Wednesday, January 14, 2009

NOTE: I don’t think it’s worthwhile at all for people to go around spouting “genocide” at the events in Gaza, mostly because it’s unnecessarily evocative of the Nazi extermination, which is of course a totally unfair analogy, and is therefore inflammatory and not descriptive, e.g. simply a term of abuse with zero information content.

Instead, I’d like you, the reader, to engage in a small thought experiment: say Hamas was, somehow, doing to Israel what Israel is currently doing to Gaza. The latest figure of dead is over 1,000 people, about half civilians and a quarter women and children, and about 4,700 wounded, according to the most credible figures available on the record.

Yet these figures are, respectively, proportionally equivalent to 4,848 Israeli deaths (which would include over 2,000 civilians, of which over 1,000 would be women and children) and 22,560 wounded; and, in Gaza, proportionally equivalent to 3 deaths. Does anyone seriously believe that international news agencies and outlets would even bat an eyelash about the Palestinian victims versus unending, wall-to-wall coverage of the apocalyptic toll inflicted upon the Israelis? If not “genocidal,” how would it be described? Would we even call that a “war”?

To deny that would be to engage in severe moral hypocrisy and to believe that some people are really less than human.

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