The newest talking point from the Hamas apologists is that they are fighting not only against an Israeli apartheid and occupation but also against a Jewish “genocide” against the Gazastanians. The problem with this claim, of course, is that the Gazan population has grown ten times over 70 years. Faced with this challenging reality, Hamas apologists are busy redefining what “genocide” means.
For a good analysis of the lie behind the “genocide” claim, I recommend Milli Sand’s essay, which looks at population growth in Gaza and the West Bank. She also examines the mass slaughters across the world in recent years, none of which have raised a peep from Hamas supporters, leftists, and other people utterly bereft of any moral compass. Indeed, a meme that’s been making the rounds nails the issue.
This tweet does, too:
So, there is no historic mass extermination of Arab Muslims living in Gaza and the West Bank. Of course, any Jews unlucky enough to find themselves wandering into those territories will be slaughtered, and Christian Arabs have been systematically killed and uprooted (which makes it baffling to me why so many Christian Arabs support the Gazastanians and West Bankians).
But what about now? Are Gazans being massacred in unprecedented numbers during the current war? No. They’re not.
First, Hamas has repeatedly been caught over the years faking deaths and injuries:
Instead, Hamas is taking a page out of the Nazi playbook, which wildly overstated deaths from the Dresden air raids in an effort to make themselves look like the victims rather than the aggressors. For several reasons, the Gazan claims about deaths are risible:
Second, as Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has said, Hamas desperately needs civilian deaths, so it’s not going to be picky about whether people are actually killed or whether it’s able to sell inflated numbers to the West. It’s noteworthy that Haniyeh, rather than leading his troops, is sitting out the war in Qatar, where he enjoys the lifestyle of a multi-billionaire.
To achieve Haniyeh’s propaganda goals, Hamas has actually contributed to the number of civilian deaths, not just by placing its tunnels, weapons, and fighters in, around, and under hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings but also by straight out slaughtering those of its own people who don’t want to be grim statistics.
Third, Hamas lies about the number who have died, whether by inflating the actual numbers or listing as civilians people who are clearly combatants. I’ve included at the end of this post a careful study detailing the many fallacies behind the Hamas genocide claim.
Mostly, Hamas and its useful idiots on the left across the West can ignore the data as they insist that Israel is the real Nazi nation. However, occasionally, the fact that the Gazastanians and West Bankians have consistently grown in number, whether under Israel’s aegis or with Israel as a neighbor, has been impossible to avoid. So, what’s a good Jihadist or leftist to do? Simple: Redefine what constitutes “genocide.”
I stumbled across this because Jon Lovitz has been waging a valiant war on Twitter against American Hamas supporters. For example, he took on Katie Halper, a hard-left Jew who is busy demanding that Israel stop fighting the terrorist organization that wants to wipe out Jews “from the river to the sea” and who thinks Hamas is a humanitarian organization. The resulting back and forth generated Halper’s astonishing claim that “Reduction of population is not required to fulfill the definition of genocide.”
Well, that’s actually the exact definition of genocide: Trying to exterminate a race, as the Nazis did when they successfully slaughtered almost the entirety of Europe’s Jewish population. Or, as Hamas explicitly intends to do, a sentiment expressed in its slogan that “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.”
George Orwell, whose 1984 is no longer being read in Western schools, made it very clear that controlling language is the fundamental way to control people. Unlike all other animals, we make sense of the world and our relationship to others via words:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
In the left’s wonderful new world, “genocide” is simply a calumny to throw against disfavored groups like Jews and whites, irrespective of whether the people against whom they have allegedly committed this act grow or diminish in number.
Image: Internet meme by @stopterrornow.
