Thursday, March 31, 2011

Hijacking of Language: "Genocide"

Zach and I have talked at length about how anti-Zionists will twist and change the meaning of words to better attack Israel. You can take a look at the Anti-Zionist Dictionary, and two other hijacking of languages articles here and here. Here's one more. I encountered a new language hijack two days ago and I wanted to share it all with you. Here is my conversation:



So I addressed the inherent contradiction at the heart of the two anti-Zionist arguments of "The Palestinians are being exterminated (so slowly it's impossible to prove)" and "The Palestinian population is about to swallow Israel whole, ha ha!". How did the anti-Zionists respond? By changing the definition of genocide.

Genocide according to Wikipedia is, "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group". According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide: "Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

There is a notion of "cultural genocide"  but not only does its definition remain intentionally unclear, but it is a separate term from "normal" genocide. 

Once again, when reality doesn't line up with the talking points used to attack Israel, the HPers prefer to try to change reality rather than their minds.

3 comments:

  1. surprised no one chimed in to the second comment by pointing out that 'erasing' a culture with a 'history' that was only recently created wasn't a particularly significant set of events, any more than, say, canceling a TV show after a few seasons.

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  2. No one points out that the Arab population under Israeli rule has grown exponentially since 1967.

    That would be inconvenient to the anti-Zio claim Israel is committing genocide. If the Jews have really done that, they've done a poor job of it.

    Plus if that was true, wouldn't the Israeli and foreign press be reporting it? After all Israel is a small country and no crime of that scale could ever be concealed for long.

    I bring this all up to show its not the truth the anti-Zios are after.

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  3. It Sounds like they’re extrapolating from internally displaced = nakba = Holocaust, (despite there being about 70,000 casualties from the conflict since 1948).

    Now they're making a mockery of real genocides.

    Not much of a culture to lose:
    In 1937, the Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul Hadi told the Peel Commission: "There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented. Palestine is alien to us."

    Ian

    ReplyDelete

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