An April 26 article in the Review was titled, “Alum’s Article on Gaza Genocide Contains Numerous Misrepresentations.” Although the article purports to address my own previous writing in the Review, it does not provide evidence of a single false or incorrect statement that I made. Nor could it, as I supplied the Review editors with evidence for every factual claim. So, instead, writers Zane Badawi and Jonas Nelson called me and my writing “racist” and “dangerously misleading.”

In fact, it is Badawi and Nelson that, again, made some incorrect statements. Contrary to Badawi and Nelson’s claims, the organization for which I am proud to work, CAMERA, does not represent itself as “neutral” on Israel’s right to exist or on Israel’s right to receive accurate media coverage, though it is non partisan with regard to political parties and candidates. Nor is it clear what they mean when they say that CAMERA “thinks that Palestinians should be thankful for Israeli checkpoints,” though checkpoints have saved many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli.

Badawi and Nelson did not even say that my statement about Hamas combatants among the fatalities is incorrect, instead making the argument that I must have used some sort of racist math to calculate it. But I did not calculate the number of slain Hamas combatants from other figures. That number was supplied by the Israel Defense Forces based on its own field observations and reported in the Israeli press, and not extrapolated from Hamas statistics. Perhaps it is Hamas’s claims, repeated by the UN, of numbers of women and children that don’t add up — after all, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry did recently announce that it had “incomplete data” on about a third of its claimed casualties according to . The problem is not that, “for [my] Hamas casualty statistic to be true, every dead Palestinian male above the age of 18 has to be labeled as a terrorist,” the problem is that, for Hamas’s numbers to be true, everyone who is not a terrorist must have been a woman or a child. This, I agree is unlikely.  

Again, there is no genocide in Gaza, only a war that was started by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said there is no evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In an interview with the BBC on April 26, Joan Donoghue, who was President of the International Court of Justice until February, said that the ICJ “did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

All wars are terrible, and can have devasting consequences for civilians, but for the authors to conflate war with “genocide” is to empty the term of any meaning.

On Nov. 3, Badawi wrote in the Review, “We have to work toward building understanding rather than giving voice to inflammatory statements and intimidation.” I don’t think that slandering those on the other side of the debate as racist without engaging with the facts furthers this goal. I do, however, appreciate that they seem to have read some of my articles on CAMERA’s website, camera.org, and I hope that they, and other Obies, will read more of them.

Karen Bekker, OC ’94