“Israel is committing crimes against humanity” or “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is inhumane” are opinions held by lots of people. Sevastopol wasn’t banned for having those opinions. He was warned repeatedly for the way he expressed those opinions (and he said those kinds of things plenty of other times). Examples:
He wasn’t warned for that, but after I told him he needed to stop, he continued:
He was warned for that post. He was also warned for this post:
He got a mod note for this one:
Which is when I made the post Crazyhorse quoted. He then continued in the same vein and got a warning for this post:
And this one:
He was suspended shortly after that. I quoted his last two posts in the announcement thread, but you can see they’re the exact same kind of stuff:
Sevastopol’s usual defense for these posts was that he was just he was just illustrating that Israelis doing things other people were being allowed to do or being held to a lower standard. I didn’t believe that explanation and I don’t think most other people who read his posts on a regular basis believed it either. The comments were simply too inflammatory for me to find that plausible. If you read more of his posts, you see he was often injecting criticism of all Jews into threads about Israel. If he was really only making those comments as a rhetorical device, it would have been easy enough to stop doing it after he was repeatedly warned for it. He did not stop at all. You can see he was banned for posts that were exactly like the ones he was warned for previous. The reason he didn’t stop is that the comparisons of Israelis to animals and Judaism to an evil cult were the point of the posts, not a figure of speech.