Moral Clarity part 3: Making connections, making separations

We need to talk about genocide.

The definition of 'genocide' is the deliberate and systematic killing of a group of people, usually from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group entirely. 

What Hitler did to the Jews is genocide.

What Israel is doing in Gaza, or has done in the West Bank, is nowhere close to meeting the definition of the term 'genocide'. If Israel were genocidal against the Palestinians, they would never have treated Palestinians in their hospitals, or given them permits to work in Israel, or allowed them to study in their universities. They would have never allowed Gazans, or West-Bankers to self-govern. So the moment you hear anyone use the word 'Palestinian' together with the word 'genocide' you can surmise that they have fallen down a propaganda rabbit hole that conflates words and meanings that have no connection, and from which they don't have the means (or desire) to extricate themselves. 

Another thing about the phrase 'the events of October 7th'.

Every time you hear that phrase, 'the events of October 7th in Israel', it's being used a lot in the media, I want you to pause for a second and think about it this way: As an attempt to isolate 'what happened' in Israel from what 'is happening' in Gaza. In other words, 'what happened in Israel' happened, it can't be changed, but the response to it can be changed. Actually that's wrong. There are currently 220 hostages being held in Gaza. October 7th was the beginning of that one event, which will not be resolved until all the hostages are released. The attempt to separate it into two events is a propagandist's way of disconnecting them in your mind in order to compare them. If they are separate and distinct you may start asking yourself questions about whether 'what happened' to the Israelis and 'what is happening' to the Palestinians are 'equal' or 'proportional'. This is a rhetorical trick. 

Think of it as an active shooter situation in a school, something with which we are unfortunately all too familiar. A crazed gunman goes in to the school, kills a bunch of people, and takes a bunch of students hostage. The police and a SWAT team show up and surround the school. Is this two events or just one? Is there consideration of a proportional response to get the hostages out safely? Of course not. When negotiations fail, if there are negotiations, the police have to go in, guns blazing, to save as many hostages as possible (the lesson learned decades ago from the Columbine school shooting). That's what's happening here. And we're in the middle of it.  

One more thing.

If anybody ever doubted that there is a connection between so-called 'anti-Israel' (anti-Zionism, call it whatever you like) feeling and anti-Semitism, ask yourself this. Why is there a positive correlation between a rise in tensions in the Middle East, and a rise in anti-Semitic incidents everywhere else in the world? Simple. Because they are the same.