Twitch gives streamer a reported 14-day ban for saying he's OK with the genocide of Palestinians

rockpapershotgun.com:

Twitch have temporarily banned an account run by streamer Asmongold, otherwise known as Zack Hoyt, after he expressed genocidal sentiments about Israel's killing of Palestinian people in Gaza. According to the eSports journalist Rod Breslau, he's been sent to the naughty step for a grand total of two weeks, which I'm sure will be a huge inconvenience and will really teach him the error of his ways. Assuming Breslau's sources are accurate, it's a great demonstration of Twitch's tolerance for streamers with big audiences, the kind of slap on the wrist you'd expect from a platform that recently reinstated Donald Trump's account after banning him in 2021 for the charge of inciting an insurrection.

Content warning for hate speech in the paragraphs ahead.

You will almost certainly know the context, but in case you don't: in October 2023, several Palestinian armed groups led by Hamas, who govern the Gaza strip, broke through the border into Israel and carried out a massacre, killing over a thousand people including civilians and children. Israel's government and military have responded by mounting a year-long invasion of Gaza that has killed over 42,000 Palestinians and reduced the region to ruin.

All this builds on decades of Israeli containment of and intervention within Gaza, which a United Nations special rapporteur has argued is a form of apartheid. The UN have repeatedly condemned Israel's killing of civilians, together with the atrocities carried out by Hamas, who are still holding a number of Israelis hostage. Back in March this year, another UN special rapporteur argued that there are "reasonable grounds" for defining Israel's current operations in Gaza as genocide.

Asmongold appears to agree that Israel's actions are genocide, but he seemingly thinks the Palestinians deserve it, based on his own, sweepingly racist assessments of Islam and of Palestinian culture.

"If you want to consider it genocide as a systematic killing of a group of people, they have