The slow death of the genocide lie

Now we know: Gaza must be a genocide because Adolf Hitler says it is. And that man knows a thing or two about genocide. His name crops up in the list of experts behind the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), which last week decreed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. He seems to have moved, though: he’s now ‘Adolf Hitler of Gaza City’ rather than of Berlin. Yet there he is, alongside Emperor Palpatine and the Cookie Monster, proudly aligning himself with this organisation whose latest ‘resolution’ says Israel has engaged in ‘systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide’.

It’s not actually Hitler. He’s been dead for 80 years. It’s not even some Nazi fanboy in Gaza City who’s taken his favourite murderer’s name. No, it’s an online wag who wants the world to know that the IAGS is not all it’s cracked up to be. For a start, any chump can become a member for $30. Hence why, for a period of time last week, this esteemed gathering of human-rights boffins included not only the usual tenured worthies who think their word counts for more than everyone else’s, but also the Cookie Monster, sporting a fetching, Hamas-style bandana.

When future historians look back on the Israelophobic delirium of the post-7 October moment, last week might strike them as the week the genocide lie finally died. For it started with media outlets across Christendom reporting with naked glee that ‘the experts’ have ruled that Israel really is the genocidal loon of world affairs. And it ended with those experts looking damn foolish, not to mention partisan, opportunistic and cynical. As the Free Press put it, the lesson is that when you see the phrase ‘experts say’ in a headline, it’s a sign to think twice and for yourself’.

The closer one looks at the IAGS and its resolution, the more it smacks of a self-appointed kangaroo court of academic smartarses desperate to pin the sickest of crimes on the Jewish State. First, there’s the make-up of the IAGS. Salo Aizenberg of HonestReporting, which challenges media prejudice against Israel, found not only that fictional baddies from Star Wars have joined the IAGS, but also that 80 of its 500 members are based at universities in Iraq. Is Iraq well known for its genocide scholarship, so much so that its professors account for nearly 20 per cent of a global association of genocide oracles?

Then there’s the tiny numbers involved. Israelophobic hotheads spent last week crowing that ‘86 per cent’ of the world’s ‘leading genocide scholars’ now say Gaza is a genocide. If you deny this is a genocide, then you’re ‘as much in denial of reality as a climate denier’, said Owen Jones – only ‘far more depraved’.

But it isn’t true that ‘86 per cent of genocide scholars’ backed this resolution. In fact, it was 86 per cent of those who could be arsed to vote. Which was only 21.6 per cent of the organisation. People have done the maths and this means a measly 108 of ‘the experts’, all of whom are unnamed, supported the charge against Israel. It is preposterous to say the debate over Gaza has been ended by a purple-prose resolution nodded through by just over a hundred academics who won’t even put their names to their incredibly serious accusations. In fact, it’s borderline tyrannical, as if this resolution were some kind of papal bull that ought to crush once and for all the supposed blasphemy of saying Gaza is a war, not a genocide.

Then there was the unusual way the resolution was pushed through. According to genocide scholar Sara Brown, who’s been a member of IAGS for 10 years and served two terms on its advisory board, there was a staggering lack of free discussion. Typically, she said, the IAGS gathers members in a ‘virtual town hall’ when it drafts controversial resolutions. But this time, the leadership ‘declined’ to have any such debate. What an ‘embarrassing absence of professionalism’, she said.

Most damning of all is the actual content of the resolution. It is about as far from judicious analysis as you can get. The opening paragraph says Israel ‘has killed more than 59,000 adults and children’ in Gaza. It is a flagrant abandonment of a scholar’s prime duty – to pursue truth – to talk about the dead in Gaza without mentioning that a very significant percentage of them are Hamas fighters. The resolution accuses Israel of carrying out ‘deliberate attacks’ on ‘hospitals, homes, commercial buildings’. Again, Hamas is invisibilised – no mention is made of the hard-proven fact that Hamas operates in such buildings. It is a profound inversion of truth to accuse Israel of turning civilian infrastructure into warzones when it was Hamas that did that.

Perhaps ‘the experts’ neglected to mention that many of the dead are Hamas militants because to do so would be to admit this is war. Not a new holocaust, but war. War between an army of anti-Semites and the democratic state they so savagely attacked on 7 October 2023. It is a lie of omission to erase the Jew-hating militia from the tragic story of Gaza. When inconvenient facts are buried to stitch someone up in a court of law, we call it a miscarriage of justice. So what should we call this travesty of a resolution?

Also last week, the alternative experts at the Scholars for Truth About Genocide made a highly convincing case that what’s happening in Gaza is war. The IAGS, they said, failed to mention one simple fact: that this tragedy would end ‘if Hamas were to release all the hostages… and lay down their weapons’. To leave out such info is an outrage, they said, because it wilfully obscures the truth that Israel’s intention in Gaza is not to destroy the Palestinian people but to secure the return of its own people and fortify its territory against further attacks from the neo-fascists of Hamas. These are war aims, not plans for extermination, and so they are casually, cynically redacted by the ‘genocide’ obsessives.

Two alternative experts, writing in the Jerusalem Post, have reminded us of another truth overlooked by the IAGS – that Israel has ‘facilitated a large volume of humanitarian assistance’ for Gaza. It has ‘helped [to] vaccinate children in Gaza’ as well as delivering medical equipment and fuel for hospitals. People can debate, if they like, whether Israel has done this stuff well or not. But the idea that a ‘genocidal’ state would try to attend to the food and health needs of the people it is genociding is so absurd that it deserves nothing but the most savage ridicule.

The events of last week confirmed that misinformation is the rotten soil in which the genocide lie has taken root. Will it die off now? Not right away. Too many people now accrue their thin sense of virtue through propagating this nonsense so that they might pose as warriors ‘on the right side of history’. Indeed, falsely accusing the Jewish nation of genocide is fast becoming the most conformist cry of the cultural establishment, so much so that they will unceremoniously cast you out as a ‘denier’ if you dare to demur from their ideological loathing for the Jewish nation that they have the gall to doll up as ‘scholarship’ or ‘activism’. But the lie has certainly taken a beating. The truth is crying out for a fair hearing. Let’s listen.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy