Readers are fully capable of fact-checking JM Sorrell’s Sept. 3 column “Moral inversion insanity.” For her claim the war began on October 7th, I’d recommend search terms like “Nakba,” “Gaza blockade,” and “longest ongoing military occupation.” On Israel’s multiculturalism, try “Nation State Law.” Regarding pinkwashing, “Israel same-sex marriage legal?” and “has Israel or Hamas killed more queer Palestinians?”
But I wish to underscore how broad ethnonationalist characterizations, like Sorrell’s of Israelis and Palestinians, echo across history — and what it means that the Gazette just published them under a featured columnist.
Portraying entire populations as immoral, dangerous, and subhuman is an age-old tool for making their extermination seem tolerable, even necessary. Take the CUP press smearing Armenians as “seditious” and a “cancer,” or Goebbels demeaning Jews as “parasites” (a term also used by the Khmer Rouge) and “morally depraved.” It’s seen in atrocity hoaxes, like 40 beheaded babies on October 7th, Serbia’s Vukovar child massacre hoax, and RTLM’s lies about Tutsi cannibalism.
Similarly, genocidal regimes tout their own as “pure,” “noble,” “civilized,” or “moral” (self-ascribed terms from Nazi Germany’s Aryans, Pakistan’s “martial race,” the Khmer Rouge’s “pure peasants,” and Rwanda’s “authentic” Hutus). These recycled narratives thrive in local media, making them feel intimate and trustworthy.
When a Gazette column degrades Palestinians as “sociopathic nihilists,” “morally repugnant,” and “deeply dangerous,” while vaunting Israelis as “aspirational” and part of a “life-affirming, expansively caring culture,” the publication places itself among the long line of media complicit in promoting genocidal rhetoric — a lineage history doesn’t remember kindly.
Nate Watson
Northampton