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I watched part of a tiresome interview of the always excellent Douglas Murray in which the interviewer continued to use hackneyed, intellectually lazy "genocide" to describe the Israeli war of survival against Hamas. I wondered why any network would hire a journalist too dim to realize when they are being made to look foolish by a much smarter interviewee and then remembered it is now the hiring norm in the industry .
It also occurred to me that if "genocide" applies whenever civilian casualties accrue, then General Dwight Eisenhower was a genocidal monster. The D-Day invasion at Normandy was preceded by many thousands of tons of bombs dropped and intense naval shelling. The landings and airborne drops turned into a large scale desperate battle over the entire peninsula lasting for weeks. An estimated 20,000 French civilians were killed, hundreds of thousands injured and most made homeless. Ike had to know this was a likely outcome.
None of the citizens of Normandy voted for Nazi occupation. None of them thought it the righteous will of God if and when Allied troops were killed. None of them applauded grade-school plays about killing Allied soldiers or becoming martyrs while doing so. French civilian victims of D-Day have a far stronger claim to “genocide” victimhood than Gazans. (Charles de Gaulle once quipped that France could probably survive another German occupation but not another American liberation.)
The defeat of the Nazis was a moral necessity. Efforts to minimize the costs of victory in a war of necessity must be made but with the realization that there is no way to allocate the costs of achieving victory proportionately and equitably. The Israelis have an unambiguous right to prosecute this war. That civilian Gazans have been killed and their lives disrupted was a foreseeable and unavoidable outcome that the hostage-takers and terrorist planners could have minimized at any time with their surrender. Even ignoring the sheer evil of Oct 7, their indifference to the well-being of their own people is far more culpable than than the inevitable costs of the Israeli response.
I miss the old American left with its intellectual heft and moral perspective. Its vomitous replacement is bad for the human race. “Genocide” is too important a word to be routinely misused by morons.
Discussion (46)
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Exactly, and well put.
There's a perversion to the language (mis)used by those condemning Israel, and an enormous amount of projection. Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization in the true senses of the words. Israel is fighting a defensive war. One would get the opposite, and mistaken, impression based on popular coverage.
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Ernie Pyle on the liberation of France:
and:
--Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, Henry Holt and Company 1944
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I remember what may have been among the the first rather successful real-time visual imagery campaigns emerging from a war zone in a part of the world of which most of the West (at least the chattering classes) was ignorant, and in which the major European and North American players weren't fighting, but which campaign quite effectively manipulated public opinion into supporting what I believe was the wrong side.
That was the mid-1960s reporting on the Nigerian Civil War. My baseline for a situation I had considerable "my truth" and "lived experience" with, and the reason I almost never succumb to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
I'm reminded of that often, when I read the reporting on the situation in Israel and Gaza. Most recently (that is, a day or two ago), when I saw the scary headlines about the situation at Al-Shifa hospital, at which--they say--IDF attacks and actions are endangering hundreds of patients there.
Wut? The lights are still on? Al-Shifa hospital is still operational? I thought everyone there--from aged crones to helpless infants--was dead. Weren't they all killed by the IDF, or died as a result of actions by the IDF, when the IDF moved in and attacked the tunnels?
After the Nigerian civil war, it became what would these days be called a "meme," as people remarked, time after time, how odd it was that after years of something that was then called the "genocide" of the "Biafran" people, there were so many of them left. Maybe even more than before the war.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
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The very real brutality that the Allies did to the Axis powers were necessary because the Axis powers were such a horrific force of evil. I would not be for storming Normandy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unless it was to utterly destroy an unrelentingly evil ideology.
I've said this before but I feel for the soft-hearted when they lament the deaths of innocent Gazaans. It's a terrible and ugly thing but Hamas cannot be allowed to win.
I feel not one iota for the weak minded morons who support evil.
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