Media Hails "Consensus" of "Experts" Declaring Gaza to be a "Genocide"

The media loves declaring things. NBC "News" portentiously declared Iraq was in a state of civil war in time for the 2004 elections, and of course the media loves when self-selecting "climate scientists" get together to declare that Florida will be entirelu underwater by the year 2020.

Now a group of left-wing, pro-Hamas nobodies declared Israel's invasion of the terror shithole of Gaza to be a "genocide," and treated this as if it was some authoritative bull issued by experts.

It wasn't.

When the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, mainstream media outlets from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Reuters described the association as a "leading" academic voice on the topic. "On Monday," the Times wrote, "the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a leading group of academic experts on the topic, declared that Israel's policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide."

So what exactly is the IAGS? Though the association's title indicates that the IAGS is composed of genocide scholars, its members actually include a swath of "academic scholars, human rights activists, students, museum and memorial professionals, policymakers, educators, anthropologists, independent scholars [i.e., Twitter bloviators], sociologists [wow], artists [wow wow], political scientists, economists, historians, international law scholars, psychologists, and literature and film scholars," according to its website.

Those who don't fit one of those 17 titles need not be discouraged. To become an active IAGS member, one needs only to fill out a biographical form and pay a membership fee--$125 for a year, $210 for two years, or $1,200 for a lifetime. Doing so provides access to the association's internal Listserv, newsletter, job listing notifications, calls for papers, and biennial conferences. It also unlocks the ability to "nominate individuals for and receive IAGS institutional awards" and join the "IAGS Women's Caucus and the Indigenous People's Caucus."

The association's bylaws, meanwhile, state that members must only "be current in their dues" to be considered in good standing--and propose resolutions on genocide. The IAGS executive board then determines "whether or not the proposed resolution will be submitted to the IAGS membership for a vote." Voting is conducted via email.

Passing a resolution is not onerous, either. The permissive membership and resolution proposal policies are important because of the association's low bar for passing resolutions. "For a proposed resolution to pass," IAGS bylaws state, "voting must have been undertaken by a quorum of more than 20% of paid up IAGS members at the time of the vote." The association says it represents "600 members from all continents." Only 129 of those members, or roughly 22 percent, voted on the Gaza resolution, according to Sara Brown, a longtime IAGS member who served on its advisory board. The IAGS told the Post that 86 percent of respondents voted in favor of the resolution. That amounts to roughly 110 yes votes reflecting just 18 percent of the group's total membership.

None of that context made its way into mainstream media coverage of the vote. The Times described the IAGS as "a leading group of academic experts on the topic," while the Post called it "the oldest and largest association of genocide scholars." The Post also touted the fact that a "large majority--86 percent--of members who voted on the resolution approved it" without noting that less than 30 percent of members actually voted.

While it's unclear who exactly voted on the resolution, there's reason to believe that at least some of the respondents were not "genocide scholars." An archived version of the association's public directory lists the first 10 IAGS members as of August 2024. Several have little to no online footprint, including an affiliation with a university of any sort.

Salo Aizenberg, an independent scholar who has contributed to the Times of Israel and Tablet magazine, registered as an IAGS member one day after the association released its Gaza report. He reviewed the Listserv and found that 80 members, or roughly 13 percent of the association's "scholars," were Iraqi. "I've been getting to know some of my fellow genocide scholars," he wrote on X. "Seems that Iraq is a center of knowledge in this field with 80 listed scholars of ~600."

In doing so, Aizenberg inspired a wave of individuals to join the IAGS, including some using names like Mo Cookie and Sheev Palpatine.

You too can become an "genocide expert" just by subscribing to the group for the low low price of thirty buck.

A "leading genocide scholars" group, cited by the Associated Press, Washington Post, and other news outlets, is open to anyone who has $30.

The "International Association of Genocide Scholars is a favored source for the AP -- it cited the group twice already this week.

"Top genocide scholars accuse Israel of genocide," a Sept. 1 article stated. PBS republished this story as well.

"Leading genocide scholars organization says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza," a Sept. 2 article from the AP reported. The Washington Post parroted the language in its own Sept. 1 article

But the group, hailed by the AP as "The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide," is in fact open to anyone who wants to pay the membership fee.

There's no verification process -- one journalist "signed up" and "became a genocide expert in Yugoslavia, gender, and the Holocaust."

Meanwhile, the New Yorker is platforming Cenk Uygur's nephew Hasan Piker -- who defends and supports Muslim terrorism against Christians and Jews, and who even declared that murdering babies was justified anti-settler violence, because there are "baby settlers" who need killing.

But they're really against political violence and they really are defending our Precious Democracy.

The left is really pushing this terrorist cunt because he's one of the few left-wing men who can squat his own weight. The media has been flooding the zone with Hasan Piker as the left's new and improved Joe Rogan.

The Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday blasted the New Yorker for inviting anti-Semitic streamer Hasan Piker to its annual festival, warning that the magazine is giving a platform to rhetoric that "normalizes antisemitism, reinforces bigotry, and launders terror."

"The New Yorker's decision to platform Hasan Piker is the latest example of mainstream media normalizing his brand of antisemitism and anti-Zionism," the ADL wrote in a series of X posts after the magazine announced that Piker will join a round-table discussion at its cultural festival next month.

"Piker's toxic and extreme rhetoric opposing Zionism and the Jewish state normalizes antisemitism, reinforces bigotry, and launders terror," the ADL's post goes on--"and it has no place at a conference devoted to prominent influencers."

The left-wing New Yorker will host the multi-day festival in New York City. The round-table discussion that Piker is scheduled to attend will focus on "how the internet has reshaped political life" and its implications "for the future of democracy."

Piker, a far-left streamer whose videos have millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube, has denied the atrocities that Hamas committed during its Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, dismissing reports of the terror group's sexual violence as "rape fantasies" and "hallucinations," Jewish Insider reported. In a stream last year, Piker said that "it doesn't matter if fucking rapes happened on October 7--like, that doesn't change the dynamic for me even this much."

This declaration of "experts" might even mean something, if the ADL had not declared that supporting Trump and/or opposing men in women's sports is anti-semitic.

Something about crying wolf, maybe.

posted by Ace at 04:40 PM

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