There were some good replies in there, but mostly I thought it was disappointing. I guess it's probably fine to just tell someone to fuck off because it's a community management issue, but I think it's good to try to have some engagement with arguments to both understand your own positions and to be ready to refute things when it actually matters. I tried responding, but in the time it took me to write something, the thread was deleted.
You probably won't find this compelling, but I think that it's good in cases where someone seems sincere and shares several of our values that at least a little effort is made to re-educate them. It's simply to our advantage for more people to agree with us. The OP was antisemitic, but it got worse in the comments, where they assigned collective guilt to Jews in general because there were a number of Jewish Nazi collaborators before the Nazis really started with the Holocaust. I think this is a stronger indication that the poster was unsalveagable as far as a forum is concerned, because I think they are just motivated by a seething resentment of Jews, but I'm curious how they would respond to the self-evident charge of them assigning collective guilt to an ethnicity, something that is really fucked.
Anyway, I don't mean this as an indictment of people who aren't the aforementioned antisemite, I just wanted to mention a thought I had and also make my comment from before:
useless comment
Why are you still centering the "uncomfortable" feelings of a group that overwhelmingly supports genocide?
This is a deranged argument that, on its own, merits your banning. The popularity of Zionism among Jews does not negate the question of ethnic discrimination, and the logic that you are using here could easily be pogromism. "Why aren't we taking violent action against a group that overwhelmingly supports genocide? Never mind that the "group" being talked about isn't a coherent political entity or even a coherent community, but an ethnic group!" Also, even if we counterfactually said that directing antisemitism against zios is okay (it is not!), there are still many Jews who closely identify with their Jewishness and are ardent anti-zionists!
Because you're using an inversion of a common zionist argument, let me use the inversion of its counter: The vast majority of people who are uncomfortable with the burning of a Star of David are not Jewish, and I'm willing to bet that the majority aren't Zionists either (or they at least oppose the genocide but may or may not understand that it's the inevitable expression of what Israel is). A lot of people object to the inciting of ethnic hatred, and you yourself recognize that the Star of David is different in this respect from a cross, because you single out Jews as an ethnicity to tar and trample on, but when discussing the burning of St. George's cross on the English flag, you relate us to the KKK because of their burning crosses in front of black churches (etc.). Those two things (England's flag and KKK rituals) have nothing to do with each other and are just superficially connected by the floating signifier of the cross, with no specific connection to something like an ethnicity because it is being extended very cross-ethnically (pun not intended), and hypothetically also applies to Arab Christians, to LatAm Christians, and so on. Regardless, around the world in many different countries, many people object to inciting ethnic hatred and they also object to genocide, e.g. in China, so the idea that the objectors are all Jews is completely false.
Also obviously this shit gets used as a cover for antisemitism, like in your case as you reveal by assigning collective guilt to Jews because like 70% of them according to some polls support Israel, as though that means the other 30% are chaff! (Never mind the other problems with this logic)
That's just the nasty thing about it, because you can't just burn the flag and not burn the Star. Incidentally, unlike the current orthodoxy, I'm fine with burning a white flag with blue bars and no star, that's whatever to me.
Let me start with:
How can you possibly dispute this? It's the only way to define communication. If you didn't have regard for reception, then why bother with language? Language is useful because it is a system of ordering and articulating ideas so that someone else can have the idea in their head that you have in yours, even if, for example, their attitude toward that idea is very different. If you were to disbelieve what I said, why not save energy by writing "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv" while thinking about your opinion? It's because you want me to understand ideas that you have and so you are using a system of common reference to do that.
Regarding the broader point, I think whether a slogan is worth using is entire contingent on the social situation.
I don't actually think "Intifada" has been that bad a term to use, because obviously many reactionaries say it's a call for the Islamist Jihad slaughter of every Jew on the planet, but most people just understand that it's a foreign word that they aren't familiar with and are at least somewhat receptive to the very simple explanation of what it is. Even when he was "standing his ground," I think that Zohran was kind of a coward on this issue, because the Intifada is not merely a "struggle," it is a specific group of anti-zionist movements. If you want to support these movements, I don't think there's a way around using their actual name, so it is therefore necessary to defend the use of the name and explain its meaning if that is part of your political project.
That necessity does not carry over to flag-burning, because unlike needing to name a group to support it, it's not necessary to burn a country's flag to call for its government to be completely dismantled and its politicians and military imprisoned (etc.) You can a) just say those words, b) say things like "from the river to the sea," etc. and you can even c) pick other extremely provocative messages that don't involve burning religious symbols, like "Death, Death to the IDF". That's one that is not just worth defending but, from what I can tell, important to defend, because the destruction of the IDF really is critical to the movement's success and we can't pretend that it doesn't need to be destroyed. "From the river to the sea," likewise, I view as necessary to defend, even more so, because it expresses the need for all of historic Palestine to exist freely and not as just a pair of ethnostates like liberal zionists suggest. It expresses the necessity that the zionist ethnostate not just retreat, but stop existing completely. If you cannot say "from the river to the sea," you cannot express anti-zionist ideology almost at all.
Flag-burning is not remotely critical in the manner of these slogans. That doesn't make the people who do it antisemites (mostly they are not), I just think it's not the best route for anti-antisemites to communicate their correct desire for the annihilation of Israel.
You're jumping at shadows, because nothing I have said is consistent with "canceling" anyone, and I have rejected moralizing and totalizing notions like that at every instance where it even vaguely came up. The idea was contained nowhere in my writing, it existed in your head and then you accused me of it, and that's shitty behavior.
I think that I have made it clear by the foregoing statements that my problem isn't about language being softened, I completely agree with you that we need strong language, stronger than what is even in the mainstream pro-Palestine protests currently. My argument is that with this strong language, we need to be very deliberate and very precise with what we say, and to pick our battles correctly because we only have so much time and capacity for dealing with stupid bullshit. If you think debates like this are a waste of time (and I kind of agree with you), using defective messaging at a huge scale entitles also doing a huge amount of labor to litigate with potentially tens of millions of people about the stupid fucking flag. It's much better to use extreme language that, when explained, is an open-and-shut case without room for squishiness like is introduced by attachment to the Star of David here, and we have no shortage of that, as discussed earlier.