Hijacking of Language: Massacre

It's time for another installment of the hijacking of language. In this case the word is massacre. An emotionally loaded buzzword, it is defined thusly:

• kill a large number of people indiscriminately; "The Hutus massacred the Tutsis in Rwanda"
• slaughter: the savage and excessive killing of many people 

Even leaving aside the dictionary definition, when people think of a massacre they think of a lot of defenseless people being killed for no reason at all. For example:



We see Huffington Posters as well as other anti-Israel commentators reference the "Deir Yassin massacre" and the "Gaza massacre" and many other undefined "massacres" quite often. You probably don't need me to find an example. What is interesting is that when you look at the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, you will see that quite a whole lot of incidents are labeled as massacres when in another situation they probably wouldn't be. For example:

During the 1948 war, examples where 60-70 people were killed after surrendering such as in Saliha and the Cairo-Haifa truck bombing were labeled as massacres. In my opinion this is quite correct, as both sides suffered these manner of incidents and labeled them accordingly. After the 1948 war and pre-occupation, however, Arab civilian casualties drop and it becomes much harder for them to find enough "massacres" worthy of the label.

For example, in 1996 a house from which rockets were fired was attacked and eleven people were killed, including part of a family. It certainly was a terrible tragedy, but there is no evidence that Israel did so on purpose for the intention of killing civilians. And it certainly doesn't fit the lining up of prisoners and shooting them that the word 'massacre' implies. Yet Arab supporters labeled it a "massacre" anyway. The same source claims that a battle in the '85 Lebanon war in which five people were killed is also a massacre. Assuming that the story told on the website is true, of course.

Many accusations of massacre, though not exactly fitting the above definition, do make sense and I would not blame those who want to use the term. The worst, however, is when we come to the modern era, and Israeli self-defense actions against Gaza are labeled as a "massacre." It is clear why Israel carried out Cast Lead. If the Palestinian supporters want their use of the term "massacre" to carry any weight at all, it would behoove them to stop cheapening it.