HANSON: Examining the American left’s genocide hypocrisy

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On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas killers slaughtered 1,200 people, more than two-thirds of them civilians, inside Israel. For the ensuing three weeks, they refused Israel’s demands to turn over the 251 hostages and to surrender the architects of the massacre. No matter — within a day of the attacks, when Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli troops on Israeli soil, the American left was already screaming “genocide!”

They did not mean Hamas’s intended genocide of Jews, a foretaste of which was seen when it launched a surprise invasion force of more than 4,000 terrorists some 25 km into Israel. The killers were accompanied by some 2,000 “innocent” Gazan “civilians.” All were bent on looting, murder, rape, torture, and hostage-taking of the defenceless.

Nor did the “genocide” chorus refer to the more than 13,000 rockets, missiles and drones launched from Gaza after Oct. 7 that predominantly targeted Israeli civilian neighbourhoods.

What was most surreal about the charges of “genocide” against Israel — along with all the other slurs of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” “war crimes” — was that they so often came from elite first- and second-generation Middle Eastern immigrants to America. Yet these prominent American accusers have remained silent about whether their lurid accusations might far better reflect the sordid histories of their own homelands.

Piker quiet on Turkish atrocities

Take the Turkish-American anchor baby Hasan Piker, the millionaire podcaster who has dual citizenship and grew up in Turkey. Piker has gained celebrity as the socialist heartthrob who is the brain of the new Democratic/Socialist/Islamist alliance. Besides his antisemitic rants, he has declared that, “America deserved 9/11,” and, “Oh God, I f—ing hate America so much.”

Yet the outspoken Piker has only once in passing mentioned Turkey’s 1974 invasion and the half-century occupation of nearly 40% of Cyprus.

Nor did Piker, who damns the creation of Israel in 1948, say a word about the Turkish torching of the historic Greek-majority Ionian city of Smyrna in 1922, in which tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated.

Given Piker’s supposedly vast historical recall and outspoken human rights advocacy, one would at least expect him to be sensitive to the horror of Turkey’s Armenian genocide, in which Turkish troops slaughtered more than one million civilians and for which the Turkish government still denies any culpability. But when once challenged by Armenian-Americans, he dismissed them, saying flippantly, “It’s more fun to enrage you.”

And the pattern goes beyond mere podcasters.

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Omar no saint, either

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a first-generation immigrant from Somalia, also brays loudly about supposed Israeli war crimes. Omar spouts “genocide” and “apartheid” in her frequently antisemitic rants. She has also labelled her adopted nation as “one of the worst countries” in the world.

But Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the truly genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre. The latter waged a decade-long war of extermination against the rival Isaaq clan that opposed Barre’s 21-year dictatorship. Estimates of the Barre regime’s murderous toll range from 50,000 to 200,000 killed, mostly civilians. Few in Omar’s politically active Somali immigrant community concede that many fled Somalia to America only when Barre’s two-decade reign of terror was finally overthrown and they feared retaliation from his victims.

Of course, the nation’s biggest elected leftist rising star has also joined in.

Mamdani another privileged ingrate

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, employs the same tired anti-Israeli and anti-American verbiage. Yet he went further than other antisemites when he launched grandstanding threats to jail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any time the latter visited New York to address the United Nations.

For America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani’s July 3 “commemorative” address blasted American “monopolies that dominate every industry,” federal agents supposedly “terrorizing our streets” and a country where we “sell our elections to the highest bidder.” The calumny was odd coming from a dual citizen of the police state of Uganda, where there are no real elections but lots of Indian “monopolies.”

Indeed, Mamdani himself better fits his own charges of “settler-colonist” and “apartheid.” His Indian community in Uganda comprises less than 0.1% of the population. But somehow it still accounts for over 60% of Uganda’s GDP. It was implanted there by 19th-century British imperialists as a “settler-colonial” community to help control the indigenous black population.

In short, we should remind these privileged ingrates — regardless of what corner of the world they hail from — to look inward before they blast their adopted country and not to project the sins of their own homelands upon either Israel or America.

— Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

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