THIS is genocidal

[The Magistrate]

6. This Is Well Over The Line, Sir

Leaving to one side that his claim has absolutely no foundation in law, that there is no way in which voting for a government which then goes to war renders anyone a combatant, and that there is no circumstance under present law in which cutting off the food supply to a civil populace is not considered a crime of war, the thing fails even in what it attempts to pass as hard-boiled analysis.

It is certainly true the population of Germany paid a high price in the Second World War. Civilians were taken as target of massive and indiscriminate bombing campaigns, lasting for years. And I do not consider this to have been criminal. It was an effective means of assailing an aggressor engaged in wholesale atrocity; indeed it was for a time the only effective means of assailing that atrocious aggressor. I am sympathetic to arguments of necessity.

But to pretend the actions of Hamas, and the capabilities of Hamas, equate to those of Nazi Germany, is beneath contempt, and further, can only be done by someone with great contempt for the people he is addressing, if he actually expects them to swallow the claimed equivalence and smile and nod afterwards. The Nazis wielded one of the greatest military capabilities ever seen on this planet; it took the combined exertion of foes many times their number and of much greater industrial power, to bring them to a halt and then to defeat. And all the while they were engaged in murdering millions.

Hamas in its capabilities compares to this rather like a fire-cracker to a string of half-ton bombs. Hamas may well dream of doing everything Hitler did, but Hamas is utterly incapable of actually doing it, and is certainly not actually doing it at present. So there is no way that one could plead necessity, that one is admittedly doing great evil, but only to ward off a greater evil actually present and certainly impending, and that one has no other means available to do this but the commission of great evil. That is a respectable argument, that can be pressed in dire straits, and may be necessary in the direst --- but it does not apply here.