Of course, genocidal statements were made by many members of the War Cabinet and administration, including claims of Nakba, openly. So, evidence for genocide is fairly overwhelming. I think it mostly comes from, again, their genocidal statements, both in terms of dehumanizing the whole of the population as well as forecasting what they ended up doing, which is starving and creating tent cities and, of course, mass slaughter under the very thin military auspices of "eliminating Hamas," something that, of course, everybody knows was never possible, nor was it ever sort of a legitimate goal in any meaningful sense, because to them, anyone shooting back that is not on the Israeli or US payroll is considered Hamas.
And so that's the opening premise, and it's not one I really spend a lot of time litigating, because I think it's self-evidently true in key ways. And also, of course, if you don't accept that, or you reject the consensus of the scholarship on this, then I'm probably not going to convince you anyway. I think the book is primarily marketed to and written for what I would call fence-sitting liberals who vaguely sense that the media created the conditions for genocide but don't necessarily have the evidence for it or the argumentation and logic for it. So this book attempts to take those people and convince them of this so they themselves can sort of defend against that in the future and sort of look back at who was responsible and talk about what it means to have accountability, both politically and in terms of the media.
...
The title is not meant to be provocative. I mean it literally. They sold a genocide. They packaged it and sold it like you would any other product. And just as The New York Times was essential to selling the war in Iraq to the public, the so-called center-left or liberal media, in this instance, was central—primarily because we had a Democratic president at the time, whose support was essential to maintaining the genocide, and who, of course, propped up many of the axioms of the genocide, and of course sent all the weapons for it.
So the intervention of Democratic-aligned media was essential, just as you needed the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times to help launder propaganda for the selling of the Iraq War. Because right-wing media will always only get you 35–40%, but to get it over the finish line to 50–60%, or in this instance, to just get the left or anti-genocide activists off Biden's back, you need liberal buy-in. And really what the liberal buy-in here accomplished, and this is key, was to waste everyone's time. It was to buy time. By December of 2023, there's not really anyone defending the genocide on principle or from first principles or on its own terms. It's truly about hand-waving, buying time, and soft genocide denial.
