After another year of the Gaza genocide, a catastrophe now widely verified as such, it’s remarkable to see supposedly informed people still speaking in either ignorant or wilful denial of that genocide, and continuing to defend the defenders of it.
Such are the latest utterances of Herald columnist Kevin McKenna.
McKenna’s previous indulgence of Israel’s protectors, denigration of Palestinian marches, and genocide denial has been duly addressed – alongside the similar spurious claims of Times columnist Iain Macwhirter.
In his latest iteration, McKenna repeats the same facile charges, while still showing no basic comprehension of what, as specified by the Genocide Convention, actually constitutes a genocide.
Israel is not just an apartheid state, it’s a genocidal regime. A major UN Commission report has just issued that unequivocal statement, joining all major global human rights groups and the highest-ranked International Association of Genocide Scholars in that view.
McKenna not only remains silent on a genocide being carried out in plain sight, giving ongoing protection to pro-Israel organisations working hard to obscure it, he has again castigated the pro-Palestinian movement as a hate-fuelled entity, alleging, with puerile prose, that “Glasgow’s Ladybird Big Book of Marxism devotees and flag-worriers” are serving to make “overt hatred of Jews acceptable throughout Scotland”.
The following statement has been posted by the Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee in response to McKenna’s shoddy article.
May it serve as an appropriate correction to McKenna’s disgraceful distortions, and as guidance to what complicity in a genocide actually looks like.
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Kevin McKenna Response
/ Statements / By GGEC Admin
The Herald’s Kevin McKenna has written a truly deceitful, ignorant and shameful article ‘commemorating’ 7 October 2023, defending Israel and its supporters, denying the genocide, and attacking our pro-Palestinian movement.
Lamentably, he and others amongst some of Scotland’s lauded commentariat have not only been squirmingly silent on Israel’s genocide, they don’t even appear to know, or at least dare to acknowledge, what actually constitutes one.
http://johnhilley.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-gaza-genocide-and-7-october.html?m=1
In two full years running the Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee, we have never witnessed any of the hateful antisemitism McKenna so mendaciously describes.
You will hear or see no anti-Jewish chants or placards, or any other kind of antisemitic sentiment at our supposed ‘hate marches’ or other events.
People here have been on the streets protesting solely, relentlessly and with honourable intent against the genocide being carried out by Israel’s savage regime.
McKenna’s attack on pro-Palestinian marchers, indeed his entire piece, resorts to the same specious conflation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. It also serves to inflame social tensions and divisions.
McKenna’s indulgence of Glasgow Friends of Israel is no less appalling. This is a group, as its title suggests, standing on the street in unwavering support of the apartheid and genocidal entity.
The outpourings of this organisation, from its street stall to its online platforms, has been no less virulent.
This organisation is being opposed by pro-Palestinian voices, not, as McKenna asserts, because of their religious affiliations, but because of their open friendship with Israel and complicit support for a genocide.
As with McKenna, they, of course deny it’s a genocide. So, who to trust in? McKenna and GFI? Or those who set out the actual meaning and conditions of a genocide, as encoded in the Genocide Convention, alongside the recent affirmations of the UN, Amnesty and every major human rights group, as well as every noted genocide scholar in the world – all of whom have now unequivocally declared it a genocide.
McKenna cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the systematic scale and depravity of the genocidal slaughter, enforced starvation and apocalyptic landscape of Gaza, posturing instead around his ‘concerns’ about Netanyahu and the ‘excesses’ of the Israeli government.
Nor, like so many proclaiming to be actual journalists, is there the remotest attempt to report the historical context and key circumstances behind the events of 7 October, including the legal right of Palestinians to resist their occupation and siege, or Israel’s culpability in the deaths of many of its own on that day through deployment of its notorious Hannibal Directive.
McKenna’s dismissive denigration of pro-Palestinian marches also gives sustenance to Keir Starmer’s “this is un-British” flag-wrapping rhetoric, and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud’s dangerous doubling-down on our elementary right to protest. This tawdry article only feeds that right-wing, dog-whistle politics, castigating those who would dare support the ‘foreign other’.
Informed understanding about the growing mood across the country – and world at large – at seeing, being horrified by, and coming out against the industrial-scale extermination of Gaza is instead reduced, for McKenna, to watching “the faces of the weekend middle-class parades through the city looking for a cause.” And is it remotely true, or responsible to headline, that “antisemitism rules [the] UK”?
Conversely, is it any surprise that the leading figure of GFI himself can stand literally with right-wing Reform figures like Thomas Kerr, and amongst others at a far-right rally? Has McKenna been watching those ‘weekend faces’ in and around Buchanan Street, all looking for an aligned cause?
Kevin McKenna is a genocide denier, a craven apologist for the regime’s street supporters, and a false witness against all those who have stood with good moral conviction in support of Palestine.
History will record all those complicit in Israel’s genocidal crimes. And this spurious article places this one firmly on the wrong historical side.
GGEC
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