After some pro-Palestine posts on our Facebook page… we got the banhammer.
Transcript
The Metal Blast page is now banned from Facebook. We were suspended first. Then after I appealed, the page was confirmed suspended. It says that it's going to be unpublished. I don't know what that means exactly. I don't know when that is going to happen, but it's very likely that there will no longer be a Metal Blast presence on Facebook.
I started Metal Blast over 10 years ago, simply with the goal of talking about heavy metal and heavy metal culture. Because of that, I spoke often about issues of freedom of speech affecting, for example, Adam Darski, the singer of Behemoth in Poland, when he was being persecuted and prosecuted by the neo-fascist PiS government; the persecution of Salman Rushdie by the Iranian system of the Ayatollahs, the Islamic Republic, for his publication of The Satanic Verses; the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff in France; the attacks against Cannibal Corpse in Russia; the ridiculous and unfounded attacks against Soziedad Alkoholica and other Basque activists in Spain over supposed "support" for terrorism—and many, many more.
One of the other topics that I care a lot about, and that I have mentioned in the past many times, is that of the systematic violation of human rights committed against the Palestinians by the state of Israel. It's something that appears in my writing sporadically. I got into a kind of infamous exchange of open letters with Kobi Farhi, the singer of Orphaned Land, a band devoted to running defense for the genocidal regime of Israel. And now that there is a full-blown genocide, a full-blown war crime in which Israel is using hunger as a weapon of war, I have been very outspoken about it. I have been very critical of what is happening. Not because I believe my opinion is so important that everybody needs to know it, but instead because I think that having a platform, I have a certain responsibility to bring attention to important things.
Since I started doing it, I started to notice some strange behaviors on Facebook. I would get a lot of interactions from fake accounts. I would get a lot of password reset attempts. So somebody was trying to access my account. And yesterday I received a notification that the page had been suspended. I appealed that, and the appeal was rejected within 10 minutes.
Now, the reason for that suspension is “inauthentic behavior,” namely, "pretending to be a local or domestic voice whilst commenting on or trying to influence a local or domestic issue." I have no idea what is the local or domestic issue that I am pretending to be affected by or commenting on. For example, if I speak about Israel, I’ve never claimed to live in Israel. I’ve never claimed to live in the occupied territories or in Gaza. I’ve never claimed to live anywhere where I don’t live. So I don’t know what that means.
It is kind of fascinating though, because I would have expected that I would get taken down, as other people have, for posting pictures of the children that have been starved by the Israelis. But it wasn't for that reason. On the contrary, it still says that my page has not violated any community standards. So I have no idea what it means to impersonate anybody or what local issue I am supposed to have commented on.
Now, of course, you could say that commenting on the genocide is a local issue, but I would argue that a crime against humanity is by definition not a local issue—because we're all part of humanity and we should not be okay with that happening.
The page was pretty small and it doesn't generate any revenue. So what really sucks is just losing the community that had developed on that page. So I hope that they, and you, of course, will follow me on Substack, where everything is also free—but at the very least, I no longer have to hope not to get banned by one of our tech overlords.
On the ban itself, I think it is important to say that I am not silly or megalomaniacal enough to believe that my ban had anything to do with me being a very important voice, because a page with 5,000 or so followers is not influential by any definition. Instead, it just has to do with the fact that the elites of our world, governments and the ultra-wealthy, have decided that certain views cannot be shared. One of them in this case being what is being done to the Palestinians, because they have realized that there is an increasing amount of pushback against it.
More and more people are speaking out against the atrocities being carried out by the Israelis, not just in Gaza, but also the pogroms and the apartheid that is being inflicted on the Palestinians in the West Bank. They’re doing this because they’re terrified, and they’re terrified of the truth: that Israel is a settler colonial state that is carrying out a genocide against the people of Palestine.
This is a training ground for what they'll do to us when we step out of line. State actors who have realized it is possible to commit a genocide that is being livestreamed, that we can watch every day on our televisions, every day on the internet, that we can see is happening, and that they can get away with it.
The ability to keep your eyes closed to what is happening is disappearing, and you can make a choice. Will I be silent about this atrocity or will I actually speak up against it?
The kind of repression that has been exercised against supporters of the Palestinian struggle, people who oppose the genocide, is enormous. And yes, it is not nice to know that you can lose a Facebook page, but people are losing their jobs, people are being arrested, and people are being deported for supporting the liberation struggle of a people that are being subjected to the greatest genocide we have seen in the 21st century—the deliberate starvation of a civilian population.
So you need to make this choice. Are you going to stand on the sidelines and look at this atrocity? Or are you going to stand up and loudly say that this has to stop?
Non serviam.
Free Palestine.
Sources:
On genocide and starvation
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/gaza-evidence-points-to-israels-continued-use-of-starvation-to-inflict-genocide-against-palestinians/
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/29/amos-goldberg-what-is-happening-in-gaza-is-a-genocide-because-gaza-does-not-exist-anymore_6730881_23.html
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza
https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20242022_israel_is_committing_the_war_crime_of_starvation_in_the_gaza_strip
https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide#:~:text=Last%20updated%3A%2010%20July%202025
https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/israel-palestine/israel-s-genocide-and-occupation-threaten-palestinian-self
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html (without NYT paywall: https://palestina-komitee.nl/omer-bartov-im-a-genocide-scholar-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/ )
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-04-28/ty-article-opinion/.premium/invoking-never-again-as-more-children-die/00000196-7bb2-d41c-a7ff-fff765000000
On the censorship and repression of Pro-Palestinian voices
https://advox.globalvoices.org/2025/05/12/digital-erasure-how-social-media-platforms-are-silencing-palestinians-in-2024/
https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/10/07/human-rights-ngos-say-social-media-platforms-continue-to-censor-pro-palestine-content
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/germany-schweizer-speech-israel-palestine
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/14/germany-orders-deportation-of-pro-palestine-activists-what-you-should-know
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/24/uk-police-detain-pro-palestine-protester-80-almost-27-hours-search-house
On the pogroms in the West Bank:
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-06-30/ty-article-opinion/.premium/quiet-west-bank-pogrom-in-progress/00000197-bd2b-d013-a5b7-bd7fb4440000
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202309_the_pogroms_are_working_the_transfer_is_already_happening
https://www.timesofisrael.com/settler-extremists-sowing-terror-huwara-riot-was-a-pogrom-top-general-says/
