Whitewashing Genocide
Politician George Latimer and his APAIC Campaign Financers are Wrong about Genocide, History, Gaza, and New York Voters
As the “Leave it Blank” NY campaign gains traction in the New York primaries, urging the Biden Administration to demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, Democratic congressional races are all the more consequential in this presidential election year.
On 29 March, George Latimer stated, “Genocide is when you create gas chambers and you force people into them to kill them. You cannot put that on an equal equivalent with the military action [in Gaza],” in a retort to Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY 16th District)’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza. With the backing of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and generous funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Latimer is the primary challenger to Representative Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th District.
Through his sophomoric statement, Latimer joins the ranks of genocide deniers. The politician from Westchester, New York sidesteps the historical record and legalities of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court. Displaying his disregard for Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s life’s work to define and punish genocide, Latimer’s construal of the term is an affront to genocide survivors and descendants everywhere.
Although government military action is often integral to the crime of genocide, its perpetrators use heinous tools and tactics to eradicate an “other.” This includes machetes, bayonets, and guns, death marches and starvation, as well as mass arson, poisoning, drowning, raping, beheading. Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Cambodians, Bosnians, Rwandans, Rohingyans, and the Indigenous peoples in our own backyard, the Americas, have all suffered such a defiling of humanity to have met the legal definition of genocide. Nazi extermination camps—the essence of Latimer’s definition—sanitized barbarism by using technology to remove direct human contact and keep genocide atrocities from public view.
In contrast to the secrecy of gas chambers, government atrocities that many deem of genocidal proportions are now unfolding in full public view. Starvation, cultural erasure, denial of humanitarian aid, targeted killings of civilians, journalists and aid workers, and forced expulsions have been used by genocide perpetrators throughout history. Francesca Albanese, Craig Mokhiber, and other human rights leaders and experts in international law assert that Israel is violating international human rights conventions and committing crimes that fit the pattern of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Heba Morayef, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, writes that “As the occupying power, under international law, Israel has a clear obligation to ensure the basic needs of Gaza’s population are met.” Morayef asserts that Israel’s blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza Strip, is in contempt of the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures on 26 January 2024 requiring Israel to prevent genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said Gaza’s state of starvation and famine is "a result of Israel's extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure.” International pressure for intervention mounts, as Ireland joined South Africa on 27 March in its landmark lawsuit accusing Israel of committing genocide.
Money talks.
Latimer receives 43% of his funding from AIPAC, the influential congressional lobbying group that works on behalf of Israel. Latimer uses the propaganda technique “oversimplification,” to render his version of “genocide-lite” palatable to his wealthy AIPAC funders and to his party platform. He conveniently omits methods other than the gas chamber that the Nazis used to kill 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, approximately 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish individuals, and up to 500,000 Roma gypsies.
As a former New York Senator, surely Latimer knows that in 2021 the United States formally recognized that the deportation and massacre of an estimated two million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire under the cover of the First World War constituted genocide. Starvation, mass drownings, arson, poisonings, mass shootings, mass raping, forced labor, sexual slavery, and death marches into the desert were some of the Ottoman’s methods of annihilation. To this day, Turkey denies the genocide and its cultural erasure continues. The Azerbaijani regime–supported by Turkey and Israel–imposed starvation on the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh through a nearly year-long blockade that ended with the 24-hour lighting assault that forced more than 100,000 Armenians to flee their indigenous homeland.
Latimer must know that during the Cambodian genocide from 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime massacred an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million people, about one quarter of Cambodia's population. Methods included mass executions, forced labor, starvation, torture, and disease from harsh living conditions. During the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, supported by Serbian nationalists, targeted Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Bosnian Croat civilians. Mass killings, forced displacement, and concentration camps such as Omarska, Trnopolje, and Keraterm, killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Bosnians.
In 1994 during a 100-day assault, the Rwanda’s Hutu government and army slaughtered the country’s Tutsi minority with machete attacks, shootings, bombings, sexual violence, and even improvised weapons such as clubs. And Rohingyans, an ethnic Muslim minority group primarily residing in the Rakhine State of Myanmar (formerly Burma), have for decades faced persecution and violence–mass killings, rapes, arson attacks on villages, and forced displacement–from the Myanmar military. If Latimer’s knowledge of world history is weak, certainly he knows his own nation’s history of exterminating the Native American population by up to 90% through deliberate massacres, the spread of infectious diseases, forced marches, and forced adoptions and conversions.
Raphael Lemkin, whose body of work was set in motion by his grappling with the Armenian case, credited with coining the term "genocide" and advocating for its recognition as an international crime, defined genocide in his 1944 book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" in part as:
…a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
Lemkin's work laid the foundation for the legal understanding and recognition of genocide as an international crime, leading to its codification in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Representative Jamaal Bowman is one of four members of Congress from New York urging a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, condemning Israel's US-backed military action as a genocide in progress. Latimer’s website notes: “Using inclusion and openness as a foreground, he is fighting to make Westchester County a destination for all people to live, work and enjoy.” Latimer’s public statement, however, belies his hawkish stance against the Palestinians. His blatant disregard for history and international law bespeaks exclusivity by not recognizing the full range of atrocities against humanity comprising genocide.
What’s more, “voter education groups” in Westchester County, such as Westchester Unites Jewish Voters in Action, who favor Latimer have been recruiting Independent and Republican voters to re-register as Democrats so as to sway the congressional primary between Bowman and Latimer. CBS News reported that although “Westchester Unites can't tell voters who to support, it's clearly an effort to boost Latimer, who's running as much more supportive of Israel, as opposed to Bowman, who is demanding a ceasefire and has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.”
Politicians and their campaign donors have no business manipulating history and well-established international human rights norms and laws for their own aims. With funding from AIPAC and a highly partisan, fictitious definition of genocide, Latimer’s pledge to premise his public service on inclusivity and openness rings particularly hollow as the White House continues to support the war in Gaza and more New York Democrats are pressuring for ceasefire.
Erratum: The article was corrected to reflect that George Latimer was a state, and not a US, senator.
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