Image: Asmongold/Twitch
Twitch streamer Asmongold has been heavily criticised for a racist rant against Palestinians.
Twitch streamer Zack Hoyt, AKA Asmongold, has been hit with a ban after going on a racist rant about Palestinians during a livestream earlier this week. Asmongold claimed to not care about the mounting loss of human lives in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, and called Palestinians “terrible people” who come from “an inferior culture in all ways.”
His racist tirade was immediately followed by a wave of online criticism, leading to the ban of his ‘zackrawrr’ channel on Twitch.
Twitch streamer Asmongold gets banned from Twitch after racist rant against Palestinians
During the livestream, the streamer began to talk about Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza before things escalated and he said he didn't “feel sorry for" Palestinians. In a clip that has now gone viral online, he said:
If you want to consider a genocide as a systematic killing of a group of people they have genocide built into Sharia law right now so no I’m not going to cry a [expletive] river when people who have genocide that’s baked into their laws are getting genocided. I don't give a [expletive]. They're terrible people. It's not even a question. It's crazy that people don't see it that way. They'd be doing the same thing.
He continued to say: “These people are not your allies. They're not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible. It kills people for their identity, and it is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways. It is that simple. No, I don't feel bad for them, I don't feel sorry for them, I don't care."
As one might imagine, these statements generated no small amount of controversy online. Dismissing the more than 42,000 lives lost in Gaza as “terrible people” from “an inferior culture” already ticks off a few violations of Twitch’s official community guidelines, such as one that “does not permit behaviour that is motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, including behaviour that promotes or encourages discrimination, denigration, harassment, or violence [...].” Hence, the speedy Twitch ban.
The ban was applied to Asmongold's "zackrawrr" channel, which was at one point a secondary channel he used for "chill" gaming streams; his nominal main Asmongold channel remains in place. However he won't be able to stream on that one either as Twitch's rules state: "any attempt to circumvent an account suspension or chat ban by using other accounts or identities will also result in an additional enforcement against your accounts, up to an indefinite suspension."
Asmongold posted an apology on Twitter/X, saying “My bad. Of course no one deserves to have their life destroyed even if they do things or have views I find regressive.” The longer version of his apology (linked above) has done little to sway public opinion on his rant, however. According to reporter Rod “Slasher” Breslau, Asmongold’s Twitch ban will last for 14 days.