“Princeton University is offering a new course titled ‘Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide’ that compares the Israel–Hamas conflict to the Holocaust” and says genocide has occurred in Gaza. “The class is instructed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a self-identified ‘noted Palestinian feminist’ who has publicly denied that Hamas killed babies or raped women during the Oct. 7 massacre,” reports Campus Reform.
According to the course description, students will examine “how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival” through “decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought.” …
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s appointment comes despite her controversial record. She retired under pressure from Hebrew University of Jerusalem last year following a suspension and brief arrest on incitement charges.
“It’s time to abolish Zionism…They will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian said.
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The legal definition, established by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group.
Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Gazans, out of a total population of over 2 million, doesn’t seem like genocide because the killings leave well over 90% of Gaza’s population alive, and the deaths are mostly either of combatants, or unintended civilian deaths (collateral damage). Israel has killed a smaller percentage of the civilian population in two years of war than died in Berlin in 1945 in just two weeks, when the Russians took over Berlin in the Battle of Berlin. Estimates of the percentage of civilians among the dead in Gaza range from just under 50% to as high as 87%. Even the higher figure may be below the percentage of civilian deaths in some other Middle Eastern conflicts, and many civilian deaths occurred due to the fact that Hamas often used civilians as human shields and operated out of hospitals and residential neighborhoods, making it harder for Israel to root out Hamas without also unintentionally killing civilians.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian doesn’t seem to have acknowledged the existence of other well-known genocides, such as the genocide committed by ISIS against the Yazidi population of Iraq and Syria. Nor does she appear to have recognized the ongoing genocide committed against certain black African ethnic groups by Arab militias in Sudan’s Darfur region, even though that genocide was formally recognized by the State Department this year, and earlier by officials of the European Union. A militia, the Rapid Support Forces, earlier slaughtered thousands of Masalit civilians after seizing the city of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur State, and recently slaughtered tens of thousands of Zaghawa and Fur civilians after seizing the city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. So many were killed in El Fasher that pools of blood were visible from outer space, reports the BBC. Shalhoub-Kevorkian doesn’t seem to have any concern about that recent, apparently ongoing genocide.
