By Dr. Kevin Barrett
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been leading an effort to convince at least one nation to invoke the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
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Murray notes that Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and the openly genocidal language of its leaders, makes this a clear-cut case: “Suddenly, not only is genocide occurring with a scale and rapidity that is simply stunning—in six weeks in Gaza 10 times the number of children have been killed as in two years of war in Ukraine—but the Western nations are roaring on a racial extermination that dehumanizes its victims.”
International law offers a clearcut definition of genocide:
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Israel is obviously guilty of genocide. For more than a century, Zionist leaders have known, and occasionally stated, that the only way to implant a “Jewish state” in Palestine is to destroy the Palestinian people. During the past century Zionist terrorists have continued to kill Palestinians, cause them gross bodily and mental harm, and impose living conditions on them intended to annihilate them as a people. During the past several weeks that genocide campaign has shifted into high gear.
It isn’t surprising that Israel, an inherently genocidal entity, would accelerate its genocide of Palestine. There is widespread agreement among Israeli leaders across the political spectrum that Israel needs to “finish the job“ that it started with the “Great Suffering” of the Nakba (the Palestinian Holocaust) of 1948.
What is shocking is the degree of Western and especially American support for Israel’s deliberate murder of 10,000 Gazan children in 10 weeks.
“Genocide Joe” Biden incited that massacre by trumpeting ridiculous lies about Hamas’s supposed beheading of 40 Israeli babies. He has continued to push equally preposterous atrocity myths—including the sudden appearance, more than two months after the fact, of evidence-free slanders about Hamas, a scrupulously religious army, supposedly raping Israeli women en masse.
Biden’s outrageous lies about Hamas were clearly designed to legitimize the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children. Worse, Biden backed his words with weapons. “Genocide Joe” and his kibbutznik cabinet have been lavishing ever-greater supplies of killing equipment, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, on the Zionist genocide perps.
A leaked document shows that as of mid-November, the U.S. had already “delivered 2,000 Hellfire missiles that can be launched from Apache helicopters, as well as an array of other mortars and ammo, including ‘36,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammunition, 1,800 of the requested M141 bunker-buster munitions and at least 3,500 night-vision devices’.”
Biden and his minyan aren’t just inciting the genocide and arming the killers. They’re also running diplomatic cover. Since the accelerated genocide began in October, the U.S. has blocked numerous UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire—most recently on Dec. 8, when Biden defied European allies by ordering a U.S. veto of an emergency Article 99 ceasefire resolution supported by 13 of the 15 members of the Security Council (the UK abstained).
Israel is using the weapons and impunity handed to it by the U.S. to commit ever-greater massacres that obviously serve no military purpose. Virtually all of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed, most by bombs, while in some cases doctors, nurses, and patients have been shot as Israel’s troops storm the completely undefended medical facilities. Women and children huddling in churches and mosques have been “shot in cold blood.” Most of Gaza’s remaining 2.2 million people have been rendered homeless. Huge swathes of Gaza’s densely populated urban landscape have been reduced to bloody rubble with dead and dying bodies lying crushed beneath it. At least 66 journalists have already been murdered, while surviving journalists have had their families massacred in retaliation for their reporting. Palestine’s intellectual leaders, like professor Rafat al-Ar’eer, are being assassinated.
While it slaughters them with bombs and bullets, Israel is starving the Palestinians, depriving them of water to make them die of thirst, and deliberately destroying sewage systems to spread epidemics. 90% of Gaza’s population is hungry, and 60% haven’t eaten for days, while most subsist on impure water.
Biden’s support for genocide is turning the world against America. Billions of people are enraged, and among them are a few with the skills to send WMD without a return address. Unless the likes of Biden and Netanyahu are brought to justice, their crimes may come back to blow back on us all.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.
