[Reminder] This post, made by /u/161719, got /r/conspiracy banned from /r/bestof; as it detailed the apartheid conditions in Occupied Palestine/Israel.
268 2016-01-25 by AssuredlyAThrowAway
The text of the comment is as follows, and it serves as a vibrant reminder of what is at stake when agenda driven moderation becomes the driving ethos within the minutely small reddit moderator community (I also added a poem that I wrote);
These are the words that you are not supposed to see.
The ones that burn truth into flesh,
tear down walls, and replace war-torn concrete with love.
Those that refuse to bend under the weight of bought-and-paid-for scorn,
who cry out in steadfast defiance as the bombs fall around them.
They are the words that can bring down Apartheid.
Their melancholic intonations, which ring forth like church bells,
serenade a country-side longing to respond.
But a silenced church bell brings forth no masses,
as its wails are contained by the silence of a click.
These are the words that you are not supposed to see.
I drove across Sinai from Cairo, which is crumbling. Sheep on the streets, buildings falling down, giant slums, poor education, nice food only for the very rich, streets covered in garbage, majority of the country is poor.
Went to Israel. Saw a city much like any city in Europe. Clean streets. Beautiful big store fronts. Sidewalks. Nice signs telling you where to go. Little stands and shops everywhere. Great food from around the world. Pastries, pizza. It was Europe, basically. I loved it. It was very clean! It was great.
You have to drive some distance out of Jerusalem to get to the wall. It is a nice drive past pastures and rolling hills with bushes and trees on them.
The wall is very tall. It is made of concrete. At the top there are guard posts with glass. There is barbed wire, even though the wall is far too high to get over. There are men with guns.
When you go through it, you are asked many questions about who you are and where you come from. If you have anything Arab about you this questioning is very long it can take several hours. You are brought through many layers of security, the inside of the wall is like a fort. You go back and force through a maze of metal bars, with many security cameras watching you. The bars look like the bars used to hold cattle at a rodeo.
You exit and on the other side is a tall wire fence covered with barbed wire. There is graffiti all over the wall. The buildings are crumbling. Noo nice food, streets made of dirt, everyone is poor. There are men waiting to be taxi drivers, I went with one. He showed me an ID card with a picture of a baby on it. He told me a story.
"This is my son. You know how I got this card?"
"My son was born with a problem in his arm, and they said that if his arm wasn't operated on he would lose the arm. We don't have that kind of hospital here, so I have to go across into Jerusalem to see the doctor. So I go to the Fence."
"The man at the fence won't let me through. He says that I can't bring through any person without a card. He is referring to my son, who is a new born. He didn't have a card."
"So I say to him, where do I get the card? He says you must get the card in Jerusalem."
"I say let me through then I will get the card and leave my son with my wife. He says that won't work, a person must be present to have fingerprints and a photo and so on in order to get the card."
"I say how will my son get the card if he cannot travel through the fence to get the card?"
"He told me I was holding up the line, and my son never got the surgery, he lost his arm."
He passed me the card, he said it was fake, and he didn't have the courage to try it out, because you could be put in prison for such a thing. He had to choose between making his son grow up without an arm or without a father. The card was so poorly done. It was obviously fake. We got up to the top of this hill, and he pointed out at these buildings coming over the hills, he said they were settlements, and they took over 3 more hills in the last few months. These were very nice buildings. Developments.
I went back to Israel that night, and I went to a waffle store. They had every kind of waffle. Chocolate waffle, ice cream waffle, Nutella. Anything. Any kind of fruit and so on. The taxis are really nice there they have meters, they don't clunk when they start. The monuments are lit up at night. There are little plaques at every monument that tell you the history in English and Hebrew and Russian and Italian.
When I took the bus back, I sat next to a young girl who had a phone with rhinestones glued to it in a heart shape, and a beanie baby on a key chain. She had a ponytail, she was texting and wearing an army uniform. She had a grenade launcher in the seat next to her. The bus stopped several times and the Palestinians were made to get off and be searched. Their bags were taken off the bus and dumped out, and the soldiers kicked through their belongings at the side of the road and we sat inside the bus and watched and they passed out snacks.
It was absolutely banal, but the whole thing chilled me, and I realized that this was the country at the center of American foreign policy, and this was the beacon of democracy, and I realized that these were the supposed "good guys," and I just thought that it wasn't fucking right, and that Christians should be embarrassed because Jesus wouldn't have stood for any of this.
Sorry I wrote a novel. It really changed me.
TL:DR; I think every American history teacher should be forced to walk around in Jerusalem, then go through the wall to Bethlehem and walk around in Palestine before teaching students that colonialism is something that "used to" happen.
36 comments
24 [deleted] 2016-01-25
[deleted]
6 phiz36 2016-01-25
What's the name of the Banksy movie?
14 [deleted] 2016-01-25
[deleted]
0 Troppin 2016-01-25
This video is from Gaza. The above anecdote is about the West Bank. They are quite different.
1 [deleted] 2016-01-25
[deleted]
1 Troppin 2016-01-25
Sure, but Gaza is under the exclusive control of Hamas, a terrorist group. In the West Bank, governance is shared between the Israeli and Palestinian Authority.
-4 DronePuppet 2016-01-25
Not sure it was a movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF6iRExbVkc
10 StonedJaguar 2016-01-25
Colonialism without the raping. Instead of raping they are commiting what they denounce with such faith. Genocide. The Palestinian Holocaust. A slower and more painful one.
5 SweatyBollocks 2016-01-25
No no, the Israeli government promotes rape too.
Speaking to an Israeli radio program following the discovery of the bodies of the three Israeli teens abducted and shot to death in the occupied West Bank in June, Kedar said, “Terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them — the only thing that deters them is if they know that their sister or their mother will be raped in the event that they are caught. What can you do, that’s the culture in which we live.
And one that you're free to question or even deny...
1 StonedJaguar 2016-01-25
Now i feel like throwing up and crying.
0 unruly_mattress 2016-01-25
Was Kedar part of the government? Is he now? Was he ever?
1 SweatyBollocks 2016-01-25
Yeah, before he made it onto Netanyahu's list of approved experts to contact during a visit to the US, Kedar served for 25 years in IDF Military Intelligence.
Makes you wonder how a professor in Israel can endorse the rape of women and receive no punishment, yet Tim Hunt gets fired for proposing gender-segregated labs in the UK. What an age we live in.
0 unruly_mattress 2016-01-25
Slow enough that the Palestinian population in the occupied territories is rising rapidly. That's some genocide.
7 x0x7 2016-01-25
At voat we permaban moderators if they censor anything in a major sub. You guys should start doing the same.
19 Quantumhead 2016-01-25
At Voat you are limited to three posts a day unless you have a sufficient karma score. I built up about 80 karma in 2-3 days, then began to comment on the anti-Islamic rhetoric being pushed there by Israel and the European right, and was paraded right back down to zero. Finally, my account was banned.
Despite popular opinion, Voat is no freer than Reddit. There is less censorship of individual posts, but the same group attacks against individual users.
2 sufipusher 2016-01-25
Your a good person for going against the tide like that. Divide and conquer eh.
1 Quantumhead 2016-01-25
Thank you very much for the kind words. I'm not sure about good, but I do still give a shit about the truth.
1 x0x7 2016-01-25
I'll make sure people at voat hear of that. It could be that they (and maybe I) are blind to the echo chamber because they aren't aware of that dynamic because they've never seen it. We never see or hear of you once you are disappeared.
You have to make a voice when something like that happens. It's the only way things improve. Atko is open to changing things reactively. We changed plenty of things to survive the ddos wars. That policy that effected you is one of them.
1 Quantumhead 2016-01-25
Don't blame yourself, buddy. It isn't your fault.
Thank you very much for the reply and the encouragement. In truth, I think the people who are responsible for attacking users in this way are doing it on most websites. They have become pretty adept at manipulating voting systems used by websites such as Reddit and Voat. Reddit seems to favour the strategy of burying its head in the sand and pretending it isn't happening.
1 WaitTilUSeeMyDick 2016-01-25
Hopefully the advertising is a little more controlled.
6 x0x7 2016-01-25
We have no advertising but we've been encouraging akto to start. We're trying to push him towards independent advertising where users just submit an image, a link and a payment. I'm pretty sure that's what he wants to do but accepting payment is difficult. The site is a little too free such that paypal decided they'd stop being a pal and for some reason I think he is intimidated by bitcoin technically.
He just came out with a financial report today. The guy shelled out $15,000 out of pocket.. sort of. https://voat.co/v/announcements/comments/815298
This is a guy that really believes in non-censorship.
6 TouchMeHerePls 2016-01-25
But you can't criticize... That's antisemitic.
4 hnicgibbs 2016-01-25
israhell - land of the beasts. dont criticize anything they do cause they're the "chosen ones". dont worry though, the invisible sky daddy will be here soon to sort everything out. he's late, must be held up in traffic. the love and light pple tell me i need to send more love so i'll sen dmore love to palestine, hopefully that helps. i'll send some hate to israhell, hopefully one of their pedo rabbis has a heart attack.
3 Subbmerged 2016-01-25
Absolutely chilling.
3 justamonarch 2016-01-25
I remember this too. And sent it around....like I am about to do now ;-)
3 UberRider480 2016-01-25
America is the world's largest terror organization. Every time I comment this it gets down voted. No one ever believed when I said those countries are just trying to protect themselves. They did nothing to deserve any of this. How are we taught the heartache and sins of the holocaust or 9/11 but can't understand how we are creating much more damage. No one understood when i said America is literally ran by satan. OP knows. Thank You for showing us the truth.
1 Quantumhead 2016-01-25
Upvoted.
1 ledankmememan 2016-01-25
What the fuck man. That sounds like something out of an awful dystopian sci-fi movie.
1 FORKinmyDICK 2016-01-25
Fuck dude I remember that. Never forget
-1 unruly_mattress 2016-01-25
I like how the same people who cry for deportation and against giving any rights to Muslim immigrants to Europe are 100% for the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sexual assaults in Germany? Deport them all! Busses exploding in Israel? Equal rights to all!
In reality, of course, both situations are neither black nor white. A good solution to the immigrants problem will be a complex one and will take decades. Likewise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's been going on for a hundred years.
1 StonedJaguar 2016-01-25
The poor people of these countries are being manipulated, used, abused by the rich. It all has different effects. If you think about it, if the Rich Political class could come to an agreement, all problems would be solved.
-12 Yserbius 2016-01-25
It wasn't the comment so much as it was the dozens of follow up comments and posts trying to brigade /r/bestof with anti-Israel comments.
6 Putin_loves_cats 2016-01-25
Yet, if it was the other way around, it would've been grade A 100% Kosher.
4 [deleted] 2016-01-25
And we should trust a guy who blatantly lies about the use of thimerasol in vaccines /s
-14 jshannow 2016-01-25
Lol that's the worst poem in the history of the world.
-17 098938503 2016-01-25
just see a bunch of whining
yes its sad that israelis have to treat them like this, but what else do you expect them to do?
they are poor, so what? are the israelis forced to hand over their wealth to them
they can build their shitty country up themselves, they have no right to live in israel
don't give a fuck if it used to be their land they got conquered and lost they attacked israel and got their asses kicked
this is the result
they should all just move to other arab countries theres enough of them around
2 loserlame 2016-01-25
Lol, this is why history repeats itself, particularly with certain groups. Dumb-asses.
2 meanmug247 2016-01-25
Karma is a bitch. Remember that.