Even Israeli experts call it “a textbook case of genocide.” Those are the exact words of Raz Siegal, an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University. On October 16, Siegal told Democracy Now:
We have to understand that the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 requires that we see special intent for genocide to happen. And to quote the convention, intent to destroy a group is defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national as such that is collectively, not just individuals. And this intent, as we just heard, is on full display by Israeli politicians and army officers since October 7th. We heard Israel’s president. It’s well-known what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9th declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” We know that Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” So we’re seeing the special intent on full display.
And it isn’t just Israelis who are guilty. Leaders of Western countries have given the Gaza Holocaust their full backing. On Saturday, October 7, even as Israeli tanks, rockets, and helicopter gunships were mass-murdering hundreds of Israeli civilian prisoners alongside dozens of their Hamas captors, US President Joe Biden condemned as “unconscionable” the “appalling terrorist attacks” and encouraged what would become genocidal Israeli “retaliation.”
In reality, the Israelis, not Hamas, were the terrorists of October 7. The only mass slaughters of civilians that day were carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces. Hamas’s brave soldiers were under strict orders to attack Israeli military targets and try to capture military hostages, with the taking of civilian hostages being a secondary option or last resort. There were no Hamas orders to kill unarmed civilians, and surviving Israeli hostages speak of the kindness and generosity of their Hamas captors.
Zionist-owned Western media immediately began broadcasting outrageous lies deliberately designed to incite genocide. (Every media person responsible for those lies must some day be tried, convicted and executed.)
Zionist genocide propagandists raved deliriously about Hamas supposedly beheading 40 babies, baking babies in ovens, gouging eyes, mutilating breasts, cutting open naked women, raping women, mutilating dead bodies, spreading cyanide, and on and on. All lies. When Joe Biden endorsed the beheaded babies canard, claiming that he had seen the bodies, he sealed his fate as a self-incriminated genocide inciter who will be executed in the unlikely event that he lives long enough to face trial.
What really happened on October 7 was reasonably clear even then, and has since become undeniable. Hamas scored what Scott Ritter has called “the most successful military raid of this century:”
Hamas effectively neutralized Israel’s vaunted intelligence services, blinding them to the possibility of an attack of this scope and scale…(then) Hamas defeated those Israeli soldiers stationed along the barrier wall in a stand-up fight. Two battalions of the Golani Brigade were routed, as were elements of other vaunted IDF units.
Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Hamas fighters killed about 600 Israeli soldiers during the first 24 hours, a total that “included many of Israel’s most elite officers, including dozens of colonels and majors.” After Hamas repeatedly defeated the Israeli military in stand-up fights, and captured hundreds of Israeli prisoners, the Zionists panicked and invoked the Hannibal Directive, according to which heavy weaponry is used to eliminate both hostage takers and hostages. According to an Israeli Air Force officer who participated in the mass murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians along with their Hamas captors, top-level Zionist commanders ordered “mass Hannibal.” In other words, they deliberately ordered the mass slaughter of their own civilians by the hundreds in order to prevent them from becoming hostages and adding to Israel’s political problems. Had they not done so, Hamas would have returned to Gaza with as many as 700 prisoners, rather than the 250 that they actually got.
Israel then used photos of the carnage that they themselves had inflicted—using helicopter gunships, tanks, and rockets—and blamed it on Hamas. Even a cursory look at the photos of the devastated kibbutz buildings, the blown-up buildings at the music festival, and the vast array of shredded automobiles makes it clear that most of the damage was done not by Hamas’s small arms fire, but by Israel’s heavy weaponry. Yet the shameless Zionists, mass-murderers of their own people, had the chutzpah to blame the courageous and ethical soldiers of Hamas for their own crimes!
The West Sparks the Genocide
By October 8 I could see, as could anyone else with eyes, that the images out of Israel showed that the Israelis, not Hamas, were responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. The Biden Administration, and its CIA daily briefer, must have known the same thing, with even greater certainty and in greater detail. Yet instead of using its knowledge of the truth to restrain Israel’s murderous impulse towards Biblical-scale vengeance, Joe Biden went on television and bloviated about supposedly seeing 40 Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas.
Everything the almost-entirely-Jewish Biden Administration did was calculated to encourage Israel to launch a genocide. And every other Western leader went along, actively or passively, with the genocide plan.
Once the exterminationist carpet-bombing of Gaza was underway, and thousands of women and children murdered, did those Western leaders reverse course and demand that Israel stop? Of course not.
Anthony Blinken, who flew to Tel Aviv first, in the midst of the carpet-bombing, let slip that his pre-eminent loyalty was to the genocidal entity, announcing that he flew to Tel Aviv “not only as the United States Secretary of State but also as a Jew.” (Remove the words only and also from that sentence to understand its real meaning.)
Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv to put his stamp of approval on the genocide. So did UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who described Hamas as “the new Nazis” according to Netanyahu. Second-tier Western powers like Austria and Czechoslovakia also sent their leaders to kiss Netanyahu’s reeking rump and endorse the Gaza Holocaust.
Why has the West’s entire leadership class been falling all over itself competing to see who can move to the head of the line of genocidal war criminals? Can’t they see that the global majority is appalled by the wholesale Zionist atrocities and sides with Palestine? Don’t they realize that the West is hastening its own demise, and ensuring the rise of a non-Western-led world order, by undermining its pretense of concern for international law and human rights?
Several possible reasons for the West’s unanimously-pro-genocide position have been proposed. Some say the West is incorrigibly racist and just doesn’t care about the deaths of brown people, especially Muslims. They add that the West’s undisputed hegemon, the USA, was founded on Old Testament style genocide, and that the formerly Protestant and now Jewish Bible-thumpers of Washington DC share Netanyahu’s vengeful lust for Biblical extermination of “Amalek” (meaning the designated racial enemies of the Jews and/or Americans).
Another potential explanation invokes realpolitik. The US imperial center increasingly dominates the West (the Ukraine war destruction of Nordstream emasculated Europe) but is losing ground elsewhere. Hamas’s crushing defeat of Israel on October 7 struck a powerful blow not only against Zionism, but against the whole Anglo-Zionist Empire. The Biden “minyan” (Jewish-Zionist cabinet) panicked and scrambled to endorse Israeli genocide, not out of sober calculation, but for the same reason that a rabid rat, when cornered, mindlessly lashes out. These people know that the days of the US empire, and the Zionist entity, are numbered, and it drives them crazy. They see that every day the rising countries, led by China, Russia, and Iran, become stronger, and the US and its European vassals grow weaker. Terrified, they realize that if war is to come, the sooner the better, because every day the West’s chances of winning recede. And then, even more terrified, they grasp that it is already too late. So they take out their frustration on the women and children of Gaza.
Another realpolitik-based explanation involves the possibility that US leaders, or at least the most extreme neocon faction, would welcome an all-out war with Iran and the Axis of Resistance—a war which every additional day of genocide brings closer. Even though such a war risks a civilization-imploding World War III, and would at minimum result in tens or hundreds of thousands of Israeli and American casualties, it might at least offer a distraction from looming US defeat in Ukraine. Additionally, a massive war in West Asia would reduce the region to chaos and set back China’s Belt-and-Road plan by a decade or two, thereby prolonging the US imperial illusion by maintaining it on life support for another few years. (China builds, the US destroys, so maximizing destruction prolongs the US imperial agony.)
But in the end, the best explanation for Western leaders’ pro-genocide position involves the role of the media. Allan Thompson’s (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide shows that more than half a million Rwandans were butchered in 1994, most hacked to death with machetes, primarily due to media incitement. By dominating the formation of public opinion, the Rwandan media, especially radio, created a pro-genocide bubble that took on a life of its own. Specifically, by spreading outrageous lies that dehumanized the target group, both broadcast and print media deliberately orchestrated the mass murder of as many as 700,000 people.
This is exactly what mainstream Western media have done in their incitement of the Gaza genocide. The aforementioned lies about beheaded and roasted babies, gouged eyeballs and broken pelvises, and other gory inventions from the fecund sado-masochistic Zionist imagination were deliberately deployed to provoke real mass murders and maimings of Palestinians.
By enthusiastically participating in the Gaza genocide, the West, starting with its media and political elites, has completely discredited itself in the eyes of the world. The era of Western hegemony is coming to an end. The majority of the Earth’s population can now see that anything, absolutely anything, would be better than allowing these genocidal monsters to continue to dominate this planet.
The war criminals have sealed their own so-called civilization’s fate, and condemned their own souls to eternal hellfire. I hope to live long enough, insha’allah, to see them all, every last one of them, dragged to Beijing or Moscow or Tehran and tried for their crimes against humanity and led to the gallows.
By Kevin Barrett