Fighting the Genocide Libel
ROOTED TRUTH tackles the lie of the century.
Guerre and Shalom is perhaps the only Substack obsessionally dedicated to fighting the War on Truth. Sometimes the battlefield is the ballot box. Sometimes the battlefield is the university. Always the battlefield is the discourse on Gaza.
Language inversion is the principle tool for whitewashing Arab imperialism in the Western mind. Of all the great examples of language inversion, it is The Great Genocide Blood Libel that is the most pernicious —and effective. It is repeated and repeated and repeated until all believe it is true. Here on Guerre and Shalom we repeat and repeat and repeat the truth so that inversion comes 360 degrees and veritas is reclaimed.
It was little surprise that The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House decided to publish Uri Zehavi’s Rooted Truth because the author is another lonely voice dedicated to fighting the lie of the century. This work, like Pax Arabica, tackles language inversion at its root and this chapter is the linchpin. Uri, as I, will never stop until “genocide” regains its real and awful meaning.
- Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)
Listen to podcasts about Pax Arabica at The Zionist Podcast on Apple or Spotify.
Listen to the Harif Lecture on Pax Arabica here:
Pax Arabica went to Westminster here:
Rooted Truth: Israel’s Case Against the Deniers
by Uri Zehavi
Preface & Introduction: The Return of the Lie // Chapter 1: Setting the Record Straight // Chapter 2: From Balfour to Independence // Chapter 3: By Right, Not Permission // Chapter 4: Apartheid as Propaganda // Chapter 5: Colonialism and the Great Erasure
Chapter 6: The Genocide Libel
On October 7, Hamas gunmen crossed the border and carried out the deadliest single day of anti-Jewish violence since the Shoah. They murdered about 1,200 people. Babies in cribs. Parents in kitchens. Young people at a music festival. They raped. They burned. They kidnapped hundreds more. While the injured were still making their way to hospitals and families were still identifying bodies, crowds in Western capitals accused Israel of “genocide.” Some waved the flag of the group that had just staged a pogrom and chanted that the Jewish state was exterminating an innocent population.
A people still burying its dead was libeled as the world’s new Nazis. The indecency speaks for itself.
The word genocide has a precise meaning. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis, coined it in 1944. The United Nations then codified it in the 1948 Convention.
Genocide is not any mass killing. It is certain acts (including killing and causing serious harm) committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Intent to destroy is the hinge. History shows what that looks like.
The Nazis sought the eradication of the Jews of Europe. Hutu extremists in Rwanda hunted Tutsi civilians with the stated goal of eliminating them. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire drove Armenians to death in marches and massacres. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tried to wipe out entire social categories. In each case the aim was explicit: erase a people.
Accusing Israel of genocide empties the term of meaning. War is brutal. Civilians are tragically killed. That is not what makes genocide. Genocide is a program to eliminate a people as such. If a high death toll alone defined genocide, the Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II would qualify. No serious historian says that because the aim there was to win a war, not to destroy Germans or Japanese as a people.
Israel’s aim is not destruction of a people. It is defense of its citizens against a movement that says out loud that all Jews should die—and that’s not even getting into their stated intent to literally annihilate the rest of the West.
Hamas declares it in charters and broadcasts. Its fighters enact it in massacres. Israel fights to stop that menace and to free hostages. That matters. Intent matters. Law says so. History says so. So does simple moral sense.
The propaganda relies on blur. Turn any tragedy into “Auschwitz.” Treat any strike as “extermination.” Ignore the difference between a military target and a family deliberately shot in its beds. Ignore Hamas embedding launchers among homes and hospitals, then marketing the consequences for Western screens. Pretend that a state warning civilians to evacuate is the same as a regime herding civilians to pits. It is a lie dressed up as empathy.
Jews do not need lectures on genocide. The word came from our experience. The lesson we took from it was not license to kill. It was the duty to live and to protect life. That is why the accusation is not only false. It is perverse. It tries to turn the one Jewish state into the very thing it exists to prevent.
The “Genocide” Lie and the Numbers Game
Every propaganda campaign needs data—or something that looks like it. The genocide libel leans on body counts, chanted like scripture at rallies and printed uncritically in Western headlines. “Thousands dead.” “Mostly women and children.” “Proof of genocide.” The figures sound grim, and that is the point. But the numbers are not data. They are weapons.
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