The Story of My Ban on Breaking News & Religion

This is the story of how I was permanently banned on Breaking News and Religion by the owner of the website, The Unknown Sleeper. 

I have tried to leave out extraneous information, but tried to include enough information to not leave readers with many questions. I am willing to answer any question you may have. 

To start, you can find the commenting thread where TUS (the unknown sleeper) decided to ban me at BNR. Below is a screenshot of the interaction. But there is a lot of backstory than just that single thread. 

https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/2024/01/03/european-anti-zionism/#comment-6359961426

BNR has a history of normalizing anti-semitism. Jewish commenter Alex The Kay left BNR due to “blatant anti-semitism” several months ago:

A former mod on BNR, commenter Sir Tainley, submitted not one, but two threads to The Den (BNR’s conflict resolution forum) about anti-semitism on BNR.

https://theden.breakingnewsandreligion.online/2023/11/02/moderator-posting-racist-memes/

https://theden.breakingnewsandreligion.online/2023/11/03/is-holocaust-denialism-welcome-on-the-site/

Sir Tainley’s complaints about anti-semitism were ignored, as were mine. Alex The Kay’s departure due to anti-semitism was meaningless for The Urban Sleeper, despite TUS claiming to “respect” Alex. 

Sir Tainley’s first complaint was regarding slurs against the Jewish people, accomplished in comparisons between Israelis and nazis. Such comparisons are recognized by the German Government, the  International Holocaust Remembrance Association, and other relevant parties as anti-Semitic. Take the number one comment on a recent BNR thread regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

“Three months whereby 1/10 of the number of supplies needed to feed a population is a starvation programme reminiscent of what occurred in the death camps of Auchwicz, Dachau and Treblinka. Though the difference with WWII is the US is directly implicated in the mass starvation of the Gazan people by supporting this inhuman policy of the Zionist entity. The US is in fact seen as being directly responsible and is a political pariah in the world.”

In Sir Tainley’s second complaint, Sir Tainley asserted that certain comments are implicitly justifying the Holocaust and compares them to BNR comments equating Israel’s actions with nazi actions. TUS disagrees, claiming that the comments don’t imply the alleged accusations of Holocaust justification or anti-Semitism.

I also complained about anti-semitism of a mod, Rawr. Rawr repeatedly posts a cartoon which every Jew I have ever asked about agreed was an anti-Semitic cartoon. 

Now, what would TUS say about me, you should be wondering at this point. TUS thinks I am a “fake Jew” and a “troll”. TUS claims I “feign Judaism and homosexuality as a smokescreen for spewing bigotry and hate”. Specifically regarding the term ‘fake Jew”, TUS offered various reasons for calling me this name. Sometimes, he would say he thinks I am a non-Jew outright lying about being Jewish. Other times he would claim my Jewishness is illegitimate because I am atheist (Jewish atheism is a not uncommon strain of Judaism in which Jews embrace the cultural aspect of Judaism but not the religious dogma). Regardless of his reasoning for calling me fake Jew, TUS claims I am “no different from any other hatemonger you might find on Stormfront or any other similar hate sites”. 

Why?

As a gay man, I am very bothered by treatment of LGBT people across the Islamic world. Approximately 74% of Christians live somewhere with civil unions or gay marriage. Only 11% of Christians live somewhere homosexuality is illegal. Meanwhile, 52% of Muslims live somewhere homosexuality is illegal per the law, and 5% of Muslims live somewhere with civil unions or gay marriage. These statistics were determined by ChatGPT by analyzing the Pew Research Center’s global religious landscape report, and cross referencing the report with population data and laws pertaining to LGBT people across the world. 

Because Islam is significantly worse for LGBT people than Christianity (which doesn’t take ChatGPT to figure out), I was critical of Islamist doctrine on BNR. While TUS would like to call me an Islamophobe, the truth of the matter is I do not hate all Muslims. Nor am I irrationally fearful of them. I hate people who oppress, jail and execute gays, and that is unfortunately a large portion of the Islamic world. 

I work with a young Muslim woman who I admire and whose company I very much enjoy. She knows I am gay, and she doesn’t care. I don’t hate her, and she doesn’t hate me. I know some will call that tokenism. Unfortunately, there are very few Muslims in the gay world. 

The majority of the time my criticism of Islamism was within the rules of Breaking News and Religion. TUS appeared to get frustrated that I was able to criticize Islamist treatment of LGBT people within the rules he established, and started calling me “fake Jew” and other insults (“troll”) because of it. 

When I complained to The Urban Sleeper that calling me fake Jew was an insult that violated his own rules (no insults), he wrote to me that the rules do not preclude rudeness, and that calling me fake Jew was simply rudeness, not an insult. Despite my claim that being called fake Jew was not just rude but an insult, as the forum owner he could and did continue to call me fake Jew and other names.

When I decided I had had enough of TUS’ nastiness and rudeness, I decided to be honest with him. Given the above experience, and that there are only one or two Jews left on BNR (Who are both far less active than I ever was), I told TUS that people who own websites that are nearly Judenfrei (A German term meaning free of Jews), shouldn’t go around calling Jewish people nazis (which he regularly refers to me as). This is when he banned me.  

Notably, The Urban Sleeper claimed months ago that he and his moderation team do not “moderate for intent”. 

https://theden.breakingnewsandreligion.online/2023/09/13/rawr/#comment-6277283218

That is to say, when I claimed Rawr the mod has an anti-Semitic agenda, it was irrelevant because ‘agendas’ are not moderated. However, that is precisely what TUS banned me for: an alleged agenda of “hate”. I did not break any of BNR rules to cause TUS to ban me. He simply decided he was “fucking done” with my alleged “bigotry” and “hate speech”. 

Questions for Discussion:

1. - I made a conscious decision to stop taking The Urban Sleeper’s nastiness lying down, and be nasty back to him. Would you have made that choice? I stood up against nastiness against me, and bigotry against Jews, at the cost of my voice in the forum. Would you have done the same?
2. - AlexTheKay is a widely respected commenter, who quit BNR due to the normalization of anti-semitism. Why do you think TUS was unable to accept that his forum has slid into a place which was hostile towards Jews, particularly when I brought to the attention of TUS that Alex left due to anti-semitism? 
3. - IsTUS calling me ‘nazi’ a propaganda tactic similar to Putin claiming Ukraine needs to be de-nazified?
4. - Is anti-semitism so engrained in social media, that is impossible for many to see?
5. - If the argument is made that you are fake Jew, then what defines a real Jew? Questioning someone’s identity is a way of dehumanizing them, which is a tactic used by anti-semites. 
6. - Are all Jews supposed to have the same political ideology? When the arguments against Israel shift into attacks against Jews, then this is a clear shift towards antisemitism.