A Response to Mazin Qumsiyeh's "Genocide in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine" By Anne Selden Annab

A Response to Mazin Qumsiyeh's "Genocide in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine"

By Anne Selden Annab

Al-Jazeerah, October 27, 2006

Poetic license is a wonderful thing for a poem or play, but it really is not a very good idea to deploy in a seemingly serious and scholarly analysis of the situation in the Middle East.

Zionists eager to encourage negative stereotypes tend to paint all Arabs and Muslims with a wide brush. We who dream of a peaceful Middle East should take care not to adapt to Zionist tactics.

Thus, I have two problem's with Mazin Qumsiyeh's latest essay "Genocide in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine" (Al-Jazeerah, October 22, 2006).

First of all, the word genocide should be used with care, else it will lose its power and its meaning will be depleted or changed, allowing actual genocides, such as racist Israel's intentional and methodical ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land, to be more easily ignored.

Genocide is a term defined by Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

Second of all, I staunchly object to Qumsiyeh's eagerness to blame everything on American "hegemony". Granted I firmly and publicly protested against America's preemptive bombing of Iraq before it even began, and I continue to ask that our troops come home as soon as possible. But objecting to this war- and all war- is a very different thing from adopting an anti-American stance which seeks to find fault with all things American, rather than to find ways to end this awful war on and of terror.

I do think Qumsiyeh has good intentions- I just think he has spent far too much time reading Chomsky and dithering about with a very Zionized peace camp that tends to protect Israel by blaming everything on America. America really does have a problem with Zionists mucking about abusing our real democracy so as to arm and empower Israel's actual GENOCIDE.

I sincerely believe that America's core ideals, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, are worth respecting and protecting. Israel's core ideals of creating and sustaining an exclusively Jewish state are not worth respecting and protecting. Nor is it a good idea for any one, regardless of religion, to help exasperate an Israeli-made clash of civilizations.

Anne Selden Annab
http://annies-letters.blogspot.com/

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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