OK, I went back and read for context. AFAICT, Martin Hyde was just saying that Israel gets singled out as having been “formed out of occupied land” while that applies to most of the countries in the M.E. The point about the percentage of Jews being “too high” looks like a sarcastic remark, implying that the poster did not realize how many Jews were actually living in the area when the country was formed-- that is, Israel was formed, and then suddenly Jews flooded in as opposed to there already being a large population at the time of partition.
Whatever. I’m not here to minutely parse every post for intention, I’m telling you how it makes me perceive the mood in those threads.
And that’s fine. But when reasonable people perceive these things differently maybe that tells us we should stick to actual charges of anti-semitism and not try to read so much between the lines. Often there actually isn’t anything “between the lunes”.
OK, let’s please focus this thread on whether the mods should sometimes recuse themselves, and whether there is mod political bias, and away from the specifics of the Gaza-Israel situation?
I think in any such situation, there is a fine line between favoring one side and expressing racist sentiments against the other side. When the other side has faced massive persecution over centuries, playing the racist card tends to come fairly easily. We (fortunately) live in an era and (most of us) in a society where racism is NOT acceptable, but the accusation of racism can be overused. To the persecuted minority, who saw the older generation murdered for daring to speak up, there’s a feeling of power in having the ability to raise the charge. BTW, I’m not just speaking of Jews here, but of blacks in many countries, of Shi’a Muslims in many countries, etc.
So, I don’t think there’s going to ever be a definition of what’s racism and what’s not (or anti-semitism, or anti-Arabism, or whatever.) We need to take each as it comes. I think the mods do an excellent job of watching out for hate-speech (however ill-defined it may be) on the one hand, and personal insult (in the form of unfounded charges of racism) on the other.
Whether posters do such an excellent job is a matter for another thread, presumably in a different forum, but that’s not the topic here.
However, you are acting as though Fenris violated the rules with a personal attack when what he actually did was walk too fine a line without actually crossing it–for which he was Mod Noted.
It is not a rule; it is a real world practice. Think of it as similar to a statue of limitations. If we catch someone breaking a rule, we can take immediate action. This serves to prevent the thread from running off the rails in acrimony. If several days have passed and no one has even shown any sign that the remark stirred up more passion or grief, taking action is rather pointless. The poster is no longer committing the same violation, (since we are talking about one-time incidents), so we are not “stopping” anything from continuing. If, after a week, I discovered a poster had called another poster a motherfucker in some little-read thread, I would issue a Warning based on the fact that the insult was a direct and egregious violation of the rules. An oblique reference to an earlier post, (that was not, itself, a violation), that requires everyone to go back and read through the thread to discover the insult, and that has not provoked further hostility over the course of several days, does not rise to the same level of infraction.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s probably not a huge deal to just make a new topic on the issue, because there will be some people, without a doubt, who will read this and ultimately think it’s recent without checking the dates or reply to something said long ago without checking the dates. Just better to start a new one rather than having people have to read all of the first stuff before they realize “Oh, the current post is the last ones”…so, closed. Feel free to make a new one on the new issue, that’s what this forum is for.
EDITED AND UPDATE: I have just moved the new posts into their own topic. Here.