Stan Grant points out in his book The Queen is Dead that “… I cannot but see in China what White nations have done the world over. Genocide is genocide. Under their flags, nations committed to Whiteness have erased entire populations, mine included. They have not been held to account. No, genocide is a word they reserve for others” (page 29). As Grant points out, those who accuse China of genocide are beneficiaries of the fruits of colonialism on which European and American economic dominance was achieved, and a close look at that history shows that genocide was a major means of acquiring the lands which produced that wealth.
Accusations of genocide are being levelled against Israel now as mass starvation of Palestinians is beginning to take its toll, as truckloads of urgently needed supplies are waiting for approval to deliver their lifesaving cargoes into Gaza, but waiting, seeming endlessly for permission to enter the sealed off region. The accusations are slowly rising to a crescendo, but ever so slowly as the feed of information is being stifled, as reporter numbers have been decimated, so many counted among the collateral damage of the war zone. Those who remain find it all but impossible to access signals for their phones to operate, or even to be able to recharge their phones.
The genocide Stan Grant refers to is the decimation of indigenous populations through the time of European colonial expansion, beginning with Columbus leading the way into the Caribbean and Americas as Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British established plantations producing sugar and tobacco to satisfy growing demand in their homelands and establishing remote prisons either to use the convicts as cheap sources of labour or to place them far from home, to be out of sight and out of mind and if the prisoners wouldn’t work, kidnap people from Africa and enslave them to do the work.
European colonisers brought with them their faith, their beliefs, their Christianity. As they stole the lands, raped indigenous women and killed those who stood in their way, they preached the gospel of Grace through Christ, introducing Biblical law. Somehow there was nothing ironic in on the one hand stealing the land, raping women and killing those who stood in the way and preaching a faith which has a foundational law creed set out in the Ten Commandments which include the laws not to kill, steal or commit adultery. Christian Europeans after all are ‘God’s People’.
The tone deafness of Israeli leaders and the slowness of American and European leaders to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis in Gaza (and the West Bank) is equally disturbing. Women and children are dying, effectively being starved to death as aid is being held up. And those who object to the measures being taken in response to an attack on Israel which took 1200 lives and a 240 hostages is charged with being antisemitic. It took South Africa to first raise the charge of genocide, a nation which suffered under and emerged from the yoke of colonialism.
Judaism, the religion of Israel has the same laws; laws given to Moses and central to the promise of the land to their forebears. The books containing those laws are common across Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But those laws are interesting in that it seems they only apply to those people who claim to be ‘God’s People’. When we consider the first of the Ten Commandments it becomes clear that they really are about ‘God’s People’. The first four deal with the relationship with God, exclusively worship only that one God, make no idols or use His name in vain and reserve the Sabbath as a holy day devoted to the worship of the only God. Next follows commandments of the relationship within the body of ‘God’s People’.
The laws were received and very shortly after, according to the Biblical book of Exodus, that same God instructed the people to exterminate the Amalekites (Exodus 17:14) and the Israeli Prime Minister referenced that as a rationalisation for the severity of the attacks on Gaza after October 7.
It seems the laws given were for ‘God’s People’, those who were not included became fair game, the laws apparently do not apply to them. Further, the promise of God to Joshua as he replaced Moses as leader of the ancient Israelites was that the land being given would “… extend from the desert to Lebanon and from the great river, the Euphrates – all the Hittite country – to the Mediterranean Sea…” (Joshua 1:3-4). From the river to the sea is the stated aim of Netanyahu, Israeli territory will be from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean… or did he mean the Euphrates?
It is not surprising that Palestinians are treated as contemptouosly as they are when they are clearly not defined as ‘God’s People’.
The disregard for indigenous peoples by colonial powers was equally contemptuous, the rapacity for land unbridled greed, lands stolen, people killed and missionaries followed close behind to wipe out indigenous cultures replacing it with adoration for Jesus. The laws did not apply to the conquered, only to ‘God’s People’.
But it is worthy of note that the Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948 was written as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust during which over six million European Jews were killed for no other reason than they were Jews, and we should also recognise that several million Gypsies suffered that same fate and did various other groups; homosexuals, people with mental disabilities, and others who were in one way or another marginalised. But then, that declaration is aspirational. Not law.
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