2939) History’s Early Warning Signs Of Genocide, By Ben Kiernan

24 August 2009

The University of Queensland’s Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect has launched a new program on the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, which it calls “the single most important element” of its mandate. The program’s leader, historian Deborah Mayersen, is the author of a Melbourne University doctoral dissertation entitled Countdown to Genocide. .

The new Queensland program is part of a worldwide attempt to stop genocides by recognising early warning signs and acting to prevent them. In addition to tracking proximate causes of genocides, scholars and activists can draw on historical cases to identify possible perpetrators and propose timely preventive action.

History’s most extreme and most extensive case of genocide was the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews during World War II. Warning signs of a murderous project appeared well in advance. For example, as early as 1924, Adolf Hitler mused in his book Mein Kampf that during World War I, if only … “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas”.

In addition to such proclamations, other warning signs, present in most genocides throughout history, also escaped much notice during Hitler’s rise to power. Besides racism and religious hatred, which in Hitler’s case combined in a vicious anti-Semitism, three other factors have recurred through the centuries. Genocidal leaders have often been preoccupied with antiquity and have envisaged themselves as heirs of a sometimes mythical ancient heritage. They have also been aggressively expansionist and have combined their hunger for territory with a conviction that only people of their own nationality and race are equipped to farm or use the land. Along with their historical fetishes and expansionism, this agrarian preoccupation often leads perpetrators to despise and distrust forest or city dwellers.

For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler complemented his vicious anti-Semitism with early inklings of a historical fantasy. He conjured up a mythical, pristine, agrarian Germandom, whose people had supposedly once farmed and fought over large territories. He praised the ancient Arminius (“Hermann”), who annihilated Roman legions, as “the first architect of our liberty”. To Hitler, Roman history was “the best mentor,” and Rome’s genocide of Carthage in 146BC, the “execution of a people through its own deserts”. Classical Sparta was another Nazi model, “the first racialist state”.

Along with ancient precedents, Hitler fantasised about agriculture. “I’ve just learnt,” he remarked after invading the USSR in 1941, that Roman army rations were “based on cereals”. With new German agricultural settlement, Nazi-occupied Ukraine and Russia could become “the granaries of Europe”. Germans were more advanced, Hitler claimed, because “Our ancestors were all peasants”. The German peasant “zealously exploited … every inch of ground,” and “Nothing is lovelier than horticulture”. Besides, “A solid stock of small and middle peasants has been at all times the best protection against social evils.” Nazi agrarianism, which characterised Jews as town-dwellers, reinforced anti-Semitic hatred.

Similar telltale racist, rural, archaic and expansionist thinking can be detected through the centuries in the mindset of many other genocide perpetrators and may be spotted in advance by those seeking to prevent future catastrophes.

If this cluster of attitudes on Hitler’s part forewarned the worst genocide in history, it also accompanied one of the earliest. Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato, author of perhaps the first recorded incitement to genocide, “Delenda Est Carthago” (Carthage Must be Destroyed), was an expansionist and agrarianist, determined to preserve Roman rural values against mercantile threats like Carthage. While Cato claimed descent from Spartans, his work De Agri Cultura began: “it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected.”

Genocides of indigenous peoples around the world have also betrayed preoccupations with antiquity, agrarianism, and empire. In the United States, the slaughter of Native Americans lasted more than a century, through a variety of political regimes. Yet, the justifications for killing stayed remarkably similar. In 1838, the second president of the short-lived Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, abandoned his predecessor Sam Houston’s policy of reconciliation with Indians, and moved to exterminate Cherokees and Comanches. Lamar announced: “Our young Republic has been formed by a Spartan spirit. Let it progress and ripen into Roman firmness, and Athenian gracefulness and wisdom.”

Like Rome besieged by barbarians, Lamar saw Indians attacking Texas with “Vandalic ferocity”. He imagined the Republic, “her vast extent of territory, stretching from the Sabine to the Pacific, and away to the Southwest as far as the obstinacy of the enemy may render it necessary for the sword to make the boundary; embracing the most delightful climate and the richest soil in the world, and behold it all in the state of high cultivation”. The consequences were dire for Indians.

Yet California was possibly the most extreme case. After the US annexed it in 1845, California’s Indian population fell from more than 100,000 to only 15,000. The San Francisco newspaper Alta California predicted in 1850 that Indians would vanish “like a dissipating mist before the morning sun from the presence of the Saxon”.

The US governor of California predicted that “[a] war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct”. His successor repeated that unless Indians surrendered their lands, the state would “make war upon” them, “which must of necessity be one of extermination of many of the tribes”. A San Francisco paper agreed: “Extermination is the quickest and cheapest remedy.”

Diseases, killings, and enslavement devastated northern California Indians in particular. Alta California reported: “Nearly all the children belonging to some of the Indian tribes in the northern part of the state have been stolen.” The state superintendent of Indian Affairs reported to Washington in 1856 that some “entire tribes were taken en mass”.

After US troops had massacred more than 250 California Indians by 1850, settler militia and volunteers killed thousands more. Over 2,000 Yana were reduced to 100, the estimated 12,000 Yuki to as few as 600. US Army major Edward Johnson stated in 1859: “The whites have waged a relentless war of extermination against the Yukas, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. … Some six hundred have been killed in the last year.” The San Francisco Bulletin commented: “Even the record of Spanish butcheries in Mexico and Peru has nothing so diabolical.”

J. Ross Browne, appointed by the US to investigate, later wrote sardonically that the violence stemmed in part from a commitment to “yeoman” farmers: “The federal government, as is usual in cases where the lives of valuable voters are at stake, was forced to interfere. Troops were sent out to aid the settlers in slaughtering the Indians. By means of mounted howitzers, muskets, Minie rifles, dragoon pistols, and sabres, a good many were cut to pieces. But on the whole, the general policy of the government was pacific. It was not designed to kill any more Indians than might be necessary to secure the adhesion of the honest yeomanry of the state.”

In the 20th century, territorial expansion and cults of agrarianism and antiquity preoccupied perpetrators even more. Before the genocide of a million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Young Turk ideologue Yusuf Akçura asserted that “the general trend of our era involves races”. He dreamed of an empire of all Turkic-speaking peoples “from Peking to Montenegro”. And Akçura considered the peasantry “the basic matter of the Turkish nation”. Other Young Turks also stressed the role of the “small farmer,” and thought the Turks belonged to an ancient “Turanian” subsection of the Aryan race.

Ziya Gökalp, a theoretician of the “pan-Turanian” movement, predicted in 1914: “Turkey shall be enlarged and become Turan.” He viewed “Greeks, Armenians, and Jews” as “a foreign body in the national Turkish state”. To expansionism and racism, Gökalp added a cult of Turkic antiquity: re-establishment of the golden age of pre-Islamic Turkic military leaders, like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Turkish armies pushing east would find their own origins “in the steppes of Central Asia”.

Currently, some of the top perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s are finally being tried in a UN-sponsored Tribunal in Phnom Penh. Several of the Khmer Rouge leaders, including “Brother Number One”, Pol Pot, have already died. As a youth, Pol Pot had termed himself the “Original Khmer”.

His regime’s 1976 guidebook to Cambodia’s ancient temples began: “Angkor Wat had been built between 1113 and 1152.” Ancient enemies like the local Cham minority, victims of genocide under Pol Pot in 1975-79, were perennial. The temple of Angkor Thom, the guidebook went on, was built “after the invasion of Cham troops in 1177, who had completely destroyed the capital”. Pol Pot added: “If our people can make Angkor, we can make anything.”

His Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 was of “greater significance than the Angkor period”. Stalinism and Maoism offered Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea a means to revolutionise Cambodia and rival its medieval model. The emptying by force of Cambodia’s supposedly foreign-contaminated cities would restore the rural tradition of an imagined era when “our society used to be good and clean”.

In ancient times, Rwanda was a peaceful Hutu realm, wrote a perpetrator of the 1994 genocide there. Hutus, he said, “were living harmoniously since as early as the 9th century”. Then, supposedly in the 16th century, came a race of interlopers, the “Tutsis from Abyssinia”. A Hutu Power radio station added an agrarian theme: “Tutsi are nomads and invaders who came to Rwanda in search of pasture.”

During the 1994 genocide, the radio urged audiences to “exterminate the Tutsi from the globe”. A listener who became a killer recalled broadcasts saying, “while a Hutu is cultivating, he has a gun,” and “When the enemy comes up, you shoot at each other. When he retreats, then you take up your hoe and cultivate!” The hunt for Tutsis was expressed in agrarian slogans like “separate the grass from the millet,” and “pull out the poison ivy together with its roots”.

Modernisation and urbanisation, accelerating worldwide since 1945, have broadly undermined traditional rural communities, but that has only intensified the narrow demands of extremist groups for restoration of pristine identities, including racial and agrarian values, and the recovery of “lost” territories. The racist fear of “contamination” often goes hand in hand with notions of the utility and virtue of the small farmer, the loss of a glorious past, and the brutal imperative of territorial conquest. In combination, these notions have led to genocide. Their expression may provide early warning of catastrophes to come.

Others may already be in progress, especially among remote indigenous communities that do not receive the attention they deserve. Small Indian groups in the Amazon region are very vulnerable. According to The Economist, Ecuador’s rainforest “is shrinking faster than in neighbouring countries (by 1.67 per cent a year). It has been ravaged by logging, poachers and oil extraction … Native tribes have been uprooted, forced deeper into the forest or have disappeared.” The New York Times recently reported of Brazil’s Kamayurá people, “A Tribal Extinction is Feared as the Rainforest Falls”.

Especially now that we have the knowledge to identify a cluster of factors that point toward possible genocide, the international community has a responsibility to protect such people.

This article draws on the author's August 5 lecture to the Sydney Democracy Forum, and on his recent book, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale/Melbourne University Press). Blood and Soil won the 2008 gold medal for the best work of history, awarded by the US Independent Publishers’ association. In June, its German edition Erde und Blut won Germany’s Nonfiction Book of the Month Prize.

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.

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Comments

This centuries biggest genocide which has not been exposed widely, yet all our Governments know about it -is the UN called Genocide of Falun Gong inside China. Here are some more recent articles .

Ethan Gutmans China's Gruesome Organ Harvest
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000%5C000%5C015%5C824qbcjr.asp

David Matas International Human rights lawyer and former Nazi hunter wrote -Commemorating the Falun Gong persecution in China
http://atruechineserenaissance.blogspot.com/2009/07/commemorating-persecution-in-china-by.html

Guardian UK reports before the 10 year anniversary of the persecution

China's Falun Gong crackdown: 'The persecution is almost underground'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/18/china-falun-gong-crackdown
by Jana Banana, Monday, 24 August 2009 11:52:52 AM

The author of this article seems to have forgotten to mention Stalin.

As stated in 'The New KGB,' by William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley:

"There is no dispute about the enormity of Hitler's Holocaust. But it is equally important to be made aware of the accomplishments of Stalin and the Soviet secret police, which brought death to at least four times as many Russians, Poles, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Gypsies, and Romanians as Hitler did in his eleven years as a leader of the '1,000-year Reich."

Concentration camps -- on both sides of the front---operated at a high pitch prior to and during the war years. The USSR policy of mass murder (genocide) preceded that of Nazi Germany, most notably with the artificial Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, the wholesale destruction of the Russian peasantry, and later of the peasantry and intelligentsia in the occupied territories as well.

As Joseph Sobran stated in,"The Holocausts (plural)" The Washington Times, April 23, 1985:

"Hitler, it is well to remember, was only one of the practitioners of the century's most ghastly innovations... and he was not even the worst. Lenin preceded him in numbers: Stalin and Mao killed far more people...Communism has proved a far more potent and persistent evil than Naziism, which was a brief flare-up by comparison...But this generation, my generation, the generation that was spared the experience of Hitler, has no right to denounce 'the Holocaust,' as long as we shut our eyes to the Holocaust in progress..."

While the Nazis, have been pursued all over the world for their crimes, the other half, the communist criminals, were allowed to go free. They were in effect, given tacit permission to continue the operation of their concentration camps, to expand their draconian systems to include psychiatric wards, thereby raising torture, suppression, and murder to a sscience. The fact that the process persisted was vividly disclosed to the free world by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, in his book, 'The Gulag Archipelago.'
by Foxy, Monday, 24 August 2009 2:53:49 PM

“The new Queensland program is part of a worldwide attempt to stop genocides by recognising early warning signs and acting to prevent them. In addition to tracking proximate causes of genocides, scholars and activists can draw on historical cases to identify possible perpetrators and propose timely preventive action.”

The rest of the article is about historical events except the final words
“Especially now that we have the knowledge to identify a cluster of factors that point toward possible genocide, the international community has a responsibility to protect such people.”

So a lot of talk and no solution except the feeble statement “the international community has a responsibility to protect. . . . “

Maybe we could qualify “the international community….”

Perhaps even go so far as to suggest “through the auspice of the United Nations”

To be honest the entire article is a farce. A very black farce.

Genocides occur because the UN and other bodies representing the “International Community”, like most politically motivated and hamstrung organizations, spend more time attending to the betterment of the bureaucrats and the politicians who work for them than existence of any “victims of genocide” who need “preventive action”.

The article makes not one “preventive” proposal or suggestion.

This article would suggest, therefore that “The new Queensland program” is likely to be as effective at reducing the real incidence of genocide as the UN has been at preventing it in the past.

In short, just another bunch of tossers snuggling their snouts deeper into the public purse.
by Col Rouge, Monday, 24 August 2009 3:43:52 PM

And of course abortion is the biggest genocide of all time but their is no voice for the unborn.
by runner, Monday, 24 August 2009 3:55:35 PM

Runner >"And of course abortion is the biggest genocide of all time but their is no voice for the unborn."
I beg to differ Runner! You are always there to have your say against choice for pregnant women, no matter what the current topic.
by suzeonline, Monday, 24 August 2009 4:51:54 PM

Oh Col,

'In short, just another bunch of tossers snuggling their snouts deeper into the public purse.'

I so agree!
by Houellebecq, Monday, 24 August 2009 5:06:18 PM

re Genocide in Palestine.

"Leaders start to draw on their historical right to the land." Why do Jews think they have a right to push Palestinians off the lands they have lived on for 2000 years?
by billie, Monday, 24 August 2009 5:43:45 PM

All the comments confuse mass murder , political repression, abortion,etc,etc with genocide,and thus render the concept meaningless.
In an otherwise impressive discussion of genuine genocide, in the form of the Holocaust, Kiernan, surprisingly, shares a common blind spot-more Russians than Jews were extermined as "untermensch" ( though, of course,many were Russian Jews.
Leslie
by Leslie, Monday, 24 August 2009 6:33:35 PM


Good point Leslie. I'm surprised no mention was made of Tasmania, or indeed of many Australian mainland nations.
by Grim, Monday, 24 August 2009 9:20:13 PM

what about the genocide of us victims who were raped and abused and made slaves , for by the goverments and churches of australia in their state and territories , institutions , orphanages , girls homes, boys homes, remand centres, church homes run by the goverment , foster homes , out of home care , and many more and it is still happening till this day ,

and its about time the australian goverment apologized to us victims the forgotten australians

and stop the cover up of what we had suffered as children in these institutions , run by the goverment of australia ,

for refrence read the senate reports, Forgotten Australians dated August 2004 And The Second report Protecting Vulnerable children dated March 2005, And The recent report Lost Innocents Ad Forgotten Austrlians revisted

we are real victims of the goverment of Australias GENOCIDE
by huffnpuff, Monday, 24 August 2009 10:52:37 PM

Foxy,
Well said. Once again Stalin's atrocities get airbrushed out of history.

The problem is that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot destroy the University of Queensland's over-simplified thesis. These were not people who fantasised after a mythical past. They envisioned an equally mythical future.

The VACUITY of Queensland University's analysis may be seen from the way some of the worst current genocides, such as those occurring, in Sudan, fall outside the pattern. Any analysis which fails to account for something occurring under the analyst's nose is, to put it politely, male bovine excrement.

Kiernan's article is an example of academic equine fertiliser at its smelliest. The reality is that ANY totalitarian ideology contains the seeds of genocide. That applies equally to Nazism, Communism, extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Islam.
by stevenlmeyer, Monday, 24 August 2009 11:32:58 PM

"The reality is that ANY totalitarian ideology contains the seeds of genocide. That applies equally to Nazism, Communism, extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Islam."

Actually Nationalism is not typical of a totalitarian regime where allegiance is demanded rather than expected. It's more a form of extreme patriotism within democracies.

No mention then of the 800,000 more recently killed within a 3 month period in Rwanda, a mostly Catholic democratic republic - or the mass killing of Muslims in Kosovo?

I think that all people are capable of all sorts of atrocities given the right circumstances. The greater the level of (extreme) patriotism, the greater the tendency toward "ethnic cleansing".

It's OK for Runner to bemoan the incidence of abortion but once the babies are born they are "fair game" for whatever predudices come their way or is dropping a bomb on a pregnant woman not a form of abortion too?
by wobbles, Tuesday, 25 August 2009 2:24:04 AM

I note with interest your use of Mirabeau Lamar as an example of one perpetrating genocide. Lamar did indeed forcibly expel the Cherokee from Texas and urge wars of extermination against the Comanche and other Indian nations. Interestingly, as a schoolboy, the future Texas president wrote an essay addressing the question, "Were the Europeans justified in their conquest of North America?" The teenage Lamar believed strongly that they were not. As an adult, however, Lamar viewed Indians as less than human. He offered only expulsion or death to his nation's native inhabitants. Those interested can read more at this link:

http://blog.jeffreyskerr.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6:deja-vu-all-over-again&catid=1:jeff&Itemid=3
by jkerr, Tuesday, 25 August 2009 7:16:42 AM

wobbles I would not completely disagree with you but would offer that Genocide is a Special Case within Mass Murder.

"The reality is that ANY totalitarian ideology contains the seeds of MASS MURDER. That applies equally to Nazism, Communism, extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Islam." - With that modification, I would agree with the statement.

Some of the posters and the author seem to use one term for the other and mostly denote some mass muder as Genocide when it is not - genocide is the deliberate wiping out of a "specific group or sub-group of people" is it not? Just murdering a lot of people is not necessarliy Genocide.

I think genocide is used when you want Mass Murder to seem even worse than it is. The term has become cheapened by the media applying it to all mass murder, or supposed mass murder - e.g. the giving of blankets infested with small pox to South American Indians, was not so much deliberate as accidental. The Europeans were used to and somewhat immune to a lot of the diseases they passed on to the new world's people.

Genocide when used by a people who are clearly alive and well, seems redundant - or have I misunderstood what it means, or its new common usage?
by odo, Tuesday, 25 August 2009 3:16:52 PM

Odo
Up to a point I agree with you. Not every mass murder should be labelled a "genocide".

However the meaning of words changes through usage. For better or worse the word "genocide" has come to mean a mass murder of exceptional scale.

In fact in some cases there need not even be a "mass murder" before the word "genocide" is used. Israel has been accused of committing "genocide" against the Palestinians. See for example:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3359209,00.html
and
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6374.shtml

It is also not exactly clear where to draw the line. Few mass murderers are honest about their intentions. The Sudanese government would never admit that it wants to kill all Darfuris or Christian / Animist South Sudanese; but, to most observers, that appears to be exactly what Abdullah Omar's regime is / was attempting.

On a more practical level I doubt it makes much difference to the victims whether they are slaughtered in a "genocide" or a "mere" mass murder.

The article raises another interesting point.

AT WHAT POINT SHOULD WE TAKE EXPRESSIONS OF HATRED BASED ON RACE, ETHNICITY OR RELIGION SERIOUSLY?

At least some of the five men Melbourne men arrested for allegedly plotting an attack on Holsworthy army barracks appear to have a hatred towards non-Muslims. See:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/melbourne-terror-suspect-hates-australians-20090825-exe9.html

Quote:

"One of five men charged over an alleged suicide terror plot to kill soldiers at a Sydney army barracks hates Australians and anyone who does not follow Islam, a court has been told."

Should we fear a future attempt at genocide from at least some strains of Islam?
by stevenlmeyer, Tuesday, 25 August 2009 5:41:40 PM

It is sad that in this article on genocide there was no mention of the colonisation of Australia.

Genocide, by all the definitions, was enacted in Australia against the Indigenous peoples.
by Aka, Tuesday, 25 August 2009 5:53:23 PM

Aka it's sad that some try to be deliberately inflamatory in this forum.

The Brits did not come to this country to wipe out the inhabitants, indeed they considered it "terra nullus". Do you believe the Brits had a plan to do that, of course they didn't they tried very hard to get along, it is well recorded in the first fleet's records.

Typical of the bleeding heart industry and its supporters ot try to hijack a debate like this.

Notice most folks instantly left the forum, tired of the same old same old whine and emotive cry.

Australians don't believe there was "genocide" of the aboriginals, that's an emotive tool that gained favour in the Howard years, before the "apology".

There are still aboriginal Australians? Then there was not a genocide, by several definitions. There may have been mass murder on occassions, or even lots of singular murders, but that does not mean there was a policy or plan to rid the country of people.

Do you know what a "troll" is Aka, in the internet forum sense, it's someone who deliberatley tries to be controversial and offensive so as to provoke emotional responses.
by odo, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 4:52:44 AM

Although there are efforts to dilute the meaning of 'genocide' by inappropriate use or by equating it with mass murder, I think that the discussion would benefit from some definitional precision. The UN definition of genocide is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG):

" Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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

Under this definition, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide would be included, as would be deliberate efforts to exterminate the Cherokees and other Native American nations, and indeed Australian Aborigines.

Despite the enormity of Stalin's crimes, I think that most of his victims wouldn't fit the UN definition - while the historical situation in Australia would.

So odo, you're talking through your hat - aka has identified as an Indigenous academic and her comment about Aborigines was spot on, whether you agree or not.

It is hardly trolling to point out that Ben Kiernan's analysis doesn't mention (nor account for) the Australian example - which is undoubtedly the main reason he doesn't mention the deliberate efforts by Australian settlers and their governments to exterminate and expropriate Aboriginal people in Australia.

Incidentally stevenlmeyer, Kiernan hails from Yale University, not the University of Queensland.
by CJ Morgan, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 8:13:49 AM

Odo, I suggest you research Tasmanian Aboriginals more thoroughly. There was a deliberate, and ultimately successful campaign to exterminate them.

Likewise, out of the estimated 500+ nations that existed around 1788, I think about 240 still exist.

Please understand, there was and is no 'aboriginal nation'. There were over 500 nations, as distinct from each other in language and culture as the French are to the Spanish, or the Jews are to the Palestinians.

By any definition, that's genocide.

CJ, you're undoubtedly correct about the author, however, the opening sentence to this article is:
"The University of Queensland’s Asia-Pacific Centre..."

I wonder if the lack of any mention about Australian genocide is possibly due to the sensibilities of those like Odo.
by Grim, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 8:54:48 AM

Billie, palestinians have not been living in the area that the Romans called Palestine, for 2000 years.

Just after the Arab-Muslim induced war of independence (for Israel), the UN made a decision to regard all those who fled the war and ended up in refugee camps on the perimetre of the new state of Israel as refugees of the war. The UN also decided to regard any of these refugees as a resident of the area if they had lived there for 2 years, which has no precedent in international law - a much more common criteria is 2 or 3 generations.

When the Muslim armies invaded palestiune in 634AD, they found a mostly Christian and Jewish population, which they proceeded to murder, enslave, deport and, when the economy began to collapse for lack of a population, discriminate against in their own (former) country. Throughout this time (ie 1400 years) Jews and Christians have remained in the area, and remained true to their faiths and communities under desperate circumstances. As did the Samaritans, and a few other groups not usually heard from.

When a significant number of Jews decided to begin moving into the area, from around the 1820s, they began a process that resulted in the attempt to re-establish a Jewish state in the area that Jews have been associated with for 4000 years.

What the Queensland study seems to miss, for all its focus on the genocides of Jews by both Hitler and Stalin, is that one of the genocides waiting to happen is of the Jews currently living in Israel by the Arab-Muslims who surround them.

Perhaps the evidence - persistent statements by both the political elites and the populace of these countries to eliminate Israel as a state and kill all the Jewish occupants - is so obvious that the Queenslanders can't see it.

When the 'palestinians' and the overwhelming majority of Muslims - Arab and not - call off their war against Israel and Jews in general, there will be peace in the Middle-East, but not before.
by camo, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 9:19:23 AM

CJ Morgan,
“Under this definition, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide would be included, as would be deliberate efforts to exterminate the Cherokees and other Native American nations, and indeed Australian Aborigines.”

Assuming that we accept the UN definition as appropriate(!)

And assuming we accept the “stolen Generations” saga as wholly bad/ of absolutely no merit (and, I’m sure you will quickly conclude that it was) it still leaves the question, if the children removed during this process where half white and half black, how do you determine which side was the most sinned against?

Sorry, I'll rephrase that, as I'm sure -- you --would have absolutely no trouble at all making a one-eyed determination regarding that: how would an objective observer determine which side was most sinned again?
by Horus, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 1:32:37 PM

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