According to recent figures from the Gaza Health Authority, at least 447 children and 248 women are among the estimated 1,417 people who have died, while more than 6,000 have been injured. Yet, in New Zealand, as elsewhere, Israel's supporters not only deny the carnage that Israel is inflicting on Gaza but have tried to manufacture a case for genocide, even if it means peddling lies. One of those peddling disinformation is Juliet Moses, a spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council.
'Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.' Wikipedia
Israel has also stopped all supplies entering Gaza, including food and medicine. More than 180,000 Palestinians have been 'removed' from their homes. Their homes are now piles of rubble, destroyed by Israeli jets.
The carnage will only intensify, and the number of deaths increase further, when Israel launches its ground assault on Gaza.
But in New Zealand, as elsewhere, supporters of Israel have chosen not to condemn the carnage in Gaza and are attempting to justify it. According to Juliet Moses, a spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council and who describes herself as a Zionist, Israel has every right to wage war against a defenceless people.
Juliet Moses has long campaigned against the legitimate rights of Palestinians, so it comes as no surprise that she believes that they do not have the right to defend themselves. According to her, they have no right to express their frustration or struggle for freedom and justice after seven decades of dispossession, oppression and siege.
And in defending Israel's barbarism Moses is more than capable of peddling disinformation. On Twitter, she has accused commentator Morgan Godfery of being an 'apologist for beheading babies and raping women.'
Like Wishart, Juliet Moses took her lead from US President Joe Biden who claimed at a press conference that he had seen 'confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.'
'I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children. I never thought I’d ever — anyway, said Biden.
But it was all a lie. The White House was forced to backpedal, admitting the president nor US officials have seen images or heard independently confirmed reports of beheaded children. It said that Biden had based his claim on assertions made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Juliet Moses though has not made a similar retraction and, given her track record for being 'economical with the truth', she is unlikely to. What such lies do though is further demonise the Palestinian resistance and dehumanise an entire people. It is a pure and unadulterated racism that suggests that Palestinians are an inferior race who can be denied basic and fundamental rights.
While we cannot condone the killing of innocent people by Hamas, that still does not justify the slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Attempting to justify genocide, as Julie Moses and others like her are attempting to do, is support for the violent ideology of a barbaric Zionism. As Naomi Klein (who is also Jewish) has noted:
'The Israeli state’s current murderous levelling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days. The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment rests solely with their perpetrators and their financial and military backers abroad.'
I imagine Moses looks at the death and destruction in Gaza, the bodies lying among the rubble, the bloodied children crying in the hospitals and thinks: 'Ah yes, a job well done'. What a monster.
ReplyDeleteSeizing on the fact that earlier reports of the beheading of Jewish babies cannot be verified is just back-handed condoning of Hamas’s pogrom. What is the most important fact: that reports of Jewish babies being beheaded cannot be confirmed; or that hundreds of unarmed Jewish civilians, men, women and children, were slaughtered by Hamas “resistance fighters “ as they rampaged through Israeli villages?
ReplyDeleteStill doesn't justify genocide in Gaza. Do you condemn the actions of the Israeli govt?
DeleteOf course I don't condone the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. If a government of working people was in power in Israel, it would find another way to wage war against Hamas. (But such a government would also have reached a just accommodation with Palestinians long ago — provided there had been an equally progressive leadership on the Palestinian side.)
DeleteAnd it's no answer to say there's fault on both sides. The most significant event of this past week is the biggest massacre of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, carried out by Hamas Einsatzgruppen. Your comment on that: "The actions of the resistance over the course of the last day are a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation".
You ignore 75 years of oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel and supported by the United States and the West in general. The fault does not 'lie on both sides'.
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