After much anticipation, star Twitch streamer Asmongold had his alternate account, zackrawrr, banned for 14 days. This comes after he made several derogatory comments about Palestine's culture and the conflict in Gaza, with many believing that the punishment should be more severe than just his channel — one of the most watched among English-speaking creators this year — getting suspended.
During a live stream on October 14, the American online personality was reacting to the trending topics of the day when he made several controversial remarks about the West Asian country. He was quoted as saying:
"If you want to consider 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 fucking river when people who have genocide that's baked into their laws are getting genocided. I don't give a f*ck. They're terrible people. It's not even a question. It's crazy people don’t see it that way. They'd be doing the same thing."
When a viewer called him out on these opinions, pointing out the sheer number of deaths in the ongoing conflict with Israel, Asmongold retorted:
"How much did they kill? As many as they can. They are not able to kill as many people as Israel because they don't have as many bombs and as many weapons. But if they did, they'd be doing the same thing. That's it."
The One True King (OTK) co-founder and co-owner went as far as to call the Palestinians an inferior culture compared to Wester values:
"These people are not your allies, they are 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, always."
It was not long after that netizens began circulating clips of the broadcast and accusing Asmongold of almost propagating 'nazism & racism.' In fact, many users, including fellow content creators across platforms and ethnicities, called for the American to be barred by Twitch.
Interestingly, Asmogold was soon invited by renowned left-wing influencer and Palestine supporter HasanAbi to explain his comments. While the former did not go as far as to apologize for what he said, he did backtrack a bit, seemingly aware of the backlash his words had caused.
This was clear from his post on X soon after appearing online with HasanAbi:
"Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing. My bad. Of course, no one deserves to have their life destroyed even if they do things or have views I find regressive. You guys deserve more than me saying stupid shit like that, I’ll do better."
On October 15, various news outlets reported that the 34-year-old's zackrawrr account had been banned by Twitch. Although he has channels by his original online alias, Asmongold, on Twitch and YouTube, they haven't been active for over a year each.
Asmongold's Twitch viewership
The zackrawrr channel has been one of the most watched ones on Twitch over the last few years, and so far in 2024, he is among the 12 top names overall by the Hours Watched metric. His ranking for 2023 was 15th, while this year, when looking at the Just Chatting genre, he ranks fifth until October 15.
Asmongold first burst into the limelight thanks to his knowledge of World of Warcraft, one of the defining games of the MMORPG genre to this day. In recent years, he has branched out more to reaction content, be it other influencers' broadcasts or any topic gaining traction on his dedicated subreddit.
His account had 1.89M followers at the time of being banned, and there is a chance it could be extended past two weeks based on any more violations that Twitch finds in its Terms of Service and community guidelines.
