evanprodromou, 3 months ago

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire collectively blamed the millions of Armenians in their territory for attacks by Armenian resistance fighters. Around 1M non-combatants were killed by the Ottoman military — in many cases, by forced marches through the Syrian desert without food and water.

Denouncing this genocide doesn’t make you an Armenian resistance fighter or an advocate for their views. It just means you’re against genocide.

In 1994, in the wake of the Rwandan civil war, the president of Rwanda was killed. Military and government officials suspected the Tutsi-aligned Rwandan Patriotic Front and blamed the Tutsi and Twa people collectively. They organized the mass killing of Tutsi people; between 500,000 and 1M people were killed in the following three months.

Abhoring this murder doesn’t make you a partisan of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. It just means you’re a human, opposed to the systematic slaughter of humans.

On October 7 2023, Hamas’s military wing attacked and killed about 550 Israeli soldiers and as many Israeli civilians. They kidnapped, tortured and raped hundreds more. In response, Israel has denied food, water and medical supplies to the 2.3M people of Gaza, driven them from their homes to a tiny sliver of land near the Egyptian border, destroyed half of all residential buildings, killed 30,000 people and seriously injured 60,000 more. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has called this action a plausible genocide.

Wanting this genocide to end with an immediate ceasefire doesn’t mean you support Hamas or want Israel to be destroyed. It means you’re opposed to mass killing and expulsion of people from their homeland.

Is it exactly the same as these other examples? Absolutely not. Genocide never is. But you can be on the side of humanity against the destruction of the people of Gaza and it doesn’t make you an advocate for the views or actions of Hamas.

https://evanp.me/2024/02/04/taking-sides-in-a-genocide/