Thread by @ShMMor

The rank dishonesty of this @NYTimes Op-ed by @Megankstack begins with the truncated legal definition of genocide.

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nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opi…

The "as such" is a crucial part of the definition, and distinguishes people killed in war from people killed for no other reason than belonging to some national, religious, ethnic, or national group. It is deliberately left out here.

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In the next paragraph, we get the social media meme makers' list of quotes by Israeli leaders that supposedly show genocidal intent. Each one is hyperlinked, but it's notable that the links are never to the statements themselves or even to news reports about them.

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Instead they all come from opinion pieces by anti-Israel activists, perfectly demonstrating the pitfalls of the circle jerk citation model that is so common in these, well, circles. Let's take the quotes one at a time.

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It would indeed be pretty shocking if the Israeli Prime Minister approvingly cited an injunction to "spare no no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" as @Megankstack implies here, but he said no such thing, and the portion of the bible she is quoting...

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...from (Samuel 15:3) is completely different from where the PM's quote came from (Deuteronomy 25:17). His quote "Remember what Amalek has done to you" is a standard Jewish utterance at any appearance of antisemitism, especially of a violent nature. Here are some examples:

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* A French poster against antisemitic harrassment (from before the Holocaust)
* A memorial poster to both murdered Jews and Allied soldiers
* A Yiddish language cartoon on the long history of Jewish suffering, from Egypt to the Spanish expulsions

What's common to all?

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The exhortation at the top in big Hebrew letters: Remember what Amalek did to you.

Do we really believe that any of these artefacts are evidence of genocidal intent? Do you, @Megankstack?

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This may all seem a bit far from today's proceedings at the ICJ in the Hague, but it's not. Walk 20 minutes to the city's Holocaust Memorial and you'll see this poignant bas relief accompanied only by the exact same passage on Amalek in Dutch and Hebrew.

Is this genocidal?

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The next damning quote is also linked to an opinion piece by a lifelong anti-Israel activist, there the link is to a tweet which links to a TikTok video showing the Israeli Defense Minister speaking in Hebrew. There's a problem, though, with the subtitles. Gallant says:

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"Gaza won't return to what it was before — Hamas won't be there anymore. We will eliminate all of it." But the "translation" eliminates the bit in the middle to make it sound like Gallant wants to eliminate all of Gaza.

This is how you gather "evidence," @Megankstack?

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The third quote deals with Israel's Energy Minister cutting off the supply of water and electricity from Israel to Gaza, something the article later characterizes as "collective punishment." But there is no provision in international law that...

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...enemies in war supply each other with water and electricity. It's a "rule," like so many others in this discussion, that was made up for Israel and Israel alone.


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https://twitter.com/ShMMor/status/1744992469274480959

Elsewhere she lambastes Israel for not running a narrower operation, as though that hadn't been tried repeatedly over the last decade only to be met with the same hysterical condemnations — and then the October 7 massacre.

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Hamas has an army of two dozen brigades (30,000 fighters). There is no narrow operation that will eliminate the threat. But, as the potted history of the conflict near the end of the essay makes clear, @Megankstack believes Israelis deserve some of that threat.

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She reproaches Israel for "hoisting its flag" as though that were not something any army does as it conquers territory in a war. This too, btw, does not consitute genocide.

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And she has no answer to the challenge that so many schools and so many mosques and so many homes in Gaza are being used as weapons depots and tunnel entrances, except to portray yet another Israeli official as a bloodthirsty ghoul for pointing this out.

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When a collection of arguments this weak are made to argue something's existence, it's an indication that the person making the argument really really wants that thing to exist.

And that's the real story here. The need to see Israel as a repository of evil meant that...

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...following the enormity of October 7, the entire community of activists & intellectuals theologically committed to the idea of an evil Israel would need a stronger fix than even the spurious "apartheid" charges could provide.


19/20wsj.com/articles/why-h…

Rather than trawling the internet for truncated quotes, we might want to investigate why so many of our self-appointed humanitarians have spent decades fantasizing about the day when they could drag the Jews in before a tribunal to face the charge of being the real Nazis.

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