• Shadywack@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Are you fucking seriously going to try and split hairs over definitions (which you’re incorrect btw, genocide’s literal definition is the killing of a large group of people in an ethnicity with the goal of destroying that nation or group) so you can level the playing field of evil here??

    The prior comment remarked that Israel could have slaughtered everyone in Gaza but didn’t, and now you’re trying to redefine genocide so that Israel looks worse.

    Mental gymnastics aside, Hamas was fucking insane to go after children. Israel is fucking insane to go after Hamas with the human shields they have.

    No amount of hand wringing externally is going to defuse this. Hubris is going to make this worse though, that I do believe.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This thread was about whether or not it’s “fair or accurate” to call them “genocidal”. The word, “literally” taken down to its roots, does mean “geno” (people) “cide” (killing), but actual definitions in use are more nuanced. From the UN “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, for instance:

      In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

      (a) Killing members of the group;

      (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

      (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

      (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

      (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

      • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The UN’s historically been an apologist for atrocities whenever the power benefits afford the defense of the reprehensible. Pulling out a UN Convention definition when politically convenient is a disgrace, much like the UN’s history of confronting atrocities for the past 40 years.

        • dx1@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That’s basically an ad hominem. That’s a commonly accepted definition, address the content specifically if you have an issue with it.

      • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Saying that relocating people is as bad as killing them seems like it’s a way to equate the level of evil from one group/nation to another. I see the pictures of bodies from the Holocaust, and I just can’t equate that to a forcible relocation.