#changing definitions

by Brendan O'Neill

Hamas will be on the back foot in this face-off, having had its ranks devastated by the IDF. But it has something in its favour: the anti-Israel hysteria of the West’s influencers. Over the past week, our elites’ crusade of criminalisation against the Jewish State has reached dizzying new heights. Israel has been found guilty in the kangaroo court of the West’s puffed-up moralists of every war crime imaginable. It has been judged the most savage nation in existence. Such shrill damnation of the Jewish State has one effect and one effect only: to inspire Hamas to continue its ruinous war in Gaza.

‘It’s definitely genocide’, the cry went up last week, following the publication of an exposé by the Guardian and others claiming that 83 per cent of the dead in Gaza are civilians. The figures come from the IDF’s own ‘intelligence database’, we were told. They show that ‘five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces’ have been civilians. This is ‘an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare’, said the Guardian. You have to look to Srebrenica or Rwanda, it said, to see similar levels of wanton destruction of human life.

The truth – as we have come to expect on everything Israel-related – is far more complicated. What the IDF database actually says is that 8,900 – around one in six – of the dead in Gaza are ‘named fighters’ from ‘Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’. There will be many other dead, it says, who are either fighters who could not be identified or fighters from other Islamist groups. Indeed, the purple-prose ‘exposé’ of the IDF’s supposed genocidal ruthlessness undercut its own claims by acknowledging that the number of fighters killed is ‘likely higher’ than 8,900 since the IDF’s database ‘does not include… operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name [or] Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ’.

Right. So it’s not true that only one in six of the dead are militants. That was a reckless and sinister misrepresentation of the facts. It’s even feasible that the number of fighters who could not be identified is higher than the number who could be: war, after all, is a messy business where establishing facts is hard. And yet the post-truth insistence that 83 per cent of the dead are civilians spread like a fire in influencer circles. ‘Barbarians’, they cried. ‘Demons’, even. The small print, the truth, was incinerated in the rush to damn Israel as genocidal.

I am attempting to take common phrases and use them in different and opposite perspectives. Turning a usual insult, sex joke, over exaggeration, etc. into a new meaning. The power of the words used in the same order but stripping away the old set meaning and realizing how well we can redefine them.

If anybody has any suggestions on such common phrases, please share. The more ideas I get, the more possibilities of rephrasing and creating a new meaning to the words we all use.