Monday, April 03, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
A year ago, I went through the history of the scurrilous "apartheid" charge against Israel and showed how the same playbook could be used to accuse Israel of "genocide" - twisting the definition of the term, socializing the charge starting with the extremists and then getting more mainstream Israel haters to write pseudo-academic papers "proving" Israel is engaging in it, and then finally having mainstream NGOs pretend to look at the issue objectively while perverting the meaning of the term.
My prediction is coming true.
Michael Barnett, Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University, wrote an absurd article for a blog called "Political Violence at a Glance" where he asks, "Is Israel on the precipice of genocide?"
He knows that Israel isn't guilty of genocide now - instead, he says that it has all the risk factors in place today:
Genocide is impossible to predict: there is no agreement on how the combination of preconditions, contingent paths, triggers, and entrepreneurs produce a form of violence once unimaginable. But research on genocide over the past several decades has provided insight into the preconditions, which provide a reasonable starting point.Preconditions are not predictors. If we use them to predict genocides, we will overpredict. But a look at the UN’s report on atrocity crimes, which lists risk factors for genocide and “lesser” forms of organized violence, is illuminating. It lists eight common and six specific risk factors. The eight common factors are situations of armed conflict or other forms of instability; record of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law; weak state structures; motives or incentives; capacity to commit atrocity crimes; absence of mitigating factors; enabling circumstances or preparatory action; and triggering factors. These are, as the document states, general risk factors. Many states might qualify. Israel ticks all the boxes.
Really? Israel has weak state structures? Israel has motives or incentives to destroy all Palestinians? Israel has "triggering factors" for genocide? Israel has no mitigating factors???
Barnett makes these pronouncements as if they are beyond dispute - but anyone who knows anything about Israel knows they are fiction.
Anyone who believes that is already an antisemite ab initio.
I don't think Barnett actually believes any of this. He once taught at Hebrew University. No, this is worse than stupidity - this is malicious.
Notice also that while the UN report is concerned with all war crimes - a far more expansive terrain - Barnett represents this already flawed list as proof that Israel is readying for the worst possible crime, genocide.
He did this knowingly.
Barnett's intent was to write an article saying Israel is on its way to the crime of genocide, and he then cherry picked third rate evidence to pretend to prove his thesis and ignored anything that shows it is garbage. His main example is Huwara, which was widely condemned across Israeli society, yet he positions it as mainstream and government policy.
It isn't scholarship. It is deceit cloaking as scholarship.
And, by the way, applying those criteria to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority shows that they are much closer in checking off all the boxes than Israel is. The only missing one is the capacity - and the only reason they haven't gotten that capacity is because Israel constantly frustrates Iranian attempts to give them that capacity.
And Iran checks off every single box. Including openly creating a weapon with the single purpose of murdering millions of Jews.
Barnett appears to be trying to set the stage so that accusing Israel of genocide in five or ten years doesn't sound so outlandish. People hear the words "Israel" and "genocide" together for a few years and they start to figure where there's smoke, there's fire. It is exactly what happened with "apartheid."
We'll be seeing more articles like this - not because they have any basis in reality, but because there are enough modern antisemites today to want to create that perception of reality.
UPDATE: Ian notes in the comments:
His book literally has the The Red Cross Ambulance Hoax on the cover.
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