Hexbear mods and US judges so rarely agree
Gonna mark this day in my calendar
Can we even make fun of this when Hexbear has the same policy in regards to flag-burning emojis?
Really puts how pathetic that policy is in sharp relief now that the fascists are adopting the same policy. I think it’s just absurd given they’re committing a genocide.
I feel like it’s okay to add it back, I don’t even know what the exact struggle session was to begin with, but anyone who argues for that position now should be banned.
There wasn’t really a struggle session over it, just a “yeah let’s not give away easy ammunition to call us antisemites” in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7th. Nobody really thought it was antisemitism to burn the Israeli flag but that anything involving the star of david is incredibly easy propaganda for zionists to claim antisemitism regardless of the reality.
The star of david and the swastika are both religious symbols.
To enforce this rule means that they should also enforce a rule against burning the nazi flag.
Otherwise it’s just jewish exceptionalism.
So is a cross but you probably wouldnt burn one cause of the implications
I would burn a Kkkristian flag with a cross on it in an instant and I don’t think any black person would look at that happening at a demonstration and assume “kkk”. The KKK cross burning was a very specific ritual involving construction of and burning of a physical cross standing by itself either in a yard or near people as a threat or at the center of their ritual gatherings. Backwards patriachal religions have no right to exist nor their symbols of the mythology and superstition any special right to protection when those symbols are at the front phalanxes of the hordes of hate and genocide.
This is just bad faith hasbara tier garbage. Like saying I want to knife Christian children because I’d burn or shoot up a Nazi belt with "god with us’ on it.
Fuck using religions as shields. Religious fascists don’t get it both ways, they don’t get to both use it, be recognized for it, receive protections for it being them and them being it and have the casual/passive support of a majority (last I checked) of the adherents of it in the west yet somehow not owners of it and somehow protected from feeling “unsafe” by incidentally destroying the symbol of their movement which they NOT I, not people against it, put on there (on the flag) as a deliberate shield to be used in just this way. And it’s shameful it works and you lean right into their troll-faced attempts at making anti-semitism hatred of pissrael.
Don’t want it burned? Make those zionist fuckers take it off their fucking flag. Not our fucking job. Not our choice. Don’t blame us.
Unironic use of maoist standard English
Removed by mod
holocaust emoji supporter
incredible
Acting like (incidentally) burning a symbol put on the flag NOT BY US but by them is the same as a mass murder camp?
Pathetic. Disgusting. Intellectually dishonest. You have no arguments so resort to emotionally extreme appeals detached from reality. YOU LOSE.
As Finkelstein once said I don’t care about your crocodile tears and I don’t care about your attempted emotional terrorism in defense of genocidal settler monsters who fully deserve being compared to Hitlerite Germany and their symbol (and this flag is their chosen symbol, the only other option I’m aware of as a stand-in for zionism being just the star by itself which I’d avoid for obvious reasons) treated as similar to the swastika with similar disdain and scorn and yes burnings and throwing in a pile of manure.
This is typical of zionists and their supporters (including liberal/apologist/secret supporters of which there are many who display the German model of self-flagellation and feeling guilt that blinds them to any critical thought on matters involving Jews/zionists) by the way who conflate everything with the Holocaust and are constantly pulling that out as a card to excuse their atrocities.
It’s time to take it away. What Germans and Poles did to European Jews 70 years ago doesn’t excuse the (genocidal) existence of pissrael nor does it provide some special magic exemption from examination and criticism and yes disdain and mockery and spitting on card nor some eternal shield they can use to bash others in the face. This “waaaagh I’m a victim, some Jews (same ones hated by zionists for not joining them) were victims, so we get to do what we want, any pushback or existence of things that are mean to us is a holocaust so ban mentions of Gaza or hurting our symbols” is infantile.
Like saying I want to knife Christian children because I’d burn or shoot up a Nazi belt with "god with us’ on it.
Bit fucking rich for a holocaust emoji supporter to pretend they’re being called a child killer just because we won’t let them doodle little auschwitz’s everywhere.
Holocaust trivialization is not okay (which is what you do saying things like that, the exact same canard that zionists pull out and accuse anyone against the existence of pissrael of being after).
holocaust emoji supporter
Holy fucking Zionist take
holocaust emoji supporter
Once you get a bunch of crosses in different directions it looks different and therefore doesnt have an association with a racist lynch mob.
Keep going, more gymnastics and contortions for jewish exceptionalism
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George’s_Cross
I think these emojis should stay, just for the record, but a significant number of European flags have Christian symbols on them.
oh it was and continued to be a constant struggle session. Dozens of comments have been removed for it, users banned and threads locked
:isreal-cool: is right up there with incels in terms of how often they trigger struggle sessions. There seems to be at least one 150+ comment thread about it every month or two.
I’m talking about the time of implementation. There was barely any disagreement that I recall, there was barely a blip about it, most people shrugged at the time or mildly agreed that not giving easy fuel was better. It was in the last few weeks that this suddenly started appearing in conversations here frequently.
There wasn’t really a struggle session over it,
(But looking down)
There was absolutely a struggle session and users got banned when it went down. It’s just so long that a lot of people forget it happened. And the argument against having the emoji wasn’t just that it could be antisemtic, it was also that it made some users uncomfortable. It’s also how we got rid of the :saudicool: emoji when someone rightly pointed out what that Arabic text on the KSA flag is.
Oh I used similar examples as the Saudi flag assuming it wouldn’t be a problem here but glad to see there was some amount of self awareness there when that struggle sesh went down.
The Saudi flag wasn’t a problem. Some muslim users at the time basically said they didn’t care if there was an emoji burning a KSA or ISIS flag (yes, also why we don’t have :isiscool: lol) just because the shahada was on it. I’m also not sure I would call it self-awareness as much as ignorance and also trying to cover their own asses. They claimed ignorance about the shahada, but IIRC :turkeycool: was only removed much later, even though it was pointed out the crescent is also an Islamic symbol (which the people against having the genuine israel cool thought was “too far”).
There’s also all of the flags with Christian symbolism that are allowed, and then there is
(the lotus flower is a sacred symbol/image in Hinduism).Yes maybe self awareness wasn’t the right way to put it, more like following through on their own line of logic in a way that doesn’t make them look as hypocritical. If there was those emojis still and not the israel one it would look even more ridiculous
Using indigenous Hawaiian Israel Kamakawiwoʻole to represent the occupation is one of the grossest fucking things on this site and whoever signed off on that change should fucking apologize.
Burning a genocidal flag emoji is too far but disrespecting an indigenous activist is fair game
Never change, whites of hexbear
It’s been called out multiple times but still stands. It pisses me off a lot. It also changes the meaning of that emoji compared to all of the other “cool” emojis.
The mods can’t just find a random white dude named Israel but have to pick on some Hawaiian instead.
It’s been a thing for years since the early days of the site and even the subreddit. The joke is that he’s the good israel. Kind of like how subreddits used to post gifs of shakira every time the subject of sharia law came up.
“Cool Israel”
Kind of like how subreddits used to post gifs of shakira every time the subject of sharia law came up.
no position in the struggle session, but I want to point out that equating cool Israel meme with Reddit athiest islamophobia doesn’t make the point you think it does
I only know Israel Epstein, but he was based Israel and based Epstein
To be fair, what happened was the one jewish user who manages/makes all the emojis expressed discomfort with it and said “you can add it but I’m not comfortable making it myself”. And then struggle sessions ensued but nobody ever added it.
posting pics of the israeli flag burning or doing it with emojis was never banned, it just wasn’t specifically added to the library, IMO out of a lack of consensus. Which may still have been the wrong call but its not the same as this US policy.
Multiple long time users, including zposter in this thread, have been banned for this
banned over the struggle session, behavior in it, and other longstanding issues, not for posting a burning israeli flag. Unless I missed something, which is possible
Banned in a struggle session about having the emoji. There’s a reason they were banned in this thread, by this admin and attacked as an anti-semite by this particular mod (Nakoichi) who has issued them death threats before
I’m not claiming they’re unrelated, just that they aren’t the same thing. The OP is about actual criminalization of actual flag burning, not punishment of harassment or other unrelated rule breaking ( that happens to be related to one’s position on flag burning). Nobody’s been stopping anybody from posting images like these over the past 2 years:
- https://hexbear.net/post/5878074/6419882
- https://hexbear.net/comment/6386732
- https://hexbear.net/comment/4647527
- https://hexbear.net/comment/4648175
I don’t even necessarily agree with banning zposter over this, but there’s a long laundry list of other reasons so I’m not too chuffed abt it
mod bootlicker you are feeding into their zionist apologia
edit: oh its literally you. Great. If you dislike the instance so much I would appreciate if you’d just leave and go post elsewhere.
Cause this is a web zone and not the government?
communist web zone tho, supposedly. one that ostensibly supports various factions that do burn that flag all the time. So we are at best sending mixed messages here, undermining support for groups like Ansarallah and Hezbollah by enacting the same policies as the fascist zionist government for some reason. What type of message does this send to those on this webzone not from the burgerreich?
undermining support for groups like Ansarallah and Hezbollah
Yeah dude those groups and the wider world are totally paying close attention to this niche shitposting site. Get over yourself.
there’s arab users here including myself that feel extremely othered by this white pearl clutching. many palestinians came here thinking this was an english speaking pro-resistance site, and here we have this quibbling zionist shit still. We can’t escape it.
How the fuck is it white pearl clutching to correct your assertion that this isn’t about Jewishness but about white supremacy?
I am not condemning people irl actually burning the actual flag in protest. We also have the
emoji. You have had a long standing beef with the mods here I get it. But that seems much more to do with your toxic contrarianism than any actual principled stance. Now you are accusing me of “white pearl clutching” and frankly go fuck yourself I am done with you. There’s a reason you have been banned like 5 times before. IDK why they tolerate your repeated ban evasion.
The consequences for violation are on a hilariously different scale. Here you might get a deleted by mod where if the government’s mods say you can’t it’s actually illegal, so there’s a big difference there. You can also reach the same policy for different reasons, im kinda ambivalent on the hexbear policy and with a flag like that no matter what move you make here plays into Israel’s hand, that’s why they made the flag be that way. I also dont think it’s all thst detrimental towards our support Ansrallah or Hezbollah in their current struggle cause they aren’t reading any of this and if they did they probably wouldnt like us, they arent leftist groups, they have our support cause they’re trying to stop a genocide. Its not like we see eye to eye with these guys in pretty much any other regard, they’re just what we have rn. Its pragmatic support. Which means you dont need to go full in. I would hope those not from the burgerreich would get this cause neither of those groups represent them and therefore we dont need to mirror their behavior. Im mostly against it cause it’ll just invite really annoying federated reply guys every time it’s used
they both are further left than you are
That simply isn’t true. Just because they oppose Israel and do things about it doesnt make them leftist by any measure. You are being absolutely absurd here.
They are banned now but this is the same user that once claimed that Russia is (not was but is) more socialist than China.
I do notice it always seems to be the most contrarian and “fuck you, I do what I want” sort of posters here who loudly demand a burning Israel flag the most. Like, it isn’t hard to express hate for Israel here, so I don’t know why they act like this is some big “censorship” thing or whatever, they accuse people of behaving like liberals, while behaving like liberals themselves, acting like the meaning of words isn’t important, just empty symbols and shibboleths.
literally just lying and making shit up. Just like when you lied about the death threats you made
Im sure it’s hard to remember but was that claim substantiated at all? Im doubting it and it would be hard to recall, but if so I’d like to hear what that argument would be.
the user was banned for their argument, so the consequences are worse than you stated. You are harassed, given death threats, lied about, smeared and banned.
hexbear-cool when since we cant get real israel-cool?
The site’s most monumental moment of cowardice emulated in law. To tap dance around the simple issue of depicting the burning of a fascist state’s flag shows a blind spot in the mod team
I think the people here in the West are in for a rude awakening when they move pass the Anglosphere and realize that non-Westerners without the legacy of the Holocaust are beginning to treat the star of David as a hate symbol in the same exact way Westerners treat the swastika as a hate symbol. And saying that it’s a religious symbol means nothing since religions aren’t inherently peaceful social institutions. If anything, given the Reddit atheist understanding of religion on Hexbear dot net, isn’t something being a religious symbol a bad thing? There are plenty of Indigenous people who see the Christian cross as a hate symbol, and given how much they have suffered at the hands of Christians since 1492, who can blame them?
The Reddit atheists on Hexbear dot net want a world without religion, and last time I checked, Judaism is a religion as well. A world without religion is a world where Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews don’t exist because no one practices Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism anymore. Treating Jews as a monolithic ethnicity instead of a religion with multiple ethnicities that traditionally practiced that religion (Ashkenazim, Sephardim) on of top of unaffiliated individuals and families converts from varying ethnicities is a Zionist talking point. It’s like saying Armenians, Ethiopians, and Palestinians are one ethnicity because those populations are one of the oldest Christian populations.
The swastika being a religious symbol for Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism didn’t save the swastika, and I don’t think it will save the star of David either.
I agree. My partner stopped wearing her star of david necklace. It took about a year post-oct 7th, but the decision was made after someone made a comment saying she was “so brave to wear that at a time like this”. She decided to take it off due to the only comment she’s ever received on that necklace implied that she was supportive of “israel”.
My Palestinian parents also have a strong association of the star of david to israel, and how could they not? The flag is waved everywhere there, if someone beats you while waving the flag, burns your land and kills your livestock, I think it’s fair to associate the symbol on that flag as a hate symbol. In their minds, the star of david is a symbol of ethnic supremacy.
Biggest HexeBear L
It is now official US law that hexbear mods are cowards
I take serious offense to this, as I did not have a hand in any of it.
I just thought :israel-cool: was a meme, they could have just gone with “we don’t want the Israeli flag in the emotes” as their excuse and it would have been better than this…
Come on guys, I’ve been here since the beginning, no need to dig yourself into a hole. Just admit you were wrong and move on. No one really cares unless you dig in.
Of course antisemites are dipshits and wrong but I can understand where they get off thinking that israel owns the usa, and not vice-versa. In a perverse way, the zionist project of israel’s mere existence gives more than enough ammo to bigots to attack it forever in a lot of ways. This is one of them. They’re going to say that jews run the usa because of shit like this, which bleeds into hatred, which in turn fuels the drive for more jews to flee to israel and keep the apartheid going.
You can do anything anywhere, what is god going to stop me?
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
But Palestinians are special, they get to say it, but it becomes a “Holocaust emoji” when it comes to a western platform. Hmm
so many closet zionists who cherish the occupier’s flag on hexbear, very sad
the most hilarious thing is they aren’t even zionists really. They just have really big egos and cannot admit they were wrong 2 years ago and keep digging the hole deeper instead of just backing out and admitting they were wrong.
The increasingly convoluted logic they have to keep using to justify their doubling down just ends up being zionist. Then they start banning users, predominantly arab and muslim ones, to keep covering their tracks.
many such cases, unfortunately
ultimately if they’re doing the work of hasbarists and defending the zionist flag, they may as well be zionists
okay but what if I carefully cut the star of David out of the flag then burn the rest
Burning a white flag is maybe a false surrender and therefore a war crime, so if you’re white it’s fine.
still has the blues stripes
Here’s the opinion (it’s dogshit). Judge McFadden is not only a member of the Federalist Society but an ex-cop.
edit: relevant part of the decision (which cites the Encyclopedia Brittanica in the Year of Our Lᴏʀᴅ MMXXV lmao)
Next, that battery was direct evidence of discrimination that likely would not have occurred but for racial animus. Direct evidence is “a smoking gun,” Amadeo v. Zant, 486 U.S. 214, 226 (1988), “that itself shows racial or gender bias,” Ayissi-Etoh v. Fannie Mae, 712 F.3d 572, 576 (D.C. Cir. 2013). One “statement alone [that] is direct evidence” is enough to send a case to trial. Ayissi-Etoh, 712 F.3d at 576–77. “A[n action] that can plausibly be interpreted in two different ways—one discriminatory and the other benign—does not constitute direct evidence.” Braxton v. Walmart, Inc., 2023 WL 2028698, at *3 (10th Cir. Feb. 16, 2023) (cleaned up).
Purposefully yanking on an Israeli flag tied around a Jewish person’s neck to choke them is direct evidence of racial discrimination. The Star of David—emblazoned upon the Israeli flag—symbolizes the Jewish race. Star of David, Encyclopedia Britannica (2025) (“The yellow badge that Jews were forced to war in Nazi-occupied Europe invested the Star of David with a symbolism indicating martyrdom and heroism.”).[1] Battery, particularly involving a racial symbol, is strong evidence of racial discrimination. Cf. Wong, 450 Fed. App’x at 28–29 (racially motivated battery violated § 1981). It is more severe than “[r]acial slurs or statements” that constitute direct evidence. E.g., Ayissi-Etoh, 712 F.3d at 576. And targeting the Star of David is as racially motivated as “the highly offensive racial slur, ‘n*****,’” which “constitutes direct evidence.” Kinnon v. Arcoub, Gopman & Assocs., Inc., 490 F.3d 886, 891 (11th Cir. 2007) (alteration added) (collecting cases); see also Herster v. Bd. of Supervisors of La. St. Univ., 887 F.3d 177, 186 (5th Cir. 2018) (finding direct evidence when employers said an employee was “too black to do various tasks” or explicitly refused to “hire a black person”).
Ali has proffered no “benign” interpretation whatsoever for choking Sumrall and it is hard to imagine one. Braxton, 2023 WL 2028698, at *3. Her closest argument contends that the Israeli flag represents the state of Israel rather than the Jewish race, so her action is merely anti- Israel, not antisemitic. PI Hr’g Tr. at 74:23–76:1. But it is quite a stretch to say that yanking on a flag tied around someone’s neck is an objection to state policies; battery is not a legitimate form of protest. See Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476, 484 (1993) (“[A] physical assault is not by any stretch of the imagination expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”). Ali did not have reason to think Sumrall was herself affiliated with the Israeli government. Rather, it is much more likely that she was intentionally attacking a Jewish person wearing a Jewish flag as a symbol of her racial heritage. As Sumrall’s counsel contended at the preliminary injunction hearing, if yanking on a flag emblazoned with the Star of David tied around a Jewish person’s neck at a pro-Israel protest is not discrimination, "I don’t know what is.” PI Hr’g Tr. at 83:3–5 (arguments of counsel).
Western logic:
Actual Jewish citizens protesting Israel’s destruction of Palestine = ‘bad bad antisemitism! No free speech for you!’
Neo-nazis everywhere = ‘This is the GOOD antisemitism! They get free speech!’
See also: https://forward.com/fast-forward/761011/star-of-david-israeli-flag-antisemitism-trevor-mcfadden
Unfortunately, I can’t find much on the legal implications of this. To me it seems like the Israeli flag being involved allows for hate crime charges. It’s still legal to burn an Israeli flag (assuming you can’t get nailed on arson charges, which is a likely scenario), but in this case the battery charge of someone allegedly yanking on a piece of clothing was elevated to a hate crime because of the Israeli flag.
