By Lilah Hosni —
To accuse Israel of genocide (as the U.N. human rights commission did last year) is “laughable, libelous and an assault on critical thinking,” says military analyst John Spencer.
“Even my seventh grader child would say, ‘What about this? What about that?” says Spencer, executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute based in Colorado Springs.
Now, renowned atheist Sam Harris has weighed in on why he supports Israel on his substack. Critics of Israel, he says, comprise a “growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country (Israel) their professional or psychiatric obsession.”
The problem, he says, is not whatever errors the Israelis commit. It is the extremist Muslims who would wipe out all Israelis and all Jews from the face of the earth.
“The jihadists — Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, etc.—are people worse than Nazis,” Harris says. “I think militant Islam is 10 times worse than you think it is.”
The genocide label doesn’t fit Israel because, by definition, it means the intentional and indiscriminate elimination of all people of an ethnicity and Israel:
- goes out of its way to warn civilians to evacuate conflict zones and established humanitarian corridors and safety zones.
- pursues military objectives of freeing hostages, dismantling Hamas and ensuring its own safety.
- has not exercised its ability for decades to wipe out Gaza’s population, which grew from 400K to 2.2M since 1967.
- Hamas has put civilians deliberately in harms way — from stationing ammo depots in hospitals to launching rockets out of schools. When Hamas uses “human shields,” natually the collateral death toll rises.
“The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the State of Israel,” Harris says. “The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamo-fascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.”
The danger of misapplying the word “genocide” to Israel is that it becomes an easy way to justify antisemitism.
“Accusing of Jews of atrocities is a very convenient way of engaging in antisemitism,” says Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust historian at Emory University. “It becomes a vehicle for anti-Semitism.”
Despite facts, the U.N.’s report alleged the worst against Israel while turning a blind eye on Hamas’ crimes:
- The war began with a Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, but the U.N. report almost doesn’t mention it.
- The war continued for two years as Israeli repeatedly demanded the hostages held by Hamas be returned, but the U.N. didn’t even acknowledge Hamas’ hostage-taking
- Hamas spent $1B during 12 years building 600+ miles of tunnels just to fight Israel, but the U.N. report mentions “tunnel” only once, referring to it as an Israeli claim.
- Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel, but in the U.N. report the word “rocket” never appears.
- Hamas’ use of human shields is not substantively examined
But TikTok spreads the libel via the Internet.
“It’s a dangerous world when the opposite of the truth becomes reality just because it goes viral,” Spencer says.
