https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-defenders-wield-words-as-weapons-91713cee?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
John F. Kennedy said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” From Pericles to Abraham Lincoln, words have often been as effective as armaments in shoring up a people’s defenses, reinforcing an army’s resolve, or inspiring a unit’s bravery.
But in war, as in peace, words can also be used to demoralize and disorient. They can be used—and have been—more deviously by the enemy, and its quill-, microphone- and laptop-carrying enablers and propagandists, to obfuscate and confuse, to seed doubt in a just cause.
The war in the Middle East is a month old but it is producing plenty of the latter. From the streets of American and European cities, television studios, newspaper columns and legislatures, we are being bombarded with rhetoric that seeks to persuade us not to believe what we see, to convince us that right is wrong, justice is tyranny, terrorism is heroism.
I’ve lost count of the number of words that are being manipulated in this way. All kinds of cunning efforts have been used to get us to see that the country whose citizens were wantonly slaughtered on Oct. 7 by an enemy that has sworn to wipe it from the planet is in fact the wicked oppressor. But here are a few of the highlights:
• Cease-fire. This is the most frequently used and superficially persuasive misuse of terminology. “Cease-fire” sounds straightforwardly decent. Who could object to the cessation of hostilities that are killing and wounding thousands?
Nine days after the attack, 13 Democrats in Congress submitted a resolution urging that the Biden administration “immediately call for and facilitate de-escalation and a cease-fire to urgently end the current violence.”
But we know what that would mean: victory for Hamas. It would mean that the terrorist group should be allowed to continue to run a statelet only a few weeks after it has made good on its commitment to attack its neighbor and done so with complete disregard for international law or common decency.
Even after Hamas’s leader helpfully spelled out that, in the event of a cease-fire, the terror group would reinitiate hostilities again and again until it had killed every Jew.
• Genocide. “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people,” says a video posted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), in one of many such claims by opponents of Israel. There is something especially malignant about this term to describe Israel’s operation—and those propagating it know that full well. They know its resonance in the history of the Jewish people, and they use it deliberately to equate what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis with a military action today that is justified in self-defense, but which inevitably, tragically results in large numbers of civilian casualties—often because Hamas itself deliberately exposes civilians to harm.
To use this term is a form of Holocaust denial. If you can suggest that what Israel is doing in Gaza is equivalent to what happened in the gas chambers, then you are explicitly reducing the Holocaust to the level of a regrettable byproduct of a legitimate military campaign. That apparently so many of our young people—and a disturbing number of elected Democratic officials—seem to believe this is shaming.
• Decolonization. This is a favorite term of the obfuscators and apologists for terror, partially because it neatly ties up the whole intersectional, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory baloney with what is supposedly happening in the Middle East.
