Financial Times turns post-Holocaust vow of ‘Never Again’ on its head

It’s unclear how being the grand nephew of a genocide scholar imbues Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper with any special insight into Israel’s war against Hamas. Yet, that’s precisely the hook in his piece (“What is genocide?“, Jan. 23), which opens by citing Leo Kuper, “a Jewish sociologist born in Johannesburg in 1908, who served as a British intelligence officer” in WW2, before, we’re told, he turned to academia, writing a book in 1981 titled ‘Genocide’.

Simon, on the other hand, has no expertise in genocide or, it seems, the Middle East. Rather, he appears to be something of a journalistic polymath, writing on topics as diverse as sports, politics and literary criticism. Indeed, since Hamas invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7th, 2023, murdering over 1,200, he’s published only a few columns (paywall) which even touch on the war – none possessing any original reporting or insight about the conflict.

A child’s bed in Kibbutz Nir Oz stained with blood after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

Though, like most of the commentary in the British media about the topic, his piece deals almost entirely with Israel and the accusation of ‘genocide’, he does note that “Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 people on October 7 2023 reran Jewish history’s central nightmare“, before adding that “one side’s genocide, or crimes against humanity, doesn’t justify another’s“.

So, strangely, while he seems open minded to viewing the worst mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust as a genocidal act, he declines to ponder the antisemitic-inspired jihadist barbarism which occurred that Shabbat day – except to chide the victims that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Concerning Israel’s actions since Oct. 7th, he begins his case by citing the UN’s Convention on Genocide, adopted in 1948″ , which defines the word as referring to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, before noting that “intent” is “usually unprovable”. Except that he does, in fact, attempt to offer proof of Israel’s intent in the following sentence:

For instance, former defence minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly. President Isaac Herzog called “an entire nation” “responsible” for Hamas’s attack.

Kuper’s lack of familiarity with the issue he decided to devote a column to is evident in these appallingly misleading and partial quotes, most of which were debunked early in the war.

As our colleague Gilead Ini demonstrated, Gallant’s words, uttered a mere two days after Oct. 7th, as truckloads of mutilated and burned Jewish corpses streamed into forensic centers, were clearly a reference to Hamas — and not, Ini added, a particularly unique one. President Joe Biden, that same week, called Hamas “animals,” and charged them with “pure unadulterated evil.”

Ini also showed that other comments by Gallant from Oct.  7th through Oct. 10th further demonstrate that he was clearly describing Hamas, which he likened to ISIS, as the responsible party, and the target of Israel’s war aims.

As far as Herzog: while it’s narrowly true, that, during a press conference five days after Oct. 7th, he said that the entire “nation” of Gaza was morally responsible, he also made clear, three times during the same press event, that Israel would operate according to international law.  In fact, when asked directly by a reporter if he was describing all Palestinians in Gaza as legitimate targets, Herzog responded immediately, saying “No, I didn’t say that. I did not say that. I want to make it clear.”

Indeed, here are additional comments by Herzog during that press event, making it clear who the IDF was targeting:

We are very cautious in the way we operate. The IDF uses all the means at its disposal in order to reduce harm to the population. For example, many resources are invested in gathering intelligence and in trying to locate the enemy separately from civilian population, in evacuating the civilian population from the center of the battle, in warning citizens, in monitoring [the] humanitarian situation.

Following his grossly misleading quotes, Kuper then comically misrepresents the response by Israel and its supporters to the genocide libel, writing that “in our era in which shared truths are lacking, Israel’s defenders dismiss accusers as antisemites“.

While some of the loudest voices promoting the allegation do have a history of antisemitism, the main rebuttal, since the charge first emerged – quite tellingly – just days after Oct. 7th, was, first, given Hamas’s sadistic, antisemitic mass murder spree 15 months ago, that the accusation is an inversion of reality, and, mostly, that, even on its own merits, there is no evidence to back up the libel.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s democracies have refused to back the charge at the ICJ that Israel is guilty of genocide, in and of itself, attests to how meritless the charge is.

You don’t need to be a Holocaust scholar (or be related to one) to recognise evidence of real genocidal intentions when you see it: babies murdered in their cribs, children tortured and killed in front of their parents, women and girls raped, the young and old burned alive, decapitated and mutilated by antisemitic death squads, some of whom boasted of how many Jews they killed.

Nor does it require any special moral or historical understanding to acknowledge – particularly today, the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – that Israel’s war against the pogromists who carried out the savage massacre of Jews is not only justified morally, and necessary for the Jewish state’s safety, but represents the very embodiment of ‘Never Again’.

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