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Comment by machina_ex_deus | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> [Palestinians] will raid and murder, rape and destroy

> those savages

Wtf? I already responded to a later comment of yours here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454043, but this rhetoric is unacceptable on HN and if you continue to post like this we will ban you—the same way we ban accounts that post like this about other groups.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

My parent comment said :"the state of Israel has a policy of systematic rape, torture, mass incarceration, murder, and dehumanization of Palestinians at an industrial scale that's been in place for decades now."

How is that allowed while what I said isn't? My parent comment literally says the same thing. Your moderation is one sided. I didn't say anything that wasn't claimed by the other side.

I see far worse slurs about Israel and Jews here which remain unmoderated. And you won't even let me attack them back.

There's a big difference between making such a statement about a government vs. about an entire population. That ought to be obvious.

> I see far worse slurs about Israel and Jews here which remain unmoderated

There are many comments criticizing Israel (and many defending Israel), but comments slurring Jewish people in general are another matter and we crack down just as hard on those (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377645).

We don't see every post on HN, but I don't believe there are many such comments going unmoderated, because readers are usually pretty quick to point them out to us. If you see a comment that should have been moderated but hasn't been (and certainly if you see one that is slurring an entire population), you can help by flagging it and emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

Also, the outright antisemitic comments I see are mostly by a small number of serial trolls, by which I mean troll accounts in a sequence n, n+1, n+2, ... where they create n+k+1 after we ban n+k. That tells me that these are mostly, if not entirely, fringe participants.

Edit: as a spot check, I just skimmed through all (live) comments from the last week that contain the word 'Jews'. I didn't see any slurs in there, and most seem to be from people defending Israel, arguing against antisemitism and so on.

Not every antisemitic comment is going to contain the word 'Jews'; the art of being antisemitic without such overt references is a long-honed one that few are aware the totality of. Unfortunately, today is also the one day of the year that the already relatively few people best equipped to identify and flag antisemitism are mostly offline.

Yes of course, and we warn/ban accounts that do that too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266839 (Sept 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738555 (July 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44362828 (June 2025)

Governments are hierarchical, and they can (and should) be held responsible for their actions. The population of Palestine, taken as a whole, is not. If you had said "the Hamas state is savage and murderous" that wouldn't have bothered me very much, but instead you generalized each individual Palestinian as a savage. I think @dang's moderation makes perfect sense here.

I was gonna argue with the parent comment but instead here you are doing your best to prove their point. In your mind there’s one Palestinian person, multiplied by a couple million, and you hate that person. It’s the same as any racism.

> Gaza was given to the Palestinians for free in 2005.

That doesn't mean anything. Israel was illegally occupying Gaza before 2005, and has been illegally blockading it since.

And every single year for the past 50 years or more, Israel has murdered more Palestinians than the Palestinians have murdered Israelis - most years, at least 2 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli. Not to mention, Netanyahu has been one of the biggest international supporters of Hamas in the world, and he has admitted to as much repeatedly: the PLA having control of Gaza would have risked a real two state solution, and he will never allow that to happen.

And Egypt was occupying it before Israel, and the British and the Ottomans and the Romans.

The Ottomans had conquered the whole of Palestine, including Gaza, and had been ruling it for some few hundred years at the time their empire crumbled and the British Empire acquired it from them. The vast majority of the population, both Arabic and Jewish, and either Muslim and Jewish and Christian, were regular citizens of the Ottoman Empire. It was not being "occupied" by the Ottomans, any more than Turkey is "occupying" Istanbul today.

Then, the majority of this population, and the vast majority of the Arabic parts of this population, were displaced to make room for the novel state of Israel, most of the population of which were Europeans and Americans of Jewish descent. They came in and took the homes of the Palestinians living today in Gaza and the West Bank, or their parents or grandparents. And then they have occupied the lands where these Palestinians had been driven away to, with direct military presence for a long time, and then with "just" a blockade and controlled movement.

The Jewish and Arabic population became the state of Israel. Where do you think the millions of Israeli Arabs came from?

And that justifies things for you some how? If someone was beating by someone else before, then it's ok to beat them now?

It points out the hypocrisy. Israel was bad for occupying Gaza decades ago, but Egypt was fine for occupying Gaza decades ago.

You sound almost exactly like Trump talking about Mexicans. When you dismiss an entire people as murderers, rapists, and savages, something's gone wrong with how you understand the world.

I'm sure that many many Palestinians hate Jews, but that shouldn't be a surprise when Palestinians have been brutally oppressed for a century for the sake of creating a Jewish state. This is the natural consequence of oppression, and the way to end that hatred is to end the oppression.

Lastly, you say "Gaza was given to the Palestinians for free", but neglect to mention how Israel came to control Gaza. Is it really that generous to return a small piece of the land that was stolen?

As if rolling out the tanks, building a wall and using the population for low skill low wage workers is giving away anything. Gaza is under a blockade since 2006.

As opposed to what Israel has been doing for 80 years?

Israel was formed by murdering Palestinians and taking over their land, driven by religious lunacy and 3000 year old fairy tales as justification.

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