Don't Mention the 'G' Word
To condone genocide would be monstrous, so the monsters pretend it isn't happening.
In the recent US Presidential Election, the on-going genocide was barely on the ballot. The anti-war Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, garnered 18% of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, a city just outside Detroit with a large Arab American population. Its Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, is the only Palestinian-American woman in the US legislature. She denounced Netanyahu as "a war criminal committing genocide against the Palestinian people", declined to endorse the candidacy of her Democratic Party leader, and secured a fourth term in office.
The two main candidates competed to demonstrate their obeisance to Zionism, if not to Benjamin Netanyahu in person. Kamala Harris was absent when Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress at the US Capitol on July 24, 2024, where he was met with an eight minute standing ovation and his audience was moved to get to its feet, the better to applaud him, over fifty more times while he spoke. Rashida Tlaib was present, seated, holding up a sign that read, 'Guilty of Genocide'.
Kamala was not among the small band of Democrats who boycotted the Israeli Prime Minister's speech because they object to him on conscientious grounds, or agree with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, who called him a war criminal. Given that Joe Biden had just withdrawn from the Presidential race and endorsed her candidacy, VP Harris had a scheduling issue, but an aide stressed that "should not be interpreted as a change in her position with regard to Israel" and noted that Harris would hold a personal meeting with Netanyahu at the White House.
Donald Trump's friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu is no secret. On the contrary, Trump boasts that Israel and its current leader has no greater friend. When last in office, Trump relocated the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Apparently, as King of the World, it was within the gift of President Trump to re-allocate ownership of bits of other countries as he saw fit.
Trump talked about how his major sponsor, Miriam Adelson and Sheldon (her spouse, now deceased) "would come into the White House, probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there, and they were always after something and, as soon as I give them something - always for Israel - as soon as I'd give them something, they'd want something else...
"I gave them the Golan Heights and they never even asked for it. You know, for 72 years they'd been trying to do the Golan Heights, right, and even Sheldon didn't have the nerve, but I said, 'you know what', I said to David Friedman (US Ambassador to Israel), 'give me a quick lesson, like 5 minutes or less, on the Golan Heights' and he did and they said, 'let's do it'. We got it done in about 15 minutes."
On March 25, 2019, in the Oval Office, witnessed by Benjamin Netanyahu in person, Trump signed a U.S. declaration recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing with a stroke of his pen more than a half-century of U.S. policy. And that's diplomacy, folks, Looney Tunes style.
Trump's son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, grew up with Netanyahu as a family friend and once gave up his bed to Uncle Bibi when the Likud leader spent the night at the Kushner's residence in Livingston, New Jersey. In Trump's last administration, Kushner was the driving force behind The Abraham Accords, which aimed to bring Israel into closer alignment with its Arab neighbours and never mind the elephant in the room. Now, of course, the elephant has snapped its chains and rampaged.
The Al Aqsa Flood may have scuppered his Abraham Accords, but Jared Kushner is undeterred. He has a vision for a post-war settlement in Gaza, which is to dump as many Palestinians as survive the Israeli onslaught on other countries and exploit the development opportunities afforded by prime beach front real estate facing a largely untapped natural gas field. He is talking Miami on the Mediterranean!
"You cannot reward what the Democratic administration is doing", Jimmy Dore told Tucker Carlson when the two got together for a two hour long live-streamed conversation with one week to go before America decided. While no one, in good conscience, would want to reward the incumbent, Harris, for enabling a genocide in Gaza, surely a vote for her opponent, Trump, was to consent to more of the same?
"What is he gonna do?" asked Jimmy Dore rhetorically of Trump, "dig up the dead babies and kill them again?" Jimmy sees Trump as a Rodney Dangerfield character, prone to saying the quiet part out loud, like the time Trump openly admitted U.S. troops were in Syria solely to steal their oil. A one liner about dead babies may sound like something the lugubrious stand up comedian might say, but seeing as Rodney Dangerfield was born Jacob Cohen in 1921 and grew up poor, fatherless and Jewish in Queens, I don’t suppose he cracked too many Holocaust gags.
Jimmy Dore knows perfectly well what Trump is going to do about Israel while in office. He will endeavour to facilitate the Zionist agenda of his main sponsors, which is the expansion of Israeli territory, and will continue to deny the establishment of an independent State of Palestine, using the US veto at the UN. One of the first choices Trump made, upon election, was to select Elise Stefanik for his UN Ambassador, which Newsweek called, 'a Gift to Netanyahu'. And then he chose Mike Huckabee, a rabid Christian Zionist who denies Palestinians' right to exist, as Ambassador to Israel.
Unlike Joe Rogan, I'm not sure that Jimmy Dore ever came right out and said, "vote Trump", while chatting with Tucker Carlson on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, before it was acquired by Elon Musk. Given that Tucker and Elon are both prominently aboard the Trump train, however, his appearance might have been construed as an endorsement. Plus the YouTube version is labelled, 'Why Trump Winning Is Essential'.
Jimmy talked about those Democrats who were making such a big deal about abortion rights being "the same people who can turn their head at the genocide happening in Palestine", suggesting that Kamala Harris could have won his vote by condemning the slaughter of Palestinian children, but she wouldn't do it.
Genocide, said Jimmy Dore, was a "red line" he was not prepared to cross. A vote for Kamala was not "voting for a lesser evil, you're just voting for straight up evil and you're doing mental gymnastics to make yourself feel better about it", he said. It seems to me Jimmy had to do some pretty nimble acrobatics himself to overlook Donald Trump's record on Israel and his often-stated and implacable support for the Apartheid state.
Who could forget Trump, back in May, telling a roomful of donors - a group that he joked included "98 percent of my Jewish friends" - that he would expel from the United States those student demonstrators who were protesting the genocide on college campuses. Not the native Americans, whose freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment, but there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that Donald J. Trump is prepared to throw protesters out of the country, they’re going to behave. Or so he said in one of his sub-Dangerfield routines.
RFK Jr brought a fresh breeze to the Presidential campaign, at least initially. JFK's nephew & RFK’s son had risen to public attention, first as an environmental lawyer and then as a campaigner for vaccine safety or, in common parlance, an 'anti-vaxxer'. As such, Kennedy saw the COVID vaxx coming and, given his previous experience, he was in a prime position to publish a meticulously-researched exposé of the overseer of the COVID campaign, 'The Real Anthony Fauci', in 2021.
When he first appeared on the Jimmy Dore show to promote the book, Kennedy called Putin a "homicidal maniac" and spoke proudly of his oldest son who had quit law school to kill Russians, manning a machine gun in the Battle of Kharkiv. By the time he declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, however, RFK Jr's knowledge of the situation in Ukraine had expanded, so that he understood the Russians' military action to be neither unprovoked, nor ill-considered.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Legal Counsel (on leave as of 4/2/23) for Children’s Health Defense, whose vision is, 'a world free of childhood chronic health conditions caused by environmental exposures', but not necessarily by Israeli bombs and bullets. Indeed, RFK Jr spouted vitriolic anti-Palestinian rhetoric, saying that Palestinian children are taught by Hamas to kill Jews from the age of two and are paid by the Palestinian Authority to kill Jews, anywhere in the world.
Jimmy Dore and his posse, specifically in the person of Max Blumenthal, hoped that RFK Jr could be re-educated, re: Israel, as he had been re: Ukraine, but that is one conversation the Presidential candidate swerved. Now that he's joined Team Trump, RFK Jr is determined to Make America Healthy Again, but he doesn't care much for the health of Palestinians.
As George Galloway told Hassan Chami, "A lot of us, me included, would have loved to be able to support an independent presidential run by Robert Kennedy's son. I mean, it's the stuff that dreams are made of. But it became an absolute nightmare when the ugliness of his support for the worst Israelis in the world became more and more obvious, making it impossible."
Chami, a Lebanese entrepreneur and activist, had a confrontation with RFK Jr. that went viral on social media over the days before the election. Somehow, he managed to get close enough to shake Kennedy's hand and to pose the question he had prepared, "Do you consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide?" Instinctively, Hassan held on to the hand he was shaking, obliging RFK Jr. to linger longer than he might have liked, mechanically repeating, "it's not a genocide, it's a war".
That is a lawyer's answer: challenge the terms of the charge. Claim that Israel is conducting a legitimate war against an enemy which started it with an unprovoked terrorist attack on October 7th 2023 in which 1,269 innocent Israelis and visiting ravers at a music festival were senselessly murdered, babies were beheaded and woman were raped. It transpires that many of those that died were Arabs and many of the Israelis who died were killed by the IDF under its Hannibal Directive, to prevent hostage-taking; ten children under 12 died and no rapes were reported.
Still, if one searches using Yahoo! powered by Bing, the top page of results pertain to the first version of the story, the hasbara put out by Israel to manufacture consent for its military assault on Gaza. It has been comprehensively debunked and discredited by an Al Jazeera investigation, which goes to show that the events of 07/10/23 were exaggerated by the Israelis in order to provide a pretext for them to perpetrate an all-too-predictable campaign of annihilation.
On this side of the pond, David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, is also a lawyer. On Monday 28 October in the House of Commons, Lammy was invited by the Conservative MP for West Suffolk, Nick Timothy, to, "take this opportunity to say that there is not a genocide occurring in the Middle East". Lammy replied: "These are, quite properly, legal terms that must be determined by International Courts, but I do agree with the honourable gentleman. Those terms were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War and the Holocaust and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term."
Lammy, too, was keen to downplay the slaughter of ten of thousands of Palestinians, making what Peter Oborn characterised as 'a series of misleading statements to parliament about the gravest of all crimes: Genocide'. Writing in the Middle East Eye, Oborn pointed out that, on the same day that Lammy agreed with his honourable Tory chum that the term, 'genocide', "is completely inappropriate, not accurate, and is repeated by the protesters and the law breakers who are intimidating British Jews", South Africa submitted a massive document, known as a 'memorial', to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) setting out the evidence that Israel has 'violated the genocide convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza'.
37 UK-based Aid Agencies wrote an open letter to David Lammy, calling upon the Foreign Secretary, 'to make a statement clarifying the Government’s understanding of i) genocide in international law; ii) the scope of the UK’s international obligations pursuant to the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute; and iii) what steps must be taken to fulfill such obligations. So far as I am aware, the Rt.Hon. David Lammy MP has yet to respond, but he has been busy lately, grovelling to President Elect Trump.
Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, a staunch supporter of Israel, is a Human Rights lawyer and it was in that capacity he was asked by Carla Denyer, the Green MP from Bristol Central, at PMQs on Wednesday 30th October, "how much more evidence does he need before he calls out what is happening as genocide and acts in line with the UK’s responsibilities as a signatory to the genocide convention?" To which Starmer produced the consummate lawyer's riposte, prefacing it with some fine words about his worry and concern: "I have never described what is going on in Gaza as genocide, but I do agree that all sides should comply with international law".
A fortnight later, at PMQs on Wednesday 13th November, Ayoub Khan, the Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who overturned a Labour majority of 15,000 in the UK General Election, reminded the Prime Minister that “Article 2 of the United Nations genocide convention makes it explicit that genocide is not about numbers; it is about intent”, suggesting that the genocidal intent of the IDF has been explicit over the past 400 days. Mr Khan invited the Prime Minister to "share his definition of genocide with the House and state what further action he is prepared to take to save the lives of desperate and starving men, women and children, given that we now hold the presidency of the United Nations Security Council?"
Starmer’s response was curt. "It would be wise to start a question like that by a reference to what happened in October of last year", he said. "I am well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I have never described this or referred to it as genocide." Because if he doesn’t admit the crime is taking place, he cannot be complicit.
There is no moral ambiguity about genocide: it is a clearly-defined red line. Nobody, no lawyer and no politician, can possibly condone the most heinous crime against humanity and so they must insist that we deny the evidence of our own eyes as the wanton slaughter of people and destruction of property is paraded on social media for all who can stomach it to bear witness to what the Palestinian novelist, Susan Abulhawa, described as “the first livestreamed genocide in history".
It is not as if Israel's objective of ethnic cleansing is a secret. It is the policy that unites the fragile Zionist coalition keeping Netayahu in power. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territory, first called for an immediate ceasefire after only a week of the assault on Gaza, on 14 October 2023, and managed to do so without using the G word, warning 'that Palestinians are in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing'.
Another word for ethnic cleansing is genocide, a term which is clearly defined under Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by five criteria. I am not certain that Israel is guilty of 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group', preferring to exterminate Palestinian kids, but the IDF has certainly committed acts listed under the other four criteria and boasted about doing so on TikTok.
By mid November 2023, five weeks into the IDF's operation in Gaza, Ms Albanese was among those UN experts who called upon the International Community 'to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people'. As a Special Rapporteur, Albanese has issued two reports on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The first, in March, was titled, 'Anatomy of a Genocide'. The second report of the Special Rapporteur, published on October 1st, is, 'Genocide as colonial erasure', which 'examines the unfolding horrors in the occupied Palestinian territory'.
As the title of her interview with Samira Mohyeddin suggests, Francesca Albanese has become The Reluctant Chronicler of this most heinous crime against humanity. As such, she was prevented from holding a briefing at the US Congress, where she would have suggested that the UN should suspend Israel over its defiance of UN resolutions. In the UK, her objection to Israel's genocide has drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from people who believe Hebrew speakers to be the only Semites. Ms Albanese has called Mr Lammy a ‘genocide denier’.
The only people who still refuse to believe that Israel is committing genocide are ideological zealots and their fellow travelers in politics and the media who have somehow persuaded themselves that Zionism simply means a belief that Jews deserve a land they can call their own; that Israel is a democracy, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East; and that opposition to Israeli colonialism is rooted in racism, which they call, 'anti-Semitism'.
There are those that condemn the thousands of peace protesters that march every weekend in London, including a large and growing Jewish Bloc, as 'terrorist sympathisers'. But even they cannot condone genocide because to do so would make them monsters. So they pretend it isn't happening.