The New York Times has a "Room for Debate" section where different people give brief arguments on a topic. The topic earlier this week was "Can we just 'live with' terrorism?"
Academic fraud Noura Erakat, whom I have proven has no problem with lying and then justifying her lies for the sake of her "narrative," spends a few paragraphs pretending that there is no difference between Western armies and terrorists killing civilians, and makes sure (as a person of Palestinian ancestry) that Israel is exhibit A:
To eradicate terrorism, we need a much more honest discussion about what terrorism actually is. If it means the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal, than that should include all such attacks on civilians, and not merely the ones launched by nonstate actors. In practice, we limit the term to include only nonstate actors.Erakat is saying that Western armies and Israel attack civilians to achieve political goals - meaning that they purposefully attack civilians. Then after stating her slander as fact, she implies that the idea that the civilian deaths are collateral damage is simply a cover-up for the real desire to murder civilians.
The victims of state-led attacks are considered collateral damage, or unfortunate but necessary killings. This framework effectively diminishes the value of their lives making it much easier for the world to tolerate excruciatingly high death tolls and absolve the states that caused them.
This paradox is not lost on most of the thinking world, especially where those losses are highest, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in southern Yemen and in the Gaza Strip.
There is a glaring omission in her "highest losses" list is what proves that her polemic is meant to deceive, not enlighten.
Syria.
Everyone sees quite clearly that Syria has been using its state armed forces to directly attack civilians. No one is justifying it. And the loss of life from the Syrian civil war dwarfs that of Yemen or Gaza.
Erakat's definition of terrorism is absolutely correct. Her assertion that the word "terrorism" does not apply to state actors such as Syria is a straw man, because it is obvious that Syria is targeting civilians and is therefore guilty of state terrorism. Practically every Arab state has been equally guilty of directly attacking civilians in recent decades.
Yet Erakat wants to make the reader think that there is no difference between how Western armies act - with clear and specific rules of engagement that are compliant with the Geneva Conventions - and how her fellow Arabs act, state and non-state actors alike.
There is a huge difference. The difference is the target. Terrorists target civilians, moral armies target military targets and sometimes civilians unfortunately die, often because the targets purposefully hide among the civilians themselves.
And while Erakat and Amnesty and HRW and other "human rights" frauds like to claim that Israel and the US and European armies target Arabs, the simplest counterproof to that is the fact that the casualties are not in the tens of millions. In fact, if Erakat knew the least amount about modern Western militaries, she would know that more money and time is spent on avoiding killing civilians than on targeting valid military targets.
That is certainly not the case with her own Palestinian brethren, nor with her fellow Arabs.
Erakat knows very well that international law depends on intent, specifically how a reasonable military expert would react given available information, before labeling an action to be a war crime. She wants to hide that basic fact.
That is why Noura Erakat is an academic fraud, preferring advocacy to the truth.
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