I am part of a neighborhood group where I grew up in Bangladesh and lived until 5th grade in the 90s.
The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.
Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.
To explain further. I can't imagine why anyone would post about Jews on my local NextDoor or FB group. It's just not a topic that comes up outside of Jewish community events, like holidays. There are certainly no Jewish community events in Bangladesh. If they are writing posts about Jews like were posted about Rohingya, then maybe it's not just "posts on Facebook".
You are the one who seems to be uptight, bringing up the topic of bombs (?!), and scolding me to relax. Maybe you should relax.
P.S. for those wondering, my flagged comment simply asked why Jews would come up as a topic at all on a local Bangladeshi group. The irony of it being flagged in a post about censorship is piquant.
Well, you insinuated that people in the local neighborhood groups are calling for violence against Jews just like Buddists called for massacre of rohingya people.
For a start, I don't outright deny that. Personally I haven't come across a lot, but there are different kinds of people and commentary on social media, so I won't be surprised if a fraction of them are indeed doing so.
Even if they do, Facebook is evidently maximizing resources to moderate calls for violence against Jews/Israel. Which I personally applaud. Palestine is a complex issue that cannot be fixed with violence. It's just that I'd appreciate if Facebook did the same level of moderation when Buddists in Myanmar were doing the same. Otherwise in plain and simple view it seems Facebook does not bother when victims are of certain group.
Remember that Bangladesh is a Muslim majority country (85%+). So naturally there is popular support in favor of Palestine and strong anti-Israel sentiments.
What's really happening is that people are organizing procession and demonstration in support of Gaza, and when they try to organize and communicate online on Facebook and other platforms about this specific issue, their posts are getting moderated out of existence.
Now if you ask whether should people organize in support/against either Palestine or Israel, that's a whole different issue and not what we are debating here.
It was already dead otherwise I would have downvoted it too. Why? Because the implication of your original post is the only reason that fb group would post about those topics is for bad reasons. Why can’t there just be a casual conversation about something that was all over the news?
In my personal circle Jews don’t come up but Palestine and Israel certainly do. Why? Because 1) they were in the news and we discuss current events and 2) being in the tech industry Israel comes up frequently. Why is this an issue?
Exactly. Israel/Palestine comes up. But not Jews. It's a strange topic for a local neighborhood group. You can deduce that from reflecting on your own interactions.
Further, FB found it necessary to stop discussions about Jews on that group. Now, we can cook up any number of conspiracies about how any mention of Jews is like discussing fight club, or the Illuminati, and that's why FB instructed the group to stop discussing it. Or we can deduce the obvious. That the group, that would normally not be expected to be discussing Jews, had some fairly distasteful discussions about Jews.
FB is not a model of good moderation by a long shot. But given the strangeness of the topic in a local neighborhood group, we can deduce that FB probably got it right in this case.
Facebook is not the same there as it is here. It's not just a fun app you use, it's a huge part of how African and Asian countries interface with the internet. Trying to lead a group effort to leave the platform wouldn't work at any scale other than complete unanimity, and you're going to have trouble reaching that with the people benefiting from weaponizing Facebook.
> Facebook is not the same there as it is here. It's not just a fun app you use, it's a huge part of how African and Asian countries interface with the internet.
Could you give a little more detail about what that means?
At least in Africa, Facebook is responsible for a large part of internet accessibility. One can say that, in Africa, "Facebook is the internet" [0]. I can't comment on Asia.
> Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for Ire*
Then again, the overwhelming majority of people talking about Israel not having a right to exist are advocating for the violent overthrow of it that by when you're repeating their slogans, you're not advocating what they're advocating.
Also, while there are some valid reasons for the idea that "Israel doesn't have a fundamental right to exist" (like if you think no state has a right to exist), if you only think this about Israel, then it's very likely an antisemitic argument.
That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't". Israel is legal abstraction, not human life and as such has no "fundamental rights" whatsoever. Humans have fundamental rights, however, and those rights always trump the non-rights of state entities.
You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
> That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't".
I think I made it clear that I don't think parent post was saying that.
> Israel is legal abstraction, not human life and as such has no "fundamental rights" whatsoever. Humans have fundamental rights, however, and those rights always trump the non-rights of state entities.
I don't know what any of that means. Does the US have fundamental rights? When it was attacked by Japan in WW2, did it have a right to defend itself? What does that even mean if "the US" has no fundamental rights?
(You could mean a lot of different things with this statement, hence my asking for a clarification. But there's a lot of history and philosophy about these concepts, and just FYI I believe you are stating a very minority view on how to think about countries.)
> You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
No, the reason Zionists "harp on" about Israel's right to exist is because so many people believe Israel, uniquely among countries, doesn't have a right to exist. For the first 30 years of its history, this included most of Israel's neighbors, who didn't just abstractly believe in Israel not having a right to exist - they went to war with Israel several times with the aim of getting rid of it.
Even today, some of Israel's neighbors insist it doesn't have the right to exist, including Iran, which is a hair away from having nukes, and which has spent billions of its people's resources to try and destroy Israel. This is not an abstract debate, its a very real threat to the lives of all Israelis.
> > That's the "correct" that matters. Not the "I'd like to put words in your mouth and pretend you meant something you don't".
> I think I made it clear that I don't think parent post was saying that.
You did not. You associated them with people who are advocating for a violent overthrow of the Israeli regime and with those who think Israel is the only state without a fundamental right to exist.
> I don't know what any of that means. Does the US have fundamental rights?
No, because fundamental rights are rights derived from natural law, roughly equivalent to the UDHR: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... Did the Soviet Union have a right to exist? Did its dissolution by its leaders violate its fundamental rights?
> > You do know that the reason Zionists harp on about "Israel's right to exist" is to deny the victim's of that state's violence legal redress, right?
> No, the reason Zionists "harp on" about Israel's right to exist is because so many people believe Israel, uniquely among countries, doesn't have a right to exist.
No. They do it because in 1948 and 1967 Israel conducted ethnic cleansings of Palestine and drove out its native inhabitants to create a Jewish supremacist state with a Jewish majority. Zionists can't (for now) argue that ethnic cleansing is alright, so instead they argue that if the victims of those cleansing were allowed to return, Israel would no longer be a Jewish-majority state and that would somehow violate Israel's fictive "fundamental rights". E.g., the Palestinian majority would probably prefer if the name of the state was changed (back) to "Palestine" rather than "Israel".
In the 1990s there was a British boxer who suffered severe brain damage during a fight and was paralyzed. So he sued the British boxing federation for medical negligence since there was no ringside doctors present. The compensation the court awarded the injured boxer was so heavy that the British boxing federation had to sell everything and eventually it went bankrupt. Did the verdict violate the British boxing federation's "right to exist"?
Jewish people were unsafe because of antisemites and antisemitism, not because they lacked an ethnostate. The diaspora also deserves safety, with or without an Israel.
> Jewish people were unsafe because of antisemites and antisemitism, not because they lacked an ethnostate.
1. Unfortunately, antisemitism is alive and well.
2. It is an unfortunate reality that Jews in particular have been persecuted throughout history. But I think it's true that most people want a state of their own, to protect them and to live in the way that they want to live. This is the source of most modern countries/states - some ethnicity with on some specific land deciding to turn it into their state.
The only reason Jews were different was because they were ethnically cleansed by the Roman empire from their own land, and dispersed across the entire Jewish diaspora. This made their situation worse than most ethnicities, made them even more in need of a land to call their own.
> The diaspora also deserves safety, with or without an Israel.
Of course. Everyone deserves safety. I wish everyone got what they deserved.
But we don't get rid of the police force because "no one deserves to be murdered". The world doesn't run just on what people deserves.
I highly recommend watching Haviv Rettig Gur's talk about the differences between the Jews of the diaspora (he's mostly talking about the US), and Israeli Jews. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKoUC0m1U9E)
To sum up a long and fascinating lecture, he makes the case that the Jews of the US diaspora are the few Jews who managed to find a country that actually took them in and treated them as equals, which is almost a complete aberration.
Whereas Israeli Jews are largely the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust- those Jews who learned the hard way that much of the world wanted to kill them, and that they couldn't trust any country to take them in.
Israel's population was largely made up, in terms of numbers, of people either fleeing the Holocaust, or Holocaust survivors who were displaced persons and literally had no other place to go - no country wanted them.
For starters, "few" is a misnomer. The US Jewish population is just shy of Israel's Jewish population (6.3m to 7.2m). Don't insinuate that American Jews are too few in number to get a voice.
If you wish to say that American Jews "had it easy", then I can just as easily say the opposite: Israeli Jews are too "traumatized" to see how they're perpetuating injustice in the name of security.
Stating that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist has been recognized to be an antisemitic statement by many prominent institutions.
It’s a radical statement that effectively denies the rights of millions of people to exist and is especially problematic given the historical context of the establishment of Israel.
The statement gets thrown around so much in certain circles that it’s gotten normalized. You’ve apparently lost sight of or never stopped to think what actually means, to the point where you’re providing it as an example of an innocent statement that got you banned for no reason. Taking this statement out of radical activist circles and into the real world won’t go well.
Take some time to educate yourself and reflect on what it actually means.
But states don't have a right to exist. It's not a right a state can have.
The context of the establishment of Israel is also the mass expulsion of Palestinians, terrorism, the murder of British soldiers trying to keep peace, biological warfare with the poisoning of wells with typhus, etc.
What does that mean, 'a right to exist'? It sounds like emotional nonsense speak - we have the powerful words right and exist, and together they sound existential, for a person.
In international law afaict existing states have a right to exist - yes, almost circular. It's not endorsement of them as good or ok; it's recognizing reality and it's considered absolutely essential to maintain peace - otherwise everyone could attack almost anyone else, because if you're going to start deligitimizing states based on their bad actions, including in their formation, there's going to be a long list.
But beyond that, I don't even know what it means for state. Beyond any doubt, the humans in Israel and the occupied territories all have a right to exist.
After the fall of the Nazi regime, two new German governments were installed, and then unification happened. Yugoslavia broke up. The Soviet Union broke up. States alter, abolish, and replace themselves all the time.
Maybe the dissolution I'm hoping for will actually take the form of Israel codifying a constitution finally that grants equal rights to Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.
>Beyond any doubt, the humans in Israel and the occupied territories all have a right to exist.
> After the fall of the Nazi regime, two new German governments were installed, and then unification happened. Yugoslavia broke up. The Soviet Union broke up. States alter, abolish, and replace themselves all the time.
All the time? You had to go back to the 1940s and 1990s to find examples. Per Wikipedia, though I wouldn't trust it completely, there have been only three new countries since 1994 - South Sudan, Kosovo, Montenegro:
The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.
Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.