NST Leader: When truth is punished and genocide denied

New Straits Times

13 hours ago

The world has become a theatre of the absurd. Here what should be isn't, and what shouldn't is. Welcome to a world of utter disorder. Treaties between sovereign nations used to be negotiated. Now, they are coerced into being at a gunpoint. The concept of sovereignty of nations is itself under threat. Call it a topsy-turvy world. Here, the oppressed become the oppressors, and those who speak for the oppressed are punished. Here, too, one word — "genocide" — is only to be used against the oppressed when they rise up against the atrocities of the occupying oppressors. Never when the oppressors slaughter the oppressed, even with the expressed intent to ethnically cleanse them. The sanctions imposed on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations official investigating Israeli atrocities in Gaza, is a reflection of the world that has gone terribly absurd. Some would even call such a world an obscene one. They are not wrong. What else would you call a world where world leaders refuse to acknowledge genocide, let alone act against it?
Why was Albanese sanctioned? Because she dared to call the slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza a genocide. She isn't the first one to do so. The Irish and the Spanish governments have similarly declared the atrocities to be so. Much earlier, international non-governmental organisations and legal scholars did the same. On Tuesday, Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, one of Britain's distinguished human rights lawyers and Labour Party member of the House of Lords, speaking to BBC's World at One, described Israel's onslaught in Gaza as genocide. Describing Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz's move to confine the Palestinians in the ruins of Rafah as a mass concentration camp, she said the ultimate aim is to make their lives so miserable that they will be forced to leave. But the Israelis forget the Palestinians' love for their homeland knows no limits. The open prison, in which the two million or so Palestinians have been confined for the longest time by the occupying Zionist regime, never made them leave. Concentration camp never will. But Kennedy had a reason to call Katz's audacious "city" a concentration camp. She wants the world to know the Holocaust is happening again, this time in Gaza.
Another top genocide scholar, Dr Melanie O'Brien, who is the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has no doubt that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that it has no defence against the charge. Speaking to the Middle East Eye news portal, the legal scholar from Australiaput it thus: "Applying the legal definitions of genocide in the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, I would determine that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide." The Geneva Convention says genocide involves acts committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". "What we are witnessing fits within that legal definition." Albanese, Kennedy, O'Brien et al are rare breeds of brave souls. We are glad that there are still some Western souls who stand up for justice. The absurd world has been wrong so long that it thinks it is right. Tragic.