The West’s Genocide Deniers Are Dragging Down The Palestinian Cause

• The West’s Genocide Deniers Are Dragging Down The Palestinian Cause
  by https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/
  Influential American academic Noam Chomsky asked what he called a “simple question” in a recent interview with the journalist Ezra Klein for the New York Times: “Is the situation of the Uyghurs, a million people who’ve been through education camps, is that worse than the situation of, say, two million and twice that many people in Gaza? I mean, are the Uyghur[s] having their power plants destroyed, their sewage plants destroyed, subjected to regular bombing? Is it not happening to them? Not to my knowledge.”
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  In that particular segment, he summarised the political worldview of many progressives and other figures in what has been known as the “New Left”.
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  Chomsky acknowledges that “there’s enough evidence to show that there’s very severe repression” of the Uyghurs by the Chinese government, and that, “We should protest it.” He steps into entirely different territory, however, when he reasoned about what is happening in Xinxiang: “It has one crucial difference from Gaza. Namely, in the Uyghur case, there’s not a lot that we can do about it, unfortunately. In the Gaza case, we can do everything about it since we were responsible for it, we can stop it tomorrow.” Great propaganda for the Palestinians and their cause; not so great for the Uyghurs suffering at the hands of the Chinese government.
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  Despite such a reasonable and fair comparison in the context of the perceived threat posed by Beijing, it effectively gives varying degrees of importance to crimes against humanity, atrocities and genocides. According to such logic, the internment of Uyghurs in “re-education camps” and the torture that takes place therein, along with the well-documented sexual abuse and forced sterilisation of Uyghur women at the hands of the Chinese authorities, does not matter as much as the military occupation and apartheid suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel.
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  Delving deeper, we find that this is not the first time that Chomsky has played down crimes against humanity; for decades he has figured in war crimes revisionism concerning the Serbian genocide of the Bosnians in the 1990s. Notably, he wrote the forward for a book – The Politics of Genocide – which claimed that Serb forces “incontestably had not killed any but ‘Bosnian Muslim men of military age'”; Australian journalist John Pilger wrote an endorsement of the book.
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  Both Chomsky and Pilger then actively dismissed criticism of their stances, fighting tooth and nail against the classification of the slaughter and mass rape of Bosnians as a genocide. They have never turned back on their views.
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