Holocaust projection

Genocide is a messy business. Usually it involves a lot of killing. Also, as evidence that genocide occurred there will be an extreme drop in population. For example:

The Jewish communities of eastern Europe were devastated. In 1933, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, numbering over three million. By 1950, the Jewish population of Poland was reduced to about 45,000.

However an increase in population would be proof that no genocide was taking place. For example:

The population of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip has passed 1.4 million people, an increase of nearly 40 percent over the past 10 years, an official Palestinian census said.

While conditions for the Palestinians in Gaza may not be pleasant, there’s certainly no genocide going on there. Rather than a 90% drop in population, the Palestinian population has increased over the past decade.

However, math won’t stop some people from imputing the worst to the Jewish state. Helena Cobban, the new executive director of Council for the National Interest writes (CNI):

From the point of view of victims it may or may not matter too much. Being killed, or having the foundations of the life of the group you belong to quite systematically destroyed, is certainly bad enough, with or without the additional genocidal intention on the part of the perpetrator. (Ask the survivors of various horrendous massacres in the Democratic republic of Congo or elsewhere about that.)

But if what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza is judged to be genocide, then the nations of the world have not only a moral duty but also a legal duty to intervene to “suppress” those acts- that is, to do everything they can to end their being committed.

That is exactly what needs to happen. We need to stop Israel committing these very harmful acts. Our government here in the U.S. should be using all the levers of its national power to lift the siege of Gaza- and beyond that, to end the Israeli military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem that has given Israel wide powers over the lives and livelihoods of those territories’ residents and has therefore allowed these very harmful, quite possibly genocidal, acts to occur.

Following on the writing of a Palestinian commentator Cobban, then, judges it reasonable to conclude that Israel may be committing genocide against the Palestinians even though any middle school student with access to Google can show that this is clearly not the case.

Cobban is engaging in Holocaust projection. It’s the fiip side of Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the claim that no genocide committed against the Jews in spite of huge amount of evidence; Holocaust projection is the claim that Jews are committing genocide despite conclusive evidence to the contrary. Cobban and CNI, then, are no more respectable than David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review.

But there’s more to Helena Cobban, than her position with CNI. She is on Human Rights Watch’s board for the Middle East and Africa. She joins a rogue’s gallery at HRW, including Sarah Leah Whitson, who raised funds for the group in Saudi Arabia promoting HRW’s criticism of Israel; Marc Garlasco, whose hobby is collecting Nazi memorabilia; and Joe Stork, a Marxist with a long history of anti-Israel activism.

Last week the director of HRW, Kenneth Roth published an essay claiming Israel was one of the few countries operating in violation of the Geneva conventions. There are a number of substantive arguments against his essay.

Still there remains an underlying problem. HRW wants to claim that it is an objective organization dedicated to the truth, but it is populated with quite a few openly anti-Israel, if not antisemitic individuals. The people who are affiliated with HRW, such as Helena Cobban give fair minded people every reason to quesiton whether HRW is what it claims or whether it has a clear anti-Israel agenda behind its Middle East advocacy.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.