"Over 9,000 Palestinians have died in the fighting, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory."--AP
"Died in the fighting" is press spin, implying military engagement in which every Palestinian is a Hamas fighter. That's a lie.
The dead are disproportionately infants and young children, blown to rags, buried under buildings, shot, suffocated, etc., while occupied, imprisoned, detained, surrounded, besieged, starved, orphaned and helpless.
"Crowds of workers from Gaza have been returning to the Palestinian territory after Israel expelled thousands of them and vowed to refuse any new permits."--BBC
"Returning" after being "expelled" doesn't quite say it. The images show men in T-shirts and pants, the clothes on their backs, some with plastic ankle-tags, walking into a rubble-strewn wasteland with no sanitation, food or water, and constant heavy bombardment. In other words, these thousands of people are being sent into the target area to be slaughtered with high explosives and white phosphorus.
The images we see of the aftermath of a strike show craters two or three times the height of the people standing on the edge or digging out bodies. Buildings adjacent to these pits are rickety skeletal remains of multistory structures in danger of further collapse.
There seems to be a taboo against the word, "genocide." Representative Tlaib pronounced it and brought down a storm of threats, patronizing racist and sexist dismissals, mockery and derision.
I'm reminded of that tired nonsense, "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck..." It was a metaphor so you could red-bait somebody without saying "Communist" in case your target might want to challenge you in court. It enabled people to act like those shrieking, pointing, soulless zombies in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and get away with it.
Here is a somewhat more accurate rendition of the "if it quacks" waterfowl-identification guide:
If it kills like a genocide,
If it causes serious bodily or mental harm like a genocide,
If it inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction like a genocide,
If it imposes measures intended to prevent births or transfer children like a genocide,
It's a genocide.
The UN's carefully-worded warnings about "risking genocide" play on a horrible false assumption, which is that it isn't genocide until everyone is killed. That's not the way the law is written.
It says: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
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.
The "incursion" on October 7 was "in part" so it qualifies. The police murders of Black people in the US would qualify as well. Oh, and Ukraine, remember Ukraine? The country we were "standing" with forever?
The commercial media establishment has thoroughly disqualified itself as a Free Press, and should henceforth be ignored as outright propaganda or mere entertainment.
The "social" media are also corrupted and useless, differing only in being personal information extractors, instead of disinformation providers.
Time to call a spade a spade. Why is America committing genocide?
