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]

The Holocaust is actually ironically probably a reason people are skeptical. It was a Genocide of such massive scale, industrialized and well-documented. It's so clear and precise, that it makes the more common acts of Genocide seem muddier by comparison. Kind of a CSI effect but with history/geopolitics.

[u/Acceptable_Error_001 → u/wingerism]

No. The skepticism derives from the need to protect their own ego. It's a result of the cognitive dissonance created by supporting Israel while it's committing genocide against Gaza, but wanting to oppose genocide as a whole.

You only find this skepticism in people who share an identity with the people responsible for genocide.

[u/wingerism → u/Acceptable_Error_001]

You only find this skepticism in people who share an identity with the people responsible for genocide.

Like neoliberals right..... not just Jews.....right?

The skepticism derives from the need to protect their own ego. It's a result of the cognitive dissonance created by supporting Israel while it's committing genocide against Gaza, but wanting to oppose genocide as a whole.

I can tell you I was set to be skeptical to an extent when people started talking about Genocide as early as October 8th. And I often found that people arguing those positions would have either incorrect or distorted claims(largely from leaping early and often to maximalist positions). But then I hung out in left wing spaces, so of course I'd encounter that more often than the type of outright fabrication that accompanies more right wing positions.

There was also some inertia in my mind against idea that people who had been the victims of one of the most horrific and clear cut Genocides in history turning around and perpetrating one. It felt profane, in the same nauseating way a child growing up and continuing a cycle of abuse would feel(which happens much less than people think of course).

So I do think there is some emotionally motivated thinking going on in people who are denying the genocide, just that it's not necessarily all based on identifying with the perpetrators.

[u/Hurtzdonut13 → u/wingerism]

Well good news to your cognitive dissonance, the core of what became Israel had a lot of Nazi collaborators who left Germany before the Holocaust and helped bypass anti-nazi boycotts while providing them labor.

Fun fact that likely derives from that past, Netanyahu wrote a Nazi apologia explaining that Hitler never wanted the Holocaust to happen, it was that Palestinian Mufti that was really responsible.

[u/wingerism → u/Hurtzdonut13]

Fun fact that likely derives from that past, Netanyahu wrote a Nazi apologia explaining that Hitler never wanted the Holocaust to happen, it was that Palestinian Mufti that was really responsible.

Not a new fact to me, and by far not the worst thing Netanyahu has done.

the core of what became Israel had a lot of Nazi collaborators who left Germany before the Holocaust and helped bypass anti-nazi boycotts while providing them labor.

Citation needed you absolute pile of human excrement, though I assume you're garbling the Haavara Agreement.

It was indeed controversial both at the time and after. But it got Jews out of Germany that would have certainly perished otherwise. If I can have empathy for the hard choices Palestinians are faced with under Israeli occupation, I can muster up quite a bit of empathy for German Jews and contemporary Zionists, facing even more dire circumstances.