We Need to Talk about How We Talk about Israel

In my previous post, the open letter to Jon Stewart, I talked about how When it comes to Israel and the Middle East, Mr. Stewart fails to point the hyperbolic discourse.

Well this week The Daily Show had another segment called ‘We need to talk about Israel‘ in which Jon Stewart and his team of correspondents demonstrated the symptom but not the syndrome, but I am glad at least they are getting closer to the root of the problems. In that segment every time Jon want to say something about Israel (and Hamas) he gets interrupted by his angry correspondents.

Now let’s see what happens when you do let people talk about Israel uninterrupted. I invite you to watch a short clip on the UN Human Rights Council emergency session on Gaza which took place on July 23rd. If you don’t have 6.5 minutes just watch the first 40 seconds. It will be more than enough to prove my point.

War crime, ethnic cleansing, genocide, extermination, massacre. Expecting Israelis not to get defensive against such horrible allegation, is as ridiculous as expecting Israel not to react to Hamas Rockets. Ironically it is Hamas who is openly calling to commit genocide against the Jews but I don’t want to get started on that. I have a much more important point to make.

The Palestinians took the word ‘genocide’ and rendered it useless. And saddest thing of all is that other people all over the world pay the price for that. They are the boy who cried wolf not while the wolf was sleeping in the forest, but while the wolf was actually terrorizing in the next village. In “the good old days” it took at least 10,000 deaths before people even began to consider to use the word genocide. Now you can use it after ten days in which less people have died than the number of passengers in a commercial airliner which got shot down. In the hallways of the UN genocide in the new “Amazing!!!!!”

It can’t be a genocide when your population keeps growing steadily. It’s not a massacre when you are fighting armed militants. It’s not ethnic cleansing when you are 100% of the population in a place which is now titled as the most densely populated area on earth.

Actually you know what? I take that back. The Palestinians didn’t rendered the word genocide useless. They just found new uses for it – delegitimizing Israel while allowing other countries to carry on with real atrocities.What’s the ISIS expression I am looking for? I believe it’s “two gays in one stone”.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go genocidal on my ice cream.