The Anti-Israel Axis & the Post-Truth Environment Part 1

On 13 October, 2024 the Sunday Sun reported on an open letter written by the Caribbean Against Apartheid in Palestine (henceforth CAAP) on the subject of Israel.

Apparently, the letter was directed at the Consular Representative of Israel, Mr. Scott Oran, a Barbadian.  Israel does not have a resident ambassador to Barbados; the ambassador to Panama is also accredited to Barbados.

Much to its credit, the editor of the Sunday Sun was careful to indicate that the letter stated that “Israel had been accused (emphasis ours) of war crimes by an International Criminal Court prosecutor”.

Treasurer of the organization, Mr. Suleiman Bulbulia was also reported as stating that “it was genocide that is being committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

In this article we would like to challenge this main accusation against Israel, namely, that it is committing genocide on the Palestinians.  We will also treat to the mantra of “International Law” a crutch that the Muslim World and sundry leftists cling to like a life raft. The rest of CAAP’s presentation is merely regurgitation of the calls to action of the Arab-Muslim world and the leftist European and American idealogues.  

But before we do that, we need to point out the nature of the psychological or mental-spiritual environment in which we live. This will allow us to put this accusation into context.

PTPS Environment

Ever since covid 19, people have learned to take almost every “official” communication, whether from government , or international organization, such as the WHO, with two grains of salt. Although they may not put it in such strict intellectual terms, people recognize, that we now live in a post-truth environment. That partly explains why the term, “conspiracy theory”, is attached to virtually everything people do not understand, regardless to whether it is true or not.

We go so far as to say, that we live in a post-truth, post-science world. There was a time, when we would readily accept any scientific report as valid, because we believed, more or less, in the infallibility of science, and scientists.  In that era, we would easily genuflect, to the “scientific” and technical knowledge of our doctors and health workers. But covid 19 and its aftermath changed all that. “Science”, regrettably, is no longer scientific! 

It appears that the truth-science value, is being replaced by what we might call, the Grand Era of Ideology (GEI). Ideology is not science, and needs no scientific validation. Ideology is belief; ideology is philosophy. It is just a fancy word for, “whatever I, or we, think is true”. You are never wrong, because whatever comes to your mind, is acceptable, is authentic, is kosher.

There is no such thing as objective truth, in the GEI.  Indeed, the aim of ideology is not to extract truth at all. Its purpose is just to express an opinion, because extracting truth is like gold mining, very hard work indeed!

One of the casualties of GEI is education, or more precisely, critical thinking. It is doubtful, whether liberal education, has ever done a good job, of preparing students for critical thinking. So, it was only a matter of time, before the GEI, assumed a dominant position in our educational institutions, as it now has.

In a sense, we have gone back to a pre-scientific era, an era where religion, perhaps the most powerful ideological force on earth, held pre-eminence. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

In ending this segment, let us note that while this might sound far-fetched and perhaps contradictory, there is a glimmer of hope that this intellectual pivot to the GEI may lead mankind, albeit through some tortuous path – to a truth outside of itself that will finally bring us all to our senses.

Accusation of Genocide

We have said all of the above because most people might believe that the accusation of genocide being brought against Israel has been scientifically examined and vetted and therefore, the anti-Israel Caribbean Against Apartheid in Palestine is on solid ground.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  At no point do the accusers stop to tell us what genocide actually means.  But not all of us are experiencing intellectual rigor mortis.

Here is how the United Nations defines genocide in the context of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) which is accessible here:

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:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Here is the very “funny” thing about this definition. According to the preface to the same UN convention:

“The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust (emphasis ours).

Now you know why Muslims and other Jew-haters have to deny the holocaust!  But there is more.

The intellectually alert will quickly notice that there is no quantity qualifier attached to any of the acts that define genocide.  Therefore, this definition of genocide could easily apply to gang killing a few people in a country.  That would explain the use of the term in this context, by the leader of this country, in a recent press conference on crime.

So, the only real notion that could possibly make genocide as defined by the UN a valid concept is the clause, “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.  Immediately we can rule out criminal acts of violence such as experienced in Barbados as genocide.

But anyone who has even a limited knowledge of the law knows that “intent” is one of the hardest things to prove and adjudicate in a court of law.  According to Cornell Law School:

“Intent generally refers to the mental objective behind an action… in Criminal Law, criminal intent, also known as mens rea, is one of two elements that must be proven in order to secure a conviction”.

Another passage from this document makes very interesting reading:

However, for crimes that require specific intent, that intent must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, for a conviction in attempted murder, which requires proof of specific intent to kill, a prosecution cannot rely on the fact that the defendant performed the act of killing in order to presume that the defendant had acted with an intention to kill. The defendant, for example, might have acted out of self-defense, therefore negating the required intent because the killing was done out of protection and not the desire to take the victims life.    

All along the Israeli Government has been arguing  that its military actions in Gaza are out of self-defence.  Quite obviously it has to make the same argument with respect to Hezbollah in Lebanon and its actions against Iran and Syria.  But the Palestinians and their dupes are having none of it.

Like Syria, Lebanon is a failed state. In our view, there should be no sympathy for the Lebanese people who have allowed Hezbollah to take over their government and their property to build tunnels near and into Israel and shoot rockets into Israeli territory on a daily basis. 

If the neighbours allowed someone to shoot at you from their property, commonsense says that we would have to view the neighbours as accessories and hold them accountable.  However, that logic does not apply in PTPS environment; hence, if we retaliated against the neighbours we would be accused of being unfair and being bullies!

We are forced to conclude, therefore, that only the illiterate or people who have chosen to live in a post-truth world will read the abundance of news and fail to comprehend the Israeli position much more take the side of the Palestinians.

But here is the most interesting part about this genocide accusation. The Charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the extinction of Jews not only in Palestine but wherever they are found. When we match this with their military actions, we have clear intention to commit genocide on Israel and Jews.  Can CAAP and the UN, the ICJ and ICC speak to that?

One of the appeals…(Access Part 2 here)