Palestine and have been very critical of Israel for many years.
Jewish Voices for Peace is one group. I wonder how they’d feel about Twitches new policy. I’m genuinely curious what their opinion would be.
Edit - corrected Jewish Voices for Peace
At the same time I’d like to remind folks that not all Jewish people subscribe to Zionism.
Further to this, the majority of zionists are christians.
I know there’s a lot of Christians involved but how do we know it’s the majority? Young Israelis are raised largely around Zionist propaganda after all.
There’s about 100 million evangelical christians in the US, and a LifeWay poll in 2017 showed that about 80% essentially considered themselves zionists. That’s 80 million. There’s 15.8 million jews worldwide. So the non-Jewish zionists outweigh Jewish zionists by a fair margin. Heck, they outweigh the zionist and the non-zionist jews taken together by a beefy margin, even.
If you had looked at the link of this post, you would have read:
Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
I.e. nothing is masqueraded here as long as they keep to this. This seems to be a reasonable policy. I’ve seen a couple of instances of people being derogatorily called zionists just for supporting the people of current Israel not being pushed away out of their now decades-old homes, which is hard to still call Zionist if they don’t support any further expansion and any offensive military action.
There’s almost never anything gained to use “Zionist” on someone as if saying “asshole”.
which is hard to still call Zionist if they don’t support any further expansion and any offensive military action.
Your ‘if’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And is fucking hilarious given they keep expanding and pushing people out of their decades old homes.
Funny how that part seems to be ignored in defense of zionists…
Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
Zionist is a political term, it has nothing to do with one’s background or religious belief.
You’re entirely right.
But see if the political view is only held by members or a certain religious group (even if not all members of said religion accept said political thought), it’s easy to conflate it, so that you can ban anyone opposing said political thought based on “they’re discriminating against me because of my religion”.
Fuck twitch.
Zionists identify themselves as zionists. How’s that a slur?
I identify myself as a homosexual.
I’ve heard homo being used in a derogatory way as an insult. That usage should not be tolerated.
Retarded is just a medical term, yet you can use it as an insult as well.
That is what this “specification of conditional” aims at. It’s fine to use the word in a descriptive way, you’re just not allowed to go around angrily calling people “fucking zionist”
They use the word starting with F not the word homosexual
I guess my pessimistic lens is a little strong and I generally don’t trust large companies to act in good faith. So maybe I’m over scrutinizing here and being a bit of a curmudgeon.
I think your perspective is fair, and it’s likely this is akin to a high school faculty dealing with some random word or idea becoming a meme of sorts and causing problems. So they have to write some new rule that sounds ridiculous or weird.
It sucks there’s so much racism and bigotry driving forces in the world that it’s hard to not be dubious of everything. You always kinda wonder about the actual motivation behind things like this.
Is this why we should not delegate the control of hate speech to the state, because it will always blow up in our faces?
Twitch is not the state
Sure it isn’t. Let’s review this when the state does the same thing lol.
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If you’re equating the Jewish people with zionism, or conflating being in favor of zionism as somehow being benevolent to the Jewish people as a whole, you are treating the Jewish people as a monolith and are yourself being anti-semitic. Zionism is perfectly compatible with anti-semitism (see for example all those anti-semitic christians who enthusiastically support zionism), and anti-zionism is in itself not anti-semitic (cf Jewish voice for peace).
So making “zionist” a slur has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with being anti-anti-semitic or not.
I removed my comment because I realized after that I’ve would be interpreted like that. I don’t believe that all Jews are zionists
Next, “apartheid” will be anti-Semitic.
Are they gonna lock up genocide joe for hate crimes?
Hey everybody has a right to a racist ethnostate how dare people criticize the idea.
From the link of this post that you could have clicked on:
Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”
Yeah, how dare people try to demean someone just because they checks notes hold dehumanizing beliefs and support a government and movement bent on removing the people from their land so they can steal it and build new homes while ethnically cleansing the existing population.
smh my head.
It’s great how people are gathering and having discussions under heavily censored platforms owned by billionaries, just amazing.
And on top of that, pretty much all the platforms, even all the way down to this one, are censored in at least one increasingly-relevant way.
At least we can still talk about butt stuff in peace.
