Here are some excerpts:
I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.About a month ago I noted on Viewpoint that British Colonel Richard Kemp stated in a tweet that the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.
Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians.
In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.
Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’
Most Western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.
In the same post I pointed out that in the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.
These were casualties of Allied civilians. They weren't even supporters of the enemy, as most of the Gazans are, but they were the tragic consequence of the need to defeat an aggressor enemy.
Anyway, Murray continues:
For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false.Murray totes up all the deaths in the three wars (1948, 1967, 1973) in which Israel's Arab neighbors attacked it with the goal of destroying the young Jewish state. He arrives at a figure of 60,000 people killed.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million.
Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.
Although you may not have heard about it from our media, in the past decade Bashar al-Assad in Syria has killed over ten times that number. Why is there no outrage over this horrifying statistic?
There are lots of reasons you might give to explain this: that people don’t care when Muslims kill Muslims; that people don’t care when Arabs kill Arabs; that they only care if Israel is involved....Perhaps so. It certainly seems undeniable that a visceral, irrational hatred of Jews has infected humanity for much of recorded history, and it's difficult to explain on naturalistic grounds why this particular hatred exists. The only explanation that seems capable of adequately accounting for it is that it's demonic.
I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things?....
But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.
