Finally, what gives this escalation its sustained genocidal character is the “dysmentalization” that Israel is experiencing: the gradual erosion and acute extinction of empathy with the victimized community, the “ever sharper separation between the regime’s people and the target people.”

The genocidal dynamic hinges on this mental, social, cultural, and political separation. It is maintained by militaristic self-aggrandizement and racist denigration, and leads to a persistent moral distancing between “civilized” Israeli society and “barbaric” Gaza squalor. Even after the last rounds are fired and final shells are launched, that genocidal dynamic will still be present.

Rwanda’s tragic and shocking violence of 1994 indelibly etched itself on the global conscience. The violence has become a paradigmatic case of genocide and, thanks to a wealth of careful...

elying on an academic consensus based on statements of experts on genocide, human rights, human rights law and Holocaust historians.

cultural genocide through dystopian digital surveillance and Orwellian re-education

"One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is “to prevent problems before they happen” -- in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance."

"Sauytbay called the detention center a “concentration camp...much more horrifying than prison,” with rape, brainwashing and torture in a “black room” were people screamed. She and another former prisoner, Zaomure Duwati, also told the ICIJ detainees were given medication that made them listless and obedient, and every move was surveilled."

"The documents make clear that many of those detained have not actually done anything. One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is “to prevent problems before they happen” -- in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance."

“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. “That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of Xinjiang. “This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. “That’s a genocidal policy.”

Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? The Chinese refer to the 19th century, during which the British oppressed them with two opium wars, as the Century of Humiliation. Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.