Tag Archives: genocide

Oscar Nominations for Hamas & ICJ Short Films

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I know it’s early to talk about the 2025 Oscars, but two new films deserve to start the ball rolling, for the category of Best Live Action Short Film—not documentary of course, which is separate. Best Live Action Short Film rewards fictional films, although docudrama-like simulations are eligible.

Both films appeared this past week, but I’ll start with the simpler and more dramatic one, aired today. Hamas, in it’s time-honored style, effectively used a static shot of a masked, uniformed fighter talking directly to the camera in his inimitable stern, you-can-trust-me fashion. Timed perfectly with its midnight release, it gives us a static photo of a man in camo with a keffiyeh-wrapped face holding up a stiff instructional finger that takes us right back to first grade, and is all the more compelling for that scary memory. Also, the only moving part of the picture at first—a rippling light-green audio wave sound tracing against a dark-green background—draws our eyes like a line of dancers.

The captioned translation says, “Our fighters carried out a complex operation on Saturday afternoon in the northern Gaza Strip.” Soon we see a video of a bloody person in military clothing being dragged limp up across a tunnel floor; next, three photos of weapons “seized” in this “complex operation.” Since the weapons shown are not Israeli, the filmmakers can be faulted for not getting better advice on how to achieve verisimilitude with their props. But film fans around the world want entertainment, not petty accuracy.

Our teacherly instructor goes on, “Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside one of the tunnels…and clashed with them from close range. Our fighters withdrew after blowing up the tunnel and leaving all members of the force dead, wounded, or captured…”

Now, Israel claims no such event occurred, and it is almost never possible to conceal the death of a single soldier for more than a few hours while the family is notified. Killing “all members of” a “Zionist force” without Israeli news media finding out would take some added ingenuity on the part of Hamas, but they can do a lot now with fictional film. Adding an ad campaign with an Israeli soldier-doll in a Hamas fist and a bare arm stuck out of a tunnel grasping at a Hamas boot gives the film true artistic flavor.

Nevertheless, and I am sure this will be controversial, I think the best short-film fiction of the year so far comes from the International Court of Justice, in its filmed reading of it’s latest judgment against Israel in yet another case brought by South Africa. The Court’s cinematic achievement extends also to shielding South Africa from allegations that it is both authoritarian and corrupt, but that is not its main Oscar-worthy accomplishment here.

That is of course its magnificently devious account of its own conclusions. It didn’t really misstate them, it just put them in such a way that gullible news outlets like the New York Times could publish completely misleading headlines. Brilliant work on the part of the screenwriters here! And the head of the ICJ read his lines with such seriousness!

Here is the New York Times headline: “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive.” Perhaps they thought their subtitle would be a helpful clarification: “The International Court of Justice ruling deepens Israel’s international isolation, but the court has no enforcement powers.” Ah, pity. The court can’t enforce what the Times falsely claims it ruled.

To find out what it did rule, we have to actually read the script of the film as performed by the Chief Judge of the ICJ. The operative passage is #57 in the 18-page ruling:

“THE COURT… Indicates the following provisional measures: The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate: (a) By thirteen votes to two, Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” (italics mine)

Now let’s see… does the New York Times reporting capture the meaning of this ruling, including the words I italicized? Hmm. Now, what about the Wall Street Journal headline? “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah.” Okay… Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive… or Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah…

I’m thinking about my first-grade teacher again, the one who taught me how to read. I don’t think she would be proud of me if I chose the Times headline as the better description of what the ICJ ordered. I’ve written many articles for both the Times and the Journal, and I promise you I know the limitations of both, but in this case only the Journal’s headline writer clearly knew how to read.

The court’s conclusions do mandate two and only two actions: That Israel re-open the Rafah Crossing for humanitarian aid, and that Israel give access to a fact-finding committee to inspect conditions throughout Gaza.

The first is based on a misconception; the Rafah Crossing was closed from the Egyptian side, not the Israeli side. This is proven by a phone call from President Biden to President el-Sisi this weekend resulting in Egypt’s agreeing to send aid through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing at the junction of the Egypt-Israel-Gaza borders. This crossing was closed on May 5 after Hamas bombed it to stop the aid flow. Anyway, aid is flowing, never enough to overcome what Hamas steals after entry, but flowing nevertheless.

As for the second mandate, if the committee expects to be protected by the IDF, it had better follow their advice about where and when.

Meanwhile, as to the ICJ’s main “provisional measure,” Israel continues to refrain from any action in Rafah “which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Still, the court’s ability to trick the New York Times and some other news outlets into misreading its conclusions—or allow them deliberately to spin them against Israel with all their power—is Oscar-worthy. Unfortunately it seems a bit of a stretch to give the Wall Street Journal headline writers a Pulitzer for knowing how to read.

War Crimes? Really?

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This has been an intriguing week. President Biden announced that he was putting a hold on shipments of certain American arms, notably hundreds of 2,000 pound and 500 pound bombs, because Israel had begun limited operations in Rafah without waiting for a hostage deal. A week or so earlier, Antony Blinken said that Israel had made an extremely generous offer and “the ball” was in Hamas’s court. Hamas eventually came back with a “counter-offer” of many detailed pages that amounted to, You stop the war, we win, you lose, you release thousands of terrorists, we give you back some hostages, dead and alive, and we once again rule Gaza as we did on October 6.

All concerned knew that this was not something Israel could have taken remotely seriously, and it amounted to no change in Hamas’s months of stonewalling. Yet most Western media, before they had time to read the document, took Hamas’s word that it was a real counter-offer, and proceeded to castigate Israel for going in a limited way into Rafah—beginning, of course, with the orderly evacuation of 100,000 civilians.

This arms shipment holdup was largely political posturing. There is little likelihood that Israel would use those kinds of bombs again (although it did early in the war), and all indications are that Israel’s plan for its Rafah operation, preceded by systematic civilian evacuations, was approved behind the scenes by the Americans. Netanyahu has treated Biden shabbily, and he finally got his wrist slapped, along with a clear warning that Biden could hit him harder in the future.

Biden is not betraying Israel nor is he flip-flopping, he is threading a very narrow needle. Neither he nor we nor the world can afford to have him lose the coming election, and so he tried to show that he would make it impossible for Israel to use those big bombs in crowded Rafah. This point is moot, because Israel was not planning to use them, and even if it was, it has enough of a stockpile to do it anyway.

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Gaza: The Goebsie Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards

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Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).

Timeline of deaths with blood libelers

But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.

But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.

The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining. Continue reading →

Gaza War: A Visual Aid

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(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.

The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →

Gaza War: Hamas is Haman

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

We have passed not just the start of Ramadan, but the first and second Fridays, with today’s noon service considered particularly sacred. Forty thousand Israeli Muslim citizens and East Jerusalem Residents have come to the Noble Sanctuary—for Jews, The Temple Mount—each Friday to pray in one of its two great mosques, without a single untoward incident. Aside from a lone gunman in the West Bank, these Ramadan Fridays have been peaceful in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of Muslims visiting the Old City of Jerusalem today are up to 120,000. An Israeli journalist reporting from the crowded Noble Sanctuary as services let out described the atmosphere as reverent and celebratory.

Meanwhile, the tiny Jewish world—there are 100 Muslims for every Jew—is preparing for Purim, an irreverent, raucous, often drunken celebration of the survival of the Persian Jews, who came under deadly threat some 2,600 years ago. The Book of Esther,  chanted aloud in the evening and following morning in synagogues circling the globe, tells the story.

This year Purim begins tomorrow, Saturday, exactly 24 weeks after the Saturday (both the Sabbath and another Jewish holy day), on which Hamas terrorists committed grotesque mass atrocities against 1200 Jews and others in Israel, deliberately inviting destruction on themselves and the women and children they hide behind. Many say that this was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That it was, but actually the Nazis rarely took the time to rape women with knives or cut off the limbs of children before killing them. The Nazis did torture Jews at times, but mainly aimed at efficient mass murder.

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Gaza, Israel, and the United Notions

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I was born in August 1946; the first UN meetings were held in London in January that year. So the UN and I are the same age—you might say, nonidentical twins. I have followed it from an early age, and I am glad to report that—despite the small scale and limitations of my lifetime efforts—I have done better with my challenges than my twin has in its equal lifetime.

Per the UN itself, the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s proved “in the worst possible way” that the UN repeatedly failed to prevent this horror, despite being able to do so. It failed to stop and even to recognize earlier genocides in Indonesia (1960s) and Cambodia (1970s) and much more recent ones in Darfur, Iraq and Syria (against the Yazidis), and Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN rights council refused to discuss China’s ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims.

The UN’s failure to prevent small wars—more than 200 in its lifetime and mine—speaks for itself; advocates argue that it has prevented World War III, but that is conjectural. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its Ukraine invasion, although the General Assembly passed it overwhelmingly. The UN has done good work against hunger and slavery and promoting sustainable development, but has consistently fallen short of its own stated goals. More than 780 million people (and rising) face hunger, and there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history.

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Concerning the War in Gaza

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After focusing on the Gaza war since 7:30 am on October 7th, I’ve finally decided to begin writing about it. People ask for my opinion and I will now refer them here. If you read on, that is what you will get. I will not keep saying, “In my opinion” again and again, so please assume it. Today I will give my overview, which may be followed by other, future entries.

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Israel is at war with the empire of Iran, which includes the failed state of Lebanon, the territory of Gaza, and the faltering state of Yemen. Iran rules these entities through the terror groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis respectively. Like Iran, they are sworn to eliminate Israel. Through these and other proxies, Iran also controls parts of Syria and Iraq and has significantly infiltrated the West Bank. Since Iran is not an Arab country, this is larger than the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The question of whether Iran gives directives to these proxies on a day to day basis is irrelevant. It nurtures, trains, arms, consults, and plans with them and has done so for many years. They don’t do anything without Iran’s approval before and after the fact. Meanwhile Iran progresses steadily toward a nuclear arsenal (which Israel already has). Continue reading →

Is Genocide Now Maladaptive?

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David Blumenthal, a good and wise friend who is a Jewish studies professor and a rabbi wrote me recently asking about the former adaptiveness and present maladaptiveness of xenophobia. The operative passage in his letter was, “In the global world, however, survival requires the cooperation of varying and different groups. Humanity, in its groups, cannot survive without the quintessential other. Xenophobia has ceased to be adaptive. So has antisemitism, racism, orientalism, and misogyny.”

I have little trouble agreeing that at some times in the past these behaviors were adaptive for the perpetrators. Continue reading →