Last week, Zack Polanski stood in front of a crowd of several hundred British sixth-form students and declared to much applause, ‘End the genocide [in Gaza]… We have to stand up for the Palestinians.’ This was to be the defining message of the conference.

Later that day, Zarah Sultana, the Your Party MP for Coventry South, dedicated five of her fifteen minutes addressing the crowd to the plight of the Gazans under IDF occupation and the ‘genocide’ currently unfolding there. (You may recall her party: that is because its leader, the infamous antisemite Jeremy Corbyn, recently shared the centuries-old blood libel, albeit in new clothes, that the Israelis, by which he means the Jews, were harvesting organs from dead Palestinian Arab women’s bodies in Gaza.) This charge has become increasingly common in certain political circles since the outbreak of the war following Hamas’ October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

This word, we must understand, carries extraordinary legal and moral weight: under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires a specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets that threshold is disputed, and Israel rejects the accusation categorically. The proceedings brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice are ongoing.

During the Q&A following her speech, Sultana answered a question on the war in Iran. Let us take into account that, even by the most conservative estimates available, over 30,000 civilians have been killed for protesting against the regime. That is a genocide. It is almost half of the number of civilians reported killed by Israel by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between terrorist fighters and civilians.

Sultana had followed in Polanski’s footsteps and attracted much applause from the audience (of whom, according to the survey filled in by the attendees before they entered, a third would vote Green, one of the most extreme left political parties available in Britain that has actually won any seats of late), but there was little in her response that would indicate the same desire for Iranian freedom. When questioned, she replied that we ought not to intervene in these events and that the Iranian people, the civilians massacred in droves by the regime, should carve out their own path towards liberation. Such nuance.

She announced to the audience that any self-respecting left-winger must unequivocally condemn the killing of the Iranian Supreme Leader. I ask here, has anyone bothered to consult the Iranian people on this issue? These ‘useful idiots’ of the extreme left, as the saying goes, are horrified about the targeted killing of the leader of the axis of terror, who has funded terrorist programs across the Western World, from Paris to London to Washington – and, lest we forget, all sorts of support for Hezbollah, numerous Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various others in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere through the Middle East. These all aim to create instability in the region.

And instability is what they have created – not solely in the Middle East, but all across the world. Khamenei declared repeatedly that his mission is to erase the values the West holds dear. The likes of Polanski and Sultana and the overwhelming majority of liberal discourse following this have expressed much outrage about this; the Iranian people, on the other hand, are over the moon! One Iranian friend in attendance with me at the conference turned to me immediately after her address and said, ‘I couldn’t stand what she was saying.’

The issue at play here is that of buzzwords. The likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana and Zack Polanski speak about Gaza because the very word ‘genocide’ has become a buzzword. And, whether or not it is a genocide, where is their outrage about the other genocides currently unfolding around the world that have not reached the same popular status? Why is ‘genocide’ a rallying cry in one context, but not in another? Why does one conflict mobilize tens of thousands of students worldwide, while others struggle to command even a fraction of that same rhetorical urgency? Where is the outrage about the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, who since 2017 have seen 10,000 members of their community killed in cold blood; about the Darfur genocide in Sudan, of which 300,000 have been murdered according to UN estimates; the many thousands of Yazidis murdered by ISIS in Iraq and Syria; or, for that matter, the genocide of over 1,195 Israelis on October 7? Where are the calls for peace now?

I have one answer: there are no calls for peace, because it is not a buzzword.

This is a common theme in the political rhetoric of the extreme left, to resort to buzzwords to capture the attention of their young target audience, allowing them – misleading them – to believe that every issue may be definitively sorted into a black-and-white frame that can be easily understood. The issue with this is that life, capricious and frequently unjust, simply does not work like that. To teach the young, impressionable followers of the Greens and Your Party that every conceivable social, political and economic issue can be sorted into a box only forces them to confront the reality later in life.

And this is unfortunate, because the left shows so much promise in defeating equally detrimental extremism on the right.

If we are to do any meaningful work to bring British politics back to its moderate form, we must first force our politicians to do away with the political circus, and force our next generation, to which I belong as well, to understand that reality is never this side or that side, and that the ‘politicians’ who spread such ideas do so not for the betterment of society, but for the worse. If British politics is to recover a measure of seriousness, it must first move beyond what can be deemed absolute and focus on what can be made better.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)