Genocide and the False Narrative

Throughout the current conflict in the Middle East we have heard a ceaseless chorus of claims of “genocide” allegedly being perpetrated against Gazans. We have descended into an Orwellian nightmare. We have the brain washing bleating of “genocide” resembling the “four legs good two legs bad” metaphor from Animal Farm and the fact inversion and reverse engineered legal sophistry resembling 1984. The common feature of those asserting the genocide mantra is their total lack of scholarly credibility on the subject, which has also been a pronounced deficiency in the discussions of “war crimes” and self-defence.

This area of international law is a distinct and specialised area. There is no point looking for expert commentary from conveyancing or even human rights practitioners. In some ways this would be like asking a podiatrist to do brain surgery. In relation to genocide or the laws of armed conflict, to speak authoritatively you need to have studied the law formally. In that process it is not sufficient to just read a convention. You need to study the companion aspects of legal interpretation which includes the travaux preparatoires (preparatory work), jurisprudence of tribunals, state practice, opinio juris (eg the belief by states that a certain practice is legally obligatory evidenced by statements, diplomatic correspondence and decisions of national courts). It is also very relevant as to what scholarly works of research you have published and whether you have had experience as a reflective practitioner applying law to real circumstances, trained military forces in the law and considered the content of military manuals.
As an example of what is involved, the ICRC study on state practice, including a deep analysis of military manuals, runs to over 4,000 pages. The ICRC customary law of armed conflict study runs to 621 pages. Often you will need to examine documents and proceedings in other legally valid languages such as French. Most of the people who make such “definitive” statements or opinions on these issues have not come close to this level of expertise.

The truth is that this genocide mantra is a deliberate strategy by Iran and its proxy galaxy of terror organisations bent on the destruction of Israel to flip the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust that helped amplify the need to recreate the State of Israel. A Holocaust, it should be emphasised, that the Palestinian leadership of that period, in the form of Haj Amin Al Hussein and his team, were fully complicit in.

The term genocide was introduced as a purely legal concept coined by a Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who fled the Nazis in WWII. It was first litigated in the Nuremberg Tribunal process at the conclusion of the war.  It is a criminal not a civil charge and is extremely difficult to sustain. The standards of proof evolved from the Nazi case study of the demonstrable and well documented intent, such as exhibited in the proceedings of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where the industrial scale details of the “final solution” were thrashed out. In the only genocide case in which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has handed down final judgement so far, concerning the war in Bosnia, after 14 years the ICJ finally determined this standard had not been satisfied (it did find an act of genocide had occurred at Srebrenica but that it was not proven that Serbia as a state was responsible).

Proving a charge of genocide involves firstly establishing the dolus specialis or specific intent. This means there must be clearly and specifically detailed evidence that describes the intent to destroy in whole or in part a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.  It must then be established that actions were carried out in practice and that the intent determined the nature of the actions. The ICJ has stated that the overall standard of proof required for this charge is that the evidence must be fully conclusive, compelling and leaving no reasonable doubt about the perpetrator’s intent. It can only be inferred from “a pattern of conduct” if this is the only reasonable inference that can be drawn therefrom.