Just don’t call it genocide
The Madleen, en route to Gaza Last week I heard the introduction to a BBC debate on whether war crimes are taking place in Gaza, featuring Today presenter Anna Foster and a panel of “expert guests”. She introduced it by saying that the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had changed his view, having defended the campaign until recently, and stating his opinion that Israel had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza in an article for Haaretz. I switched off after a few minutes, having heard Foster’s lecture on why we shouldn’t call it genocide:
The decision of whether someone is guilty of war crimes will always be made in a court, not a radio studio; words like ‘genocide’ are a legal definition of a specific crime, rather than an emotive description of events that upset us, the latter use — incorrect until a judge decides — is increasing.
I will concede that spurious accusations of genocide happen; we hear it used to refer to actual examples of oppression, such as by Israelis of Palestinians before the actual genocide began, and by racists, such as those who claim “race-mixing is genocide” or that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa right now. However, the use of ‘genocide’ to refer to Israel’s actions are not a mere emotional reaction and nor have they increased recently. Rather, they increased when genocidal actions accompanied by genocidal rhetoric started being relayed to us by Palestinian witnesses in Gaza from October 2023 onwards. I have previously heard someone on the radio tell us we mustn’t use the term ‘genocide’ because the matter is before the International Criminal Court and we might prejudice the outcome! This completely overlooks the point of why there is an anti-genocide movement at all: people want it stopped. They want action.
First, it’s not illegal to talk about genocide in regard to Israel’s onslaught against the people of Gaza. It’s illegal in the UK to cover a situation that is the subject of active proceedings in a British court which is going to be tried by a jury in a way that might prejudice or unduly influence it (e.g. disclose information or claims about a victim or a witness). This is not the case with matters which will be heard by judges only, such as civil cases or appeals, and it is not the case when the matter is not being heard by a British court, jury or no jury. The ICC is an international court, located in the Netherlands, so it is in no sense a British court, and does not use juries. Second, any word for a crime is a legal term, and when a crime is discovered — say, a body is found of someone who was obviously killed by someone else — words like murder are freely used. For example, after the killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in London in 1992, headlines called it murder and one headline read “Boy found clinging to sex murder mum”. After an innocent man was accused of the crime and acquitted after it turned out that a ‘confession’ was made to impress a ‘girlfriend’ who turned out to be an undercover police officer, it was later traced to a serial rapist and double murderer from south-east London, Robert Napper, who pled guilty to manslaughter and was sent to Broadmoor.
Third, and most importantly, the standard of evidence required to act to prevent or stop a crime taking place is much less than what is required to convict someone of a crime and send them to prison or the gallows. You cannot try people for anything without taking such action; you cannot put a concentration camp guard on trial for torture, murder, genocide or whatever while he is still in post. This applies to ordinary people as well as to the state. When the police are made aware of a household or institution in which children are being abused, they raid the house to rescue the children. They do not wait until an individual is proven guilty. If two strong men are walking together and discover a man raping a woman, they disturb the man and if he does not run away, they pull him off. They do not have a debate about it or go and try to convince a panel of experts that what they were seeing really was rape; by that time, the woman might be dead. When atrocities were being clearly reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, military action was demanded and (albeit three years late) delivered; we did not wait for anyone to be convicted or for a court to rule on what legal terms applied. It took many more years for that to happen.
History shows that genocides only stop when they are stopped. The Holocaust stopped when Nazi Germany was occupied by the victorious allied powers and the concentration camps liberated; the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda stopped when the Rwandan Patriotic Front occupied the country and forced the Interahamwe out. When the genocidal campaign of the Bosnian Serbs (the Chetniks) was raging in the early 1990s, western radio talk shows and newspaper letters pages were full of calls for military action — the deployment of troops and use of bombs — to stop it; today, the campaign has for much of the last two years been too timid, too afraid of being arrested for “supporting terrorism” or accusations of antisemitism (and also, after the wars of 20 years ago, distrustful of western military intervention) to demand anything more than a ceasefire, or at most the cessation of arms supply and for their governments to take a “tough stance” on Israel.
But it’s soul-destroying to regularly see footage of atrocities on social media and then hear both radio presenters and politicians falling over themselves not to offend the perpetrators or their supporters by calling this what it is, to insist that Israel, a reprobate state with a human rights record far worse than many third-world dictatorships, “has a right to defend itself” from an internal rebellion from natives it has incarcerated and oppressed in numerous ways for the past half century. Last month when our politicians started to concede that our government’s close relationship with Israel might be too much of an embarrassment to continue with, David Lammy’s speech did not mention the words crime, atrocity or genocide once and was laden with appeals to his own support for Israel, his condemnation of Hamas, his desire for “a strong friendship with you based on shared values, with flourishing ties between our people and societies”, Britain’s bilateral relationship with Israel and a whole lot of other cant aimed at Israel’s “better nature” and its presumed concern for “the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”. (Let’s not forget, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Labour party in the 2019 election, when a senior female Labour politician was asked if she considered it antisemitic to even talk of Israeli atrocities, she hurriedly agreed that it was.)
Yet, the censorship continues in the mainstream media; we continue to watch our friends and their children being murdered in plain view while the media debate whether crimes are even taking place (and cutting off people who say they are) and politicians continue to placate both Israel and its apologists in London and New York. Enough. It is absurd to talk of waiting for the ICC to rule before we can call it genocide. It is like waiting for the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials before Auschwitz has even been liberated, and those who silence and censor talk of genocide are collaborators, and we must entertain the possibility that they are willing collaborators.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Why people are deserting the BBC
- Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
- The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
- Ask a loaded question …
- Racism on Today
tells us in the Quran:
narrated that the Prophet ﷺ said: “While a man was in a barren tract of land, he heard a voice in a cloud saying: ‘Irrigate the garden of so-and-so.’ The cloud moved and poured its water over a rocky area. The water collected in a channel, so the man followed it and found a person standing in his garden, directing the water with his shovel. He asked him: ‘O servant of Allah, what is your name?’ He said the name that was heard from the cloud. He then asked: ‘Why do you ask about my name?’ He replied: ‘I heard a voice in the cloud which poured this water, saying: “Irrigate the garden of so-and-so,” mentioning your name. What do you do with it?’ He said: ‘Now that you have asked, I look at what it produces and give one-third in charity, my family and I eat one-third, and I reinvest one-third back into the garden.'” [