the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I’m big enough to admit when I’m wrong. Calling Greta Thunberg ‘Tom Thumberg’ in a recent post was, on reflection, both ill-advised and inaccurate.

In that same post I noted how the names given to the same phenomena – human actions causing irreversible negative impacts on the environment – had undergone a makeover. How global warming, as it was known, had an immediacy about it. Things were getting warmer and the whole world was affected. Simple, easily graspable and neat. Climate change, by contrast makes me think of a wealthy Victorian consumptive who retreats to the Swiss Alps for a year on the orders of her doctor. It isn’t frightening.  

So in n that same spirit, henceforth I’ll call her the Poison Dwarf. This has nothing to do with her height. It’s to do with the poison that comes out of her mouth and that way that it reduces the worst crime ever to little more than a platform for her to promote her ‘virtue’. She is far from alone in this. People march, politicians bluster and the media fails, but all are united by one simple thing. They are either all stupid or else they have all chosen to deliberately misinterpret what the word genocide actually means. But not only that, but to also pervert the meaning of genocide to suit their own ends so that it no longer has a functionally specific one. 

By that I mean that the word genocide has suddenly become a word whose meaning is contested and not just by placard waving simpletons either. But also by news outlets, academics, politicians and others who one would hope would roundly denounce such sophistry for the obscenity it was, have done the very opposite. 

Previously, I’d always imagined the word to mean the specific killing of people based on their identity. Turns out I wasn’t too far wrong. According to the UN, it means “ acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Crucially, it also adds “the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected. This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals.”

To me, that’s pretty clear. Targeted killing because of being part of a group and nothing else. Which is exactly what happened on 7th October, when Israeli’s were massacred for simply being Jews. That’s what prompted Hamas to do it. Killing Jews, for no other reason beyond the fact that were Jews. Quite how this basic understanding has not seemed relevant as being the cause of the war that what followed is as incomprehensible as it is offensive. 

So to is the fact that in the waging of any war, there will always been civilian deaths, especially when one side deliberately embeds itself within civilian infrastructure. The people in Gaza aren’t being killed because they’re Palestinian, their being killed because they live in a war zone. Again, how this basic understanding is absent is baffling. As to is how the one that is undeniably a genocide has been conveniently ignored been by those who wish to portray the one that isn’t as being inarguably one.

One has to observe that if Israel was indeed carrying out a genocide on Palestinian people, they’re being incredibly inept given as how Palestinians make up around 21% of Israels population. Perhaps that explains why the International Court of Justice has been repeatedly asked to broaden its definition of genocide so as to cover anything Israel does in its war with Hamas.

The Poison Dwarf is by no means the only person guilty of this reductive reasoning, ignoring the actual whilst amplifying the farcical. Many people may have their own reasons for doing so. For some, group acceptance, for others, career enhancement. For charities, aid organisations and other NGO’s, increased visibility on the world stage, a greater moral purpose and more funding and for politicians, something more international to focus on than the mundane and domestic

But it all boils down to the same thing. Egotism.