Streamer Hasan Piker (Image: Instagram)
On January 30, left-wing political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker announced to his audience that he had been banned indefinitely from the platform once again.
The reasoning for the ban came from a phrase used in a stream the day before.
In the wake of the assassination of ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE, Piker was analyzing an article by journalist Ken Klippenstein titled, “Exclusive: ICE’s Secret Watchlists of Americans.” The streamer got to a passage that said:
“Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protestors (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), ‘Antifa,’ and others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.'”
Upon reading this sentence, Piker responded out loud to his audience by saying:
“This is another big ‘suck my d—‘ to all the f—ing Israel d— riders out there, you f—ng rabid ultra-Zionist pigs… this is precisely the f—ing same s—, OK, you Israel-first monsters.”
It is unclear exactly which words in this rant led to his banning, but a post on X by Piker leads us to assume that it was “zionist pig.”
@hasanthehun on X wrote, “You CAN say Nazi pig on Twitch. You CAN say Democrat pig. You can say Republican pig. You can say Islamist pig. You CANNOT say Zionist pig. The ADL which is an arm of Israel’s suppression in the West that works w/ law enforcement & does espionage has made it a bannable offense.”
Piker confirmed on Instagram that he would be live-streaming on his YouTube channel during his exile from Twitch.
This is not the first ban Piker has received, however. He was banned for saying “cracker” on Twitch in 2021. He was also banned under the premises of “improper handling of terrorist propaganda” last May, when he was dissecting Elias Rodriguez’s manifesto on stream.
Piker’s ban reportedly lasted three days, and he is currently back on Twitch.
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