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What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Genocide Belén Fernández ([link removed])


Amnesty International: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza

Amnesty International (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ) found that "Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza."

Imagine for a moment that a magnitude 8 earthquake occurred somewhere in the world, and the Western corporate media refused to use the word “earthquake” in reporting it, instead talking ambiguously of a "tectonic incident" that had caused buildings to collapse and people to die.

Obviously, reporters would be called out for deliberate linguistic ineptness and a bizarre obfuscation of truth. And yet just such a verbal sleight of hand has been on display for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip, where corporate media outlets continue to dance around the word “genocide” while the Israeli military carries out the systematic mass killing of Palestinians.

Since October 2023, nearly 45,000 people have officially been killed in Gaza—although as a letter to the Lancet medical journal (7/20/24 ([link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext) ) pointed out back in July, the true death toll at that time was likely to exceed 186,000. A new report (BBC, 11/8/24 ([link removed]) ) from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights indicates that almost 70% of the over 8,000 Palestinian fatalities verified by the UN over a six-month period were women and children; a survey of medical volunteers in Gaza found that "44 doctors, nurses and paramedics saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza" (New York Times, 10/9/24 ([link removed]) ).

Nearly the entire population ([link removed]) of Gaza has been displaced, and most of the territory has been reduced to rubble ([link removed]) .


** 'Committed with intent'
------------------------------------------------------------
HuffPost: Israeli President Suggests That Civilians In Gaza Are Legitimate Targets

From the beginning of the Israeli assault, officials like President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23 ([link removed]) ) made it clear that they saw themselves as being at war with a population.

As per Article II of the Genocide Convention ([link removed] on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.pdf) , “genocide means…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israeli leaders again and again ([link removed]) have effectively admitted genocidal intent ([link removed]) . Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23 ([link removed]) ), at the beginning of Israel's assault, declared:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog (HuffPost, 10/13/23 ([link removed]) ) likewise insisted, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.... It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Mother Jones, 11/3/23 ([link removed]) ) invoked a biblical justification for genocide: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember." The Bible (1 Samuel 15:3 ([link removed] Samuel 15%3A3) ) says of the Amalekites: "Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants."

And Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi couldn't have been more clear (X, 10/7/23 ([link removed]) ), posting the following comment ([link removed]) to X at the outset of hostilities in October 2023: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”

In other words, Gaza is a pretty textbook case of genocide. But the term “genocide” is ostracized by the corporate media world because it violates the political line of the United States, the global superpower that is currently enabling Israel’s genocidal behavior—to the tune of ([link removed]) tens of billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. And the media’s refusal ([link removed]) to call a spade a spade has produced all manner of linguistic gymnastics.


** 'Blistering retaliatory offensive'
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Intercept: Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

A New York Times memo (Intercept, 4/15/24 ([link removed]) ) said of the word "genocide," "We should...set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not." The same memo declared, “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7."

In the eyes of the Associated Press (12/4/24 ([link removed]) ), for example, the genocide in Gaza is merely “Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive,” while Fox News (11/3/24 ([link removed]) ) detects a “fight against terrorists” and the Washington Post (12/3/24 ([link removed]) ) sees “one of the most deadly and destructive wars in recent memory.”

Or take the New York Times, where a memo (Intercept, 4/15/24 ([link removed]) ) leaked earlier this year explicitly instructed journalists to avoid using words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” when discussing “Palestine”—another word whose use was highly discouraged. On October 7, the one-year anniversary of Israel's ongoing assault, the US newspaper of record headlined the affair ([link removed]) as “The War That Won’t End,” with the G-word appearing only in a fleeting reference to “accusations of genocide and war crimes.”

This particular Times dispatch begins with Yaniv Hegyi, an Israeli who “fled his home last October 7, after terrorists from Gaza overran his village in southern Israel.” As ever, the selectivity with which US media deploys the T-word ([link removed]) safely obliterates the chance that domestic audiences will be confronted with the fact that the state of Israel has literally been terrorizing ([link removed]) Palestinians since the moment of its foundation on Palestinian land in 1948—or that Zionist terrorism ([link removed]) preceded even that moment.

Only after we’ve been introduced to Hegyi, victim of “terrorists,” do we meet Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian who “fled his home on October 12, after the Israeli Air Force responded by striking his city in northern Gaza.” Which brings us to another tactic that has been institutionalized in the US political and media establishment alike: the perennial Israeli monopoly on “responding,” “retaliating ([link removed]) ” and generally engaging in “self-defense ([link removed]) ” no matter what it does—including genocide ([link removed]) .

Never mind that Israel would have nothing to “retaliate” against if it hadn’t up and invented itself on other people’s land, and then spent the next 76 years (and counting ([link removed]) ) occupying, forcibly displacing and slaughtering Palestinians en masse. Fortuitously for Israel, the corporate media are ever standing by to set the record askew.


** 'Propaganda war never stops'
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WSJ: The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops

The Wall Street Journal (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ) calls for ethnic cleansing as an alternative to genocide: "Not one of the groups yelling genocide calls on Egypt to let women and children escape to safety by opening its border with Gaza."

That said, the media have been increasingly unable to abide by a de facto blanket ban on the word “genocide,” given, inter alia, Amnesty International’s recent determination (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ) that Israel is committing just that in the Gaza Strip. In such cases, then, the term inevitably finds its way into news reports—but only as an allegation.

CNN (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ), for instance, reported that Amnesty had “said that it had gathered ‘sufficient evidence to believe’ that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people—a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.” The rest of the article similarly alternates between Amnesty’s charges and Israel’s vehement rebuttals.

This template was also followed by AP (via ABC, 12/4/24 ([link removed]) ), NBC News (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ) and the other usual suspects. Significantly, this sort of rebuttal option is never extended to Palestinians; you’d never see Yaniv Hegyi fleeing his home from “conduct by Gazans that the Israeli government says amounts to terrorism—a charge the government of Gaza has vehemently denied.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/5/24 ([link removed]) ) took it upon themselves to pen a diatribe against the organization that had chosen to “lend…its once-good name to the genocide lie,” and thereby “assure… its good standing in the anti-Israel herd.” Bearing the headline “The Propaganda War on Israel Never Stops,” the rant came accompanied by an entirely irrelevant 23-minute documentary on “the worst antisemitic riot in American history” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which took place in 1991.

According to the Journal, Amnesty has committed an “inversion of reality”: It’s actually Hamas that is the “genocidal” actor—and, by the way, there are “terrorist headquarters in hospitals ([link removed]) ” in Gaza. This is just about the most unabashed apology forwar crimes ([link removed]) you can ask for. Israel has pulverized the bulk of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, and an October UN press release ([link removed]) noted that

Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.

By converting Israel into the victim not only of “terrorists” but also of a “propaganda war,” the Journal is engaging in its own criminal “inversion of reality.” But for a corporate media committed to complicity in genocide by linguistic omission, it’s all in a day’s work.
Read more ([link removed])

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