by Ilana Mercer, The Unz Review:
Genocide is a crime, ‘the crime of all crimes.’ It stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attaches to genocide
IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.
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The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.
This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.
But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. Israel, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.
Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.
Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”
In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza.
In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.
The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.
HASBARA AND A FLORET OF BABY FLESH
Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara.
In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.
Think of Hasbara as providing cretins with bogus constructs with which to rape reality.
The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attack s. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these, list the names of children 18 year and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)
This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.
Hasbara to what end ? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing with Israel and demonizing Arabs . (+972 Magazine.)
