[The images in this article are a rogues’ gallery of our modern genocide liars.]
The War in Gaza may be coming to an end, but the war for truth has only just begun. Whatever your stance on Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict, and the last two years in particular, all sane people can agree on the following: The claim of genocide is total lie. In the words of the (normally) mild-mannered Professor Steven Pinker, “It’s a terrible blood libel”.
Unfortunately, not all people are sane, rational or good faith actors. In fact, an increasing amount of academia, and almost all of the so-called “human rights” establishment, “believe” something that is patently untrue. To them we can add the pathetic governments of Ireland and Spain.
We will need to fight tooth and nail against this libel over the coming years. To help you in this effort, I have collected 5 texts on the matter (4 from Guerre and Shalom, one from Professor Pinker’s interview on The Free Press). The individuals selected, including myself, are known for their opposition to the populist right in all countries —which is to say that to be against the Great Genocide Blood Libel isn’t a political stance or a matter of taste or a position of the “right wing”: it is obligatory for all good faith actors. That Spain’s Pedro Sánchez trumpets “genocide” says all you need to know about that vile politician.
I hope that these resources are useful.
Text 1 (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - “There is not even a primae facie case”.
Genocide is a word with a clear meaning. In plain English, it is the attempt to wipe another group off the face of the Earth and to substantially succeed in that effort. As we are all aware, the Nazi Holocaust and the extermination of the Tutsis in Rwanda are the ultimate embodiment of genocide. In memory of these victims, we guard - or should guard jealously - this sacred, but awful, term.
War, however horrific, does not amount to genocide. The fire bombing of Tokyo and the utter destruction of German cities during World War II constituted war crimes - grave, grievous war crimes - but there is no suggestion of genocide. It is abundantly clear that the British, Americans and their allies did not intend to wipe out the German and Japanese peoples.
Closer to our current time, the United Nations states that the average civilian to the combatant casualty rate in contemporary conflict is 9:1. In the American invasion of Afghanistan that rate fell to 5:1, while in Iraq it fell further still to 3:1. Again, although many, including the author of this letter, opposed the Iraq invasion, none of us would suggest that these interventions amounted to genocide. Quite clearly they didn’t. They were war. Bloody, horrific, and in the latter case mentioned, avoidable war. Yet war is not equivalent in any way to the events of the Holocaust.
The current Gaza conflict is rightly the subject of intense debate. It is not my intention to litigate the issues here. Nonetheless, one matter is clear: even if one were to accept the “Hamas Health Ministry’s” figures as gospel truth, the combatant to death ratio in this conflict is roughly 1.5:1 (if not lower), which is to say (far) lower than in WWII, Iraq, Afghanistan or any modern military conflict. Moreover, the population of Gaza has increased over the period since October 7th 2023. In this factual matrix, the proposition that Israel has committed genocide is manifestly false to the extent that there is not even a prima facie case. It is akin to saying that the Earth is flat.
Text 2 (Prof Steven Pinker) - “It’s a terrible blood libel”.
Transcribed from his Free Press interview.
It’s a case where the "My Side Bias” - where the drive to moralise - just obliterates rational consideration. In terms of magnitude Syria was way worse than Gaza. Gaza, by the standards of measuring war, is, so far, what you would call a small war, that is it’s killed in the tens of thousands. Now that’s horrible; each one of those deaths is a tragedy; but there have been wars that have killed in the hundreds of thousands, such as the Syrian Civil War, in the millions and then, in the World Wars, in the tens of millions.
So there’s that dimension, but, in addition, there’s a huge difference between people getting killed in the course of a war designed to achieve other objectives and people being targeted for murder in order to murder those people, as a group … or as a lot of individuals… but yes as group: that’s what genocide means. The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths is a kind of blood libel. It’s trying to import moral opprobrium that we associate with genocide to a designated enemy, in this case Israel.
[I alluded to My Side Bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard-left critical theory has defined, namely “White Oppressors” versus “Everyone else as victims”.]
It is a blood libel in the sense that it is an accusation of deliberate murder, ill- founded. And one could disagree with Israel’s campaign against Gaza; one could say that it is not justifiable; that it’s not a just war. It’s still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible, as in we know that there have been (real) genocides. I really think it’s a terrible blood libel and it’s a sign of how people’s moralising in the service of demonising and dichotomising —dividing the world into Good and Evil - can just flatten their ability to analyse and think clearly.
Text 3 (Prof Susan Bordo, of the Substack Bordo Lines) - “We will need yet another third term to describe Germany’s actions during WWII”
I’ve just finished rewatching Ken Burns’ searing documentary, “The United States and the Holocaust” and am freshly astounded that it’s now become commonplace to describe Israel as committing genocide. Apparently, there’s not even an argument or justification required anymore; it’s simply accepted, the word tossed around as though it should be obvious to any right-thinking person.
I’d always thought that the systematic targeting of people just because of who they are was the essence of genocide (as distinguished from war crimes, which have often been just as brutal in their effect on whole populations of people, but without the aim of exterminating them on racial, ethnic or other “genetic” grounds.) Somehow, however, in the mass fervor to condemn Israel it’s not been enough to accuse Netanyahu of war crimes. No, we’ve allowed the horrendous numbers of Palestinian deaths to alter the meaning of “genocide” so that genocide has become, as Dave Rich put it, “the plural of war crimes.”
If we are going to obliterate the distinction between war crimes and genocide, then we will need yet another third term to describe Germany’s actions during WWII, which were so manifestly aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people, NO MATTER what country we lived in. In fact, they rounded us up in Germany and every country they occupied—way before the Nazis conceived of a more efficient way of doing away with us—and murdered and raped us JUST BECAUSE WE WERE JEWS. Beyond the communists, Germany did not have political targets of their hatred—this was a RACIAL war, imagined from the beginning as aimed at racial purification. (And even the evil of communism was attributed to the dominance of Jews within the ranks of “Bolsheviks”)
Have any Israeli soldiers invaded nearby countries, looking for Arabs to gather up and rape and murder? Have they ever lined up Palestinian women and children in Gaza, shot them and thrown them into mass graves? Have they ever celebrated the deaths of the civilians who were killed in the bombings of buildings built over Hamas’s network of tunnels, where the terrorists cowered, allowing their own people to be collateral of their war against Jews?
Hamas’s stated - often, proudly stated - aim IS genocidal. (Don’t trust me; read their literature and watch interviews with them.) Yet somehow, the so-called “pro-Palestine” groups in this country and others have ignored that, while seeing the Israelis who have been terrorized, raped and murdered by Hamas—again, I emphasize, DELIBERATELY—as the unfortunate by-product of an act of “resistance.” Little wonder that I don’t see any of those (so-called) “pro-Palestinian” groups celebrating the release of those remaining hostages that haven’t been murdered by Hamas.
Text 4 (Dave Rich of the Substack Everyday Hate) - “Genocide is not the plural of war crimes ”.
When Omar Bartov, one of America’s best-known genocide scholars, wrote in the New York Times that “Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population”, he gave the game away with that word, “only”. This is the word on which the whole ‘genocide’ argument rests, because this is a crime defined by intent: if there is a reasonable alternative explanation for Israel’s actions, then you can’t make the case for genocide.
Of course, if you erase the war from the story of what is happening in Gaza, then it is possible to argue that there is no other explanation for why so many Palestinians have been killed and so much infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. You can make it look as if Israel acts for no reason other than wilful cruelty and murderous intent. But on the other hand, to try to explain why the IDF is in Gaza at all without mentioning Hamas, hostages, or what happened on 7 October 2023, is in my view both unethical and dishonest.
It is possible for people to argue, rightly or wrongly, that Israeli actions in Gaza have been illegal, immoral and unjustified without that sleight of hand. As with most armed conflicts, you can come up with examples of war crimes in Gaza, but genocide is not the plural of war crimes. In principle, Israel is a State like any other and as such, is not incapable of committing genocide, which remains a crime within the compass of human behaviour. But I am yet to read a report or article that fully acknowledges the facts and meaning of Hamas’s October 7 assault, considers Iran’s wider ‘axis of resistance’ strategy, remembers the fate of Israeli hostages, and discusses the way that Hamas prepared the Gazan terrain for military conflict, and bearing all that in mind, still made a convincing argument that this is a genocide. Without considering that full defence of Israel’s actions in detail what you are left with is not a legal justification but a political argument, whether it bears UN branding or not.
I have written before about the strange desire to prove that there is a genocide occurring in Gaza, even to the point of trying to change the existing legal definition that applies everywhere else on earth, just to make it fit. And now, some of Israel’s most extreme critics, some of whom accused Israel of committing genocide long before October 7, are the ones most disappointed and worried by the prospect that President Trump’s peace plan might work.
If this was a real genocide, then surely any proposal to stop further killing ought to be welcomed. Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa complained that Trump’s deal would be “akin to negotiating a ceasefire between Auschwitz or Warsaw and the Nazi regime.” Quite apart from the grotesque comparison, I imagine the prisoners in Auschwitz, facing the daily terror of selection for the gas chambers and with millions of Jews already dead, would have welcomed anything that offered even the possibility of survival.
The UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign have even claimed that Trump’s plan “should be understood as a continuation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people rather than a plan to end it” - which just goes to show that Israel will be accused of genocide whether it kills or doesn’t kill, bombs or doesn’t bomb. It is as if, when it comes to Palestine, “genocide” has shed its legal meaning and become a political label, whose antithesis is “resistance”.
Text 5 (Daniel Clarke-Serret) - “Put simply, there is no deliberate targeting of civilians.”
Article II of the Genocide Convention contains the following narrow definition:
A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Now let me quote from the UN Office of Genocide Prevention which provides a commentary on the above legal provisions:
“The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.
Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”
The above in mind, the claims of genocide in Gaza are more laughable. Again the “substantial” element is entirely missing. Lord Andrew Roberts, among other prominent military historians, have confirmed that the civilian to combatant death ratio is the lowest in the modern history of warfare; thus far from genocide, it’s war at its most humane. In a difficult urban environment, where dwelling after dwelling has been booby trapped or converted into weapons storage facilities, the IDF has been paying scrupulous regard to the fate of non-combatants.
Yet the international community, led by the United Nations and with the hearty support of neighbouring Egypt, have refused to allow significant numbers of Palestinians to leave the territory for temporary shelter in refugee camps; the normal humanitarian practice in the event of war. Instead, with the violent blessing of their own elected leaders, women and children have been forced to remain in an urban, overpopulated hellhole designed to maximise their own side’s death count. An intolerable situation, which the Israeli forces have navigated with humanitarian aplomb.
In addition, even if we are to believe the figures coming from the “Hamas health ministry” as entirely impartial and accurate (and why wouldn’t you?!), we know that a substantial proportion of the dead are terrorist fighters. Of the civilians, many have been killed by misfired Hamas / PIJ rockets and - when attempting to flee - by Hamas itself. None of this - not even natural deaths - are accounted for in the “Hamas data”. We are expected to believe that not a single terrorist fighter has been killed; and supported by discredited NGOs, we are simultaneously asked to reject Israeli figures of the Hamas dead. When faced with numbers provided by Islamist terrorists on one side and Andrew Roberts on the other, we are asked to believe the barbarians. Incredibly, Amnesty International and the UN think that a democracy is less reliable than the local branch of ISIS in its truthful use of data. It seems that Lenin was right about useful idiots.
But whatever the tragic figure of civilians killed by Israeli bombs, we can say with certainty that the mental element of genocide is entirely absent. There was and there is no “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Put simply, there is no deliberate targeting of civilians. There is no government policy to do so and there is no evidence that it is happening on the ground.
If Israel were deliberately targeting civilians, why did it give evacuation orders? Why did it provide a safe zone for the innocent by the South Western coast? Why did it drop leaflets and sent text messages pleading for the civilians to evacuate?
Was it Israel that told the Gazan governing authorities to hide their weapons and military bases in hospitals, schools and mosques? Was it Israel that asked Hamas to use civilians as human shields while walking in the open air? And so on and so forth. If Israel wanted to murder the entire Gazan population it could have done so on October 8th. It didn’t. It won’t. If it is found in hindsight that there are examples of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers who have committed individual war crimes, then that needs to be dealt with on an individual legal basis. But there is no government policy at all of murder. Conclusion: No genocide is being committed. There isn’t even a primae facie case.
We will leave the last word to Alice Nderitu, the UN’s former special adviser on the prevention of genocide:
“This push that I should say that there’s a genocide going on in Gaza? They knew that I’m not a court of law, and it’s only a court of law that can determine whether a genocide has happened. But I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.”
“It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], not for Myanmar. The focus was always Israel.”
“This was a war. Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side. . . . By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the UN was created for.”
So why are intelligent people giving the Great Genocide Lie a hearing when it is so patently false? No simple response can be given. But perhaps the most generous answer that one can grasp for is the provenance of these claims. The United Nations, the Republic of Ireland, the Republic of South Africa, The Guardian newspaper and Amnesty International are seen as reputable sources.
How could the “brave Irish who fought against British tyranny” lie?
How could the party of Nelson Mandela be party to such injustice?
How could the United Nations be in the league with devil, being, as it claims to be, the bringer of world peace and the bearer of Universal Human Rights?
But what this whole episode proves is that though a wolf may be clothed in sheep’s clothing, it remains a wolf. All are capable of lies: some for money, some in ignorance and some because of a misplaced sense of their own righteousness.
When, concerned that “genocide” wasn’t going stick in an ICJ court case against Israel, it decided to apply to extend the definition, Ireland exposed its bad faith. It was more concerned that it could blood libel Israel rather than apply the law and the facts. Through its behaviour, exemplified through its President’s decision to use Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 to repeat his nation’s genocide calumnies, Ireland has exposed itself to the condemnation of history. Genocide is a lie. A blatant lie. And through spreading its noxious poison, the Irish-ANC alliance have painfully lost their holier-than-thou sheen.
A collection of invaluable essays by yourself, the esteemed Steven Pinker, Susan Bardo, and Dave Rich, Daniel! The Great Genocide Blood Libel is flat out ridiculous and no based on any facts at all. Genocide is a concerted effort ordered from the top down by the government of a country. For example, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Bosnian Genocide, the Armenian Genocide, the mass murder perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rogue, and the genocide of the Maya Indians by the Guatemalan government in the 1980s. Israel's War in Gaza is in no way, shape or form genocide. There is ZERO evidence that the Israeli government and the IDF ever had any intention to wipe out the people of Gaza as a whole. Have there been war crimes by individual Israeli soldiers? Yes, and those should be prosecuted. But that's not the same as full-on genocide. It's absolutely shameful the Irish people who have long history of oppression themselves, would turn their back on the Jewish people by leading the charge of the international prosecution of Israel for genocide. Same with South Africa, for whom its Jewish population was disproportionately represented among whites in the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
These are all good (re)sources. But who will listen to logic and truthful exposition if, as you said yourself, logic is no longer in vogue? How exactly are we to proceed? Who subscribes to your (and perhaps my) list besides those who already agree?
I was told that our primary mission may not be to convince those who refuse to listen or have already made up their minds, but rather to support one another. Perhaps we should see that as our main task—and if, along the way, someone changes their mind, that would be a welcome byproduct rather than the goal.
I remain convinced that social media agitates but does not educate, precisely because it enables self-selection.
This evening I am attending a joint Israeli–Christian dinner. I’m hoping that being face to face will make it harder to hide behind the screens of hate and ignorance.
As for the ongoing discussion of genocide—if it’s still of value—add Thane Rosenbaum (see my interview with him that I posted on Substack).