Who is Asmongold and why was he banned from Twitch?

Twitch streamer Asmongold has been banned from the platform following deeply racist and genocidal statements he made during a stream on Monday night. Asmongold has been a streamer and YouTube creator for over a decade and has amassed a following of 3.5 million Twitch subscribers on his main account.

The comments made by Asmongold

Asmongold claimed, without evidence, that Palestinians have genocide baked into Sharia law and that he had no sympathy for a people with such an ideology being’ genocided.’ The streamer went on to say that Palestinians were “terrible people” and that if they had the same amount of weapons as Israel, they would be responsible for the same level of carnage currently being inflicted on the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Supporters of the Israeli government often trout out such counterfactuals as a way to justify the violence being inflicted by the regime and to mask the violence under the cloak of self-defense.

Asmongold went on to say that Palestinians should not be treated as allies as they “are not the same to us” and that they come from an “inferior culture.” Such blatant Islamaphobic comments forced Twitch to take action against the streamer. However, the platform has not issued a statement about the ban.

Asmongold speaks with Hasan Piker

After making the comments, he joined Hasan Piker’s Twitch stream to discuss the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Piker attempted to show his guest how the comments mirror the language used by Nazis during the holocaust and explained that half the population of Gaza would have been too young to vote for Hamas during the last elections held in 2005.

Asmongold saw it wise to send out an apology, reflecting on the position his remarks had landed him in. “Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing. My Bad.”

Throughout the apology he underplays the violence of his language and chalked it up to “saying stupid shit” adding that he would “do better.”