cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/356919
‘Omar al-Mokhtar is considered the great symbol for the Libyan resistance (Jihad) against the Italian occupation. In 1922 he reorganized the Mojahideen and re-ignited the resistance against Italy after World War I when the [Fascists] thought that they succeeded in silencing the Libyan resistance. Omar Al-Mokhtar was ill [a] couple of times and many of his comrades asked him to retire and leave the country; he was [nearly] 80 years old. But he refused and kept fighting and he deserved a name given to him as “The Lion of the Desert.” On 16 September, 1931 the [Fascists] hanged Omar Al-Mokhtar in the city of Solouq and they forced the Libyans to watch their hero be hanged. No consideration to Omar Al-Mokhtar's old age, no consideration to international law and no consideration to world war treaties.’
(Source. Note that the ‘Mojahideen’ is not to be confused with the unrelated Afghan mujahideen.)
As paraphrased in the dramatization Lion of the Desert, to General Rodolfo Graziani:
‘We will never surrender. We win, or we die. […] You will have the next generation to fight, and after the next, the next. As for me, I will live longer than my hangman.’
— Omar al-Mukhtar (1862–1931)
I'm sorry to see people somewhere on the Internet coming out against Lemmy. First of all, let me say that I sympathize with the China issue. I'm a Muslim and I have been concerned about the Uyghurs for a very long time. This is not some bandwagon that I am jumping on, and I have ties to the region as well. I moderate the Uyghur sub on Reddit, created #uyghur on matrix.org, and on lemmy.ml I have registered communities like c/uyghur and c/xinjiang. I did that mainly to promote the welfare of Uyghurs and guard against whitewashing of the situation in Xinjiang. Obviously I am pro-Uyghur, and I feel that the admins of lemmy.ml have been gracious enough to respect me as a user and a mod. I have also not seen them engage in censorship of opposing viewpoints on this issue, and we have at least once that I can remember disagreed on China's Uyghur policy here on the site. This did not result in any problem.
Please don't cancel Lemmy, because the software is amazing and the creators really are nice. I don't have to agree with them on politics in China. As long as they're not crazy about it, the situation is manageable. So far they've always been fair.
Even suppose that one day they implement a policy on lemmy.ml that says they won't allow anyone to post pro-Uyghur things. So what? It's their Lemmy instance, they can decide what's on it. I can go start my own instance. I really don't think lemmy.ml has any obligation to do what the community wants. They've already done enough by creating the software and making it FOSS.
Besides, you know how many people posted pro-Uyghur content on c/uyghur since I created it? None. So if you're concerned about how the issue is being represented on this site, maybe you could come post something sometime, or argue in the comments.
Anyway, at present I'm not recommending any other Reddit alternative and probably won't.