by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:

Although I sometimes fall short, I always try to be very accurate and careful in my writing, doing my best to avoid the mistakes that might be eagerly pounced upon by my legion of harsh critics. This is especially necessary when discussing the ultra-controversial topics that are so often the focus of my essays.

For example, a few weeks after Israel began its brutal military assault on Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th Hamas raid, one of my articles included the following passage:

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

Last Thursday, most of the world was still reeling from the televised devastation in Gaza, as a densely-populated portion of one of its largest refugee camps was demolished by multiple 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, apparently killing hundreds of helpless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.

Soon afterward on CNN, pro-Israel former AIPAC staffer Wolf Blitzer questioned an Israeli military spokesman about the horrific loss of human life and was told that the massive attack had been completely justified because the Israelis believed that a Hamas commander was in the vicinity.

These are blatant war crimes, probably the worst ever televised in the history of the world, or at least I can’t recall anything comparable. Admittedly there have been far larger modern massacres, such as in 1994 Rwanda where according to Wikipedia the Hutus butchered many hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors with machetes; but both the Hutu killers and their Tutsi victims were mostly primitive African villagers, so none of those dark deeds were ever broadcast live on global television.

In sharp contrast, the grim events of the last four weeks have been widely watched around the world on electronic and social media. In just one month some 10,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza, a total larger than the combined losses on both sides in the past twenty months of the Ukraine war. Despite the fulminations of Western media outlets, since early 2022 only about 550 children have been killed in Ukraine, while after just a few weeks the total in Gaza has passed 4,000. Moreover, while the Ukraine war was fought between powerful, well-equipped modern armies on both sides, the defenseless civilians of Gaza are being relentlessly pounded by one of the world’s most lavishly-armed military forces.

My point was that although the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis was obviously vastly larger in scale than anything the Israelis were doing in Gaza, the former had occurred out of sight, while the latter was currently being televised worldwide.

Since then, I’ve repeatedly described the ongoing attacks on Gaza as constituting “the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world,” making sure that I always include the word “televised” to maintain the accuracy of my statement. When we read a few sentences in a history book explaining that Tamerlane built mountains of skulls during his 1387 conquest of Persia, the psychological impact is far less than when we see a photo-laden magazine story of the the few hundred Vietnamese villagers killed in the 1969 My Lai massacre, let alone the ongoing annihilation of Gaza’s Palestinians live-streamed on social media.

For similar reasons, I’d been extremely reluctant to describe these ongoing events as a “genocide” even though that word is so widely used by other critics of Israel’s actions. I had preferred to reserve that momentous term for events such as those in Rwanda, during which militant Hutus spent 100 days slaughtering the bulk of their Tutsi compatriots, seeking to completely exterminate that ethnic group with bullets and machete-blows.

But in my quoted passage I was also careful to include one additional disclaimer. I stated that my description of the notorious Rwanda genocide, one of the largest in all human history, was “according to Wikipedia,” indicating that I was drawing my information from the 21,000 word article on that subject.

Until several years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered to include that clarification given that the general facts of that horrific 1994 slaughter seemed so well known and universally accepted. I’d read the stories in my newspapers at the time, and subsequently seen them cited and discussed in countless articles since then. Leading journalists had published numerous books on the subject, whose favorable reviews I’d read, while I’d also seen the Oscar-nominated 2004 film Hotel Rwanda dramatizing part of that story. I’d never had the slightest doubts about the reality and circumstances of those terrible events, nor had I realized that anyone else did. And if everyone agrees that a historical incident happened in a particular way, there’s no need for even the most careful writer to hedge himself when he cites it.

But back in 2021 I’d republished a lengthy article that claimed the entire story I’d always accepted was almost totally false and largely inverted, and it seemed sufficiently detailed and sober that I afterwards felt I needed to be much more circumspect whenever I mentioned it.

It’s probably worth briefly sketching out the background and history of what had happened in 1994 Rwanda, which I’d absorbed at the time from all my newspapers and magazines, later reinforced by the popular film and numerous subsequent references throughout the mainstream media.

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