I was dreading writing this since I did not want to risk starting any drama, but I don’t know what else to do anymore after seeing the moderating staff reject my report.
It’s truly undeniable that these last three years have been stressful for all of us — most of all Palestinians — so some cynicism is to be expected. That being said, tolerating anti-Jewish sentiment like this does not help any of us either. All that it really does is play into the Herzlians’ hands, capitulating to their alarmism, and makes our spaces less welcoming to Jewish critics of Zionism. I know that we’re all tired of Herzlians constantly abusing accusations of antisemitism, but going so far as to tolerate that phenomenon only gives them exactly what they want to see.
And for the record, yes, I do think that bashing Germans or Italians or the Japanese per se during World War II would have been wrong, because it misidentifies ethnicity as the real problem and needlessly erases the Germans, Italians, and Japanese folk who opposed the Axis. It would have been easier to understand coming from the people whom the Axis oppressed, but even so I would have gently discouraged that kind of thinking. I refuse to play ethnic supremacists’ games by indulging in a little ethnocentrism myself.
I am not going to ragequit Lemmygrad.ml again, but I have to be honest and admit that tolerance for toxicity like this only makes me less interested in using this forum and convinces me that I was correct to limit my usage anyway. That isn’t meant to be a threat; if you truly see nothing wrong with speech like this then I guess that there’s really not much that I can do to stop you. But however you feel about that, I’ll do what feels natural to me and be around less and less.
