The Register-Guard · Eugene, Oregon · 17 July 2014

CP-2014-002

Genocide in Gaza is a lie worthy of Goebbels

Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Content Agency

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Transcribed from the clipping

“Genocide in Gaza is a lie worthy of Goebbels. ‘Here’s the difference between us,’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained on ‘Fox News Sunday.’ ‘We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.’ It’s a classic talking point.

It’s also objectively true, and that truth is very frustrating for Israel’s critics. All one needs to do is delve into the muck of Twitter and read the timelines for such hashtags as #GazaUnderAttack and #GenocideInGaza: ‘They’re killing the women and children to ensure there won’t be a new generation of Palestine.’

‘One Holocaust can never justify another.’ And let’s not even talk about the globally trending hashtag #HitlerWasRight. Of course it’s not just on Twitter.

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the feckless Palestinian Authority, recently condemned Israel for committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza… On the one hand, the Israeli military is supposed to be ruthlessly competent and determined to wipe out the Palestinians. On the other, the Palestinian population has grown more than 100 percent since 1970.

The population in the Gaza Strip has grown nearly threefold since 1990. The Palestinians themselves expect the population to double over the next two decades. ‘Genocide’ is a loaded political term, but under any remotely reasonable definition, shouldn’t those numbers be going the other way?

It’s just a hunch, but if the Israelis wanted to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible, never mind commit genocide, they probably wouldn’t issue warnings to Gazans (by phone and leaflet) to get out of harm’s way… And if Hamas were chiefly concerned with protecting Palestinian lives, it would not implore Gazans to stay in their homes — serving as human shields and inflating the body count as a propaganda prop to increase international pressure on Israel… It was Joseph Goebbels who said, ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’”

Context added by this archive

The argument against the word, made at length in an American syndicated column in the same summer the archive holds the placards using it.

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