URBAN WARFARE
I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza
John Spencer
July 23, 2025

…Bartov cites death tolls from Hamas health authorities without question. He says 58,000 have been killed, including 17,000 children. But these numbers come from a terrorist organization. They mix civilians and fighters and count anyone under 18 as a child, even though Hamas uses teenagers and younger children as combatants. The figures are not independently verified and have been shown to contain false details, including names, ages, and sex. Civilian deaths are tragic, but in Gaza, they are also part of Hamas’s strategy. No military operation is judged solely by body counts or destruction figures. If we used Bartov’s logic, every major war would be called genocide. Two million civilians died in the Korean War, an average of 54,000 per month. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars killed hundreds of thousands. The fight against ISIS leveled multiple cities and killed tens of thousands. None of those wars were considered genocidal. Gaza is not either. READ MORE

FUTURE OF JEWISH Joshua Hoffman: The New York Times is lying to you about genocide An op-ed published last week, titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” was written by Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian and the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. In this op-ed, Bartov accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, cloaking his arguments in the moral authority of his academic title and the historical weight of the word “genocide.” The Times amplified his claim without hesitation, feeding the narrative that Israel, a nation born in the ashes of an actual genocide, is now guilty of the very crime that defined Jews in the 20th century. This is not journalism; it is propaganda dressed as moral scholarship. And it is not new. The Times has a long and troubling record of shaping reality rather than reporting it.