Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill – These accusations of ‘genocide’ bring shame on humanity:

The more you think about the genocide case against Israel, the more horrendous it becomes. First there’s the hypocrisy. It is an orgy of cant. Turkey has noisily joined the ranks of shameless governments pointing a collective finger at Israel. This is the same Turkish government that denies that its nation carried out the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when a million people were wiped from the face of the Earth. As part of a programme of tyrannical Islamisation, Armenian Christians were forced on to death marches in the desert during which unimaginable numbers perished. Now the genocide deniers are genocide judges. It would be funny if it were not so repulsive.

Turkey is providing ‘documents’ for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice this week. ‘I believe that Israel will be convicted’, says Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This is the same Erdoğan who locks people up for speaking of the Armenian Genocide. Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which forbids ‘insulting Turkishness’, has been used to prosecute people who mention 1915. Writers and publishers have been banged up for the sin of saying ‘Armenia’ and ‘genocide’ in the same breath. Now this tyrant who ruthlessly punishes discussion of his own nation’s genocide loudly accuses Israel of genocide. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral fraud….

Iran has lined up with South Africa, too. It’s getting ridiculous now. Vastly more people have perished in Iran’s wars of the past 40 years than in the wars Israel has been involved in since 1948. Just last year Iran slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens for the crime of believing women are human beings. Kurds in particular got it in the neck. Masses were murdered. ‘They tried to wipe us out’, said one Kurd. For Iran to sit in judgment on any nation is a nauseating spectacle, an inversion of morality of Orwellian proportions.

Then there’s South Africa, the nation that brought the case against Israel. Its imperious judges reeled off charge after charge against the Jewish State at the ICJ this week. You’ll forgive my gagging. ANC-run South Africa is one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. The heirs to Mandela have catastrophically failed to make good his promise of a new, fair nation. South Africa under their rule has some of the highest rates of murder and rape in the world. Poverty is rampant. The ANC has massacred black workers who were merely campaigning for better pay. It failed to counter murderous pogroms against Zimbabwean immigrants. It presides over a country where, for millions, life is brutish and short. Perhaps it should save some of the fashionable sympathy it feels for the people of Gaza for its own long-suffering citizens.

Who will be called up next to give evidence? An old Hutu commander, perhaps? Maybe they’ll dig up Pol Pot and let him rage against the Jews. The ICJ trial of Israel is one of the most absurd and sinister events of the 21st century so far. Israel is being accused of unconscionable violence by the practitioners of unconscionable violence. It is being charged with reckless disregard for civilian life by the self-enriched rulers of nations in which thousands of civilians die every year from preventable disease, political violence and execution. It is being charged with war crimes by nations that beat to death young women who want to show their hair. It is being called criminal by criminals….

Let’s be clear: to accuse the Jews of genocide is the gravest calumny. To drag the historical victims of genocidal mania to court in order to bark the accusation of genocide in their faces is, to me, unconscionable. To liken these survivors of the Nazi derangement to the Nazis – as so many leftists and Islamists are doing – is an unforgivable inversion of morality, history and truth. To use the Genocide Convention that was brought in following the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews against the nation in which many of the descendants of those Jews now reside is nothing more than act of cruelty. It reorders history itself. It whitewashes the sins of the Western world by putting those sins on to their historic targets. It is self-serving absolution dressed up as radical critique. The Final Absolution, we might say.