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.
the problem is that about 75% of people have no idea what happened during the partition plan and 20% who do think what the Zionists did were justified (even pre partition/pre war/war time(
These are indeed very good alternatives
I’m partial to three, m’self.
Izan - Nazi backwards Iz A Nazi or IzrAeli Nazi
I wish I could upvote this more.
Edit: a word
Next, “apartheid” will be anti-Semitic.
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.
That’s an insane number. Must be a very broad definition of Zionist.
oh no, statistics that challenge my world view! Quick, let’s not look into it at all and move the goal posts!
Could you at least try to engage in this discussion? Or maybe come up with any evidence supporting your world view?
A different definition of the term isn’t a different worldview. Also, not immediately spinning every exchange into an exhaustive debate isn’t a critical character flaw. Unlike being an insufferable ass about not getting the amount of attention you apparently feel entitled to.
Though I would take look at that poll about 80% of Christians being “essentially” Zionists if you’d link to it.
the majority of zionists are christians.
us braindead fundies are numbered in dozens of millions and they largely support Zionism.
in rural US, radio glorifying genocide… it is very disturbing.
Which makes the blob anti-semitic for saying anti-zionism is anti-semitic.
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”.
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.
Except not all Zionists are Jews, many are Christian.
Well, I guess, but… you could argue that Zionists are mostly seen to be purely Jewish due to the nature of the movement.
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…
say what you say about state of Israel but they got AIPAC to run propaganda of the history!
being able to mobilize foreign population to support your genocide really is the psyop of all times lol
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.
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
How do you people propose to call them? Expansionists? Colonialists? Genocidists?
Israeli supremacists
Waiting for the free-speech absolutists to boycott twitch for this (they won’t)
One of the orchestrators of this whole thing, Destiny, defends child porn and the use of slurs.
Ironic is putting it lightly.
How about “genocidal assholes?” Can they still say that?
They already banned a swathe of pro-palestinian political streamers in the run up to the US election, so this is likely retroactive reasoning.
But Zionism isn’t a religion, it’s a nationalist movement.
Do a lot of slurs have a wikipedia page?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/*removed*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetback_(slur)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paki_(slur)
So yeah. Not that ‘Zionist’ is a slur
Edit: Really, shitty censorship bot? We’re adulterating URLs now, and selectively only that specific slur? Gross on both counts
Yes, probably most of them…
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).
Do any of the forms of zionism (a belief that they should own the land) involve market purchases of the land they would like? (instead of settler colonial theft?)
Okay, now streamers can get more creative when refering to a zionist. I think that ‘bibi’s removed’ is a good term.
They probably don’t like zionazi either. Neither this nor zionist is a code word for Jew. The entire political class, the great majority being Christian, and their donors are zionist, because going with the flow of AIPAC is path to get your candidates to also serve your oligarchist or Christofascist protections.
Netanyahuists or likudists or Mossadists or Epsteinists ok?
BTW, Chuck Shumer is going to allow a vote in Senate over this “criticism of zionism is anti semitic” law in US. Reddit also supports mods who recomend permabans over criticism of zionism already.
Friendly reminder that selfhosted streaming exists (Owncast) or online alternatives like PeerTube.
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.
That kind of sucks, but it should only be for a dev release
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp-data/-/blob/main/images/splash-log.md
Once genz matures, public opinion on Israel will shift. I hope Israel enters the “and find out” stage.
Fuck 'em, disgusting parasites leeching on US might to commit a genocide. Americans will pay for this too…
next 9/11: why would anybody do this to us 🤡
sad reality many of us did not sign up to fund the genocide but AIPAC was able to infiltrated state and corpos from within while avoiding foreign agent registration.
our spooks are fucking useless…
Good thing I’m an anti-zionist then I suppose.