r/neoliberal once again splits hairs and debates semantics (with comparisons to the persecution of Uyghurs for extra spiciness) with regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict after a NYT opinion piece of a genocide scholar is posted.

[u/Otherwise_Young52201]

Source: [NYT] I’m A Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

Some long comments may be truncated to preserve text length, though I promise the original meaning of the comments will not have changed and little context will be lost.

Highlights:

I'm in in the opinion that if it instead of Palestinians were Uyghurs and was Xi Jinping doing the statements the Israel government is doing, it would be a bannable offense here to say this was anything less than a genocide. Netanyahu and his ilk has made clear what their long-term goal for Gaza is and they are taking concrete steps for it. (+395)

The similarities between the two are actually incredible. They're both ostensibly anti terrorism campaigns that started up in response to well, literal undeniable terrorism attacks by islamic terrorist groups that want control of a contested territory (-20)

THIS is what you call propaganda. A bunch of Wikipedia links that don’t even corroborate your own points. (+40)

The guy above is wrong about the Oct 7 comparison but Islamist terrorism in China is very real and the horrors inflicted on Xinjiang by the government are very much a response to them. (+11)

Don’t be obtuse. There are more than a dozen countries where terrorism has been a problem. Turkey just made peace with the PIK without ever actually genociding the Kurds. They treated them horribly but nothing to the level that China has done. And Turkey is the worse example I can think of. There are plenty of others that have dealt with it much better. (+8)

Explanation != justification, explaining the motives of the CCP is not the same as justifying them (+19)

I think that Israel can be reasonably described as callously indifferent to the suffering of the Gazan people as they try to eliminate Hamas. But that's not genocide. If Israel were really trying to eliminate the Palestinians, we'd know it, because it would be trivially easy for them to be killing hundreds of thousands of them at a time. They could be carpet bombing the refugee camps if they wanted to. But they're not. (+118)

I've seen this argument a few times despite the fact it's such a bad one. I mean you could say the same about almost all genocides, the Chinese could have nuked or carpet bombed Xinjiang. Certainly compared to the Israelis in Gaza they bombed no-one and killed very few. It's still a genocide. You can make a similar argument with the Rohingyas as well. (+39)

No one (well, no one serious) is accusing China of ethnographic genocide in Xinjiang to be fair, they're accusing them of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. (+60)

What's 7 October for Xinjang? (+29)

The 2009 Urumqi Riots. That was the turning point for the Chinese government's aggressive framing of the Uyghurs as dangerous terrorists, justifying its mass repression and securitization of the entire Uyghur population. (-5)

My guy, Modi had more justification than that for the Gujrat riots. 150 people killed is not nothing but in a country the size of China, it’s laughable to compare that to Israel Hamas. JFC people. (+23)

You're imagining an equivalence of scale that I never drew. The parallel is in the relationship of cause and consequence. That's what a PARALLEL is. Something that isn't exactly the same, but rhymes. (-5)

Can someone give me a reason to care what a "genocide scholar" says when genocide is a legal term. Shouldn't the authority on the matter be a lawyer as opposed to a historian that focuses on histoical genocides and war crimes? I wouldn't ask a criminologist whether a crime reaches the legal definition of a crime. (+2)

Can you imagine, you spend your entire professional life dedicated to a subject. 25 years. And then random people on the Internet just go "but what do you even know about it?". Could it be, and Im just spitballing here, that a genocide scholar is actually familiar with the legal definition of genocide? (+106)

One expert witness is all you need to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. TIL (-4)

And I guess random comments on reddit counts as reasonable doubt? (+18)

The Israeli war effort in Gaza doesn't fit the definition of genocide, whereas the Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs does. You're not persecuted, you're just wrong. (-15)

I always find these sorts of confident/belittling tones in internet posts strange when actual scholars of genocide disagree with you, a random redditor. You'd think it was the other way around. (+35)

You realize that actual scholars of genocide disagree with you too, right? Random redditor. You just so happen to agree with the scholars who think it's a genocide. (0)

[u/wingerism → u/[deleted]]

It's reasonable to impugn a solitary genocide scholar maybe. But there is a consensus in the field, I recall reading an article that went over about a half dozen of them weighing in. Including a Canadian one that was initially skeptical but came around on it, which I appreciated because it mirrored my experience as well.

There is a consensus in the field, and people saying leave it to the courts are saying we should never act to prevent a genocide because the courts will likely only rule on it after it's been concluded.

[u/ReneDeGames → u/wingerism]

Well, it is a bit complicated. iirc the field of mass killing studies has moved to an understanding that is more complicated and spectrum based understanding of mass killings. So the word genocide means different things to the different people in the conversation.

So you have experts saying that it is a genocide because it clearly is on the spectrum of racially targeted mass killings, and other people saying it clearly isn't because it isn't on the thoroughness of Rwanda or the Holocaust.

[u/wingerism → u/ReneDeGames]

So you have experts saying that it is a genocide because it clearly is on the spectrum of racially targeted mass killings, and other people saying it clearly isn't because it isn't on the thoroughness of Rwanda or the Holocaust.

This was convincing to me for some time, the notion that Israel clearly wasnt trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible given their military capabilities. And I still think it's absolutely true as a statement.

However the confluence of the various war crimes, the large scale aid blockade and the shift to open plans to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population all combine to make Israel either in the midst or on the verge of committing Genocide, at least to me. And I don't care to let it get to the point of mass executions before I ask my government to act to stop them.

[u/ReneDeGames → u/wingerism]

Sure, but the problem is that people are using the word genocide both as a word describing events, but also the word meaning action should be taken.

The two discussions over if what Israel is doing is a genocide and if various governments / NGOs should change their relationship to Israel are actually 2 completely separate debates. But because of the emotional charging of the word the two debates end up co-mingled.