Hacker objects:
“The use of the term “Ethnic Cleansing” by VD is, I submit, disingenuous on his part. While his definition is a correct one, it’s not a common one or one that’s generally understood.”
It is not disingenuous, it is linguistically precise rhetoric. In case you hadn’t noticed, I regularly use words that are neither common nor generally understood.
As usual, those with a weak logical case attempt to linguistically clean the language to their liking. Hence Malkin’s attack on the term “concentration camp” being used for literal concentration camps and so forth.
Those who are attempting to disguise or explain away their actions always try to hide behind euphemisms. Their apologists will often fiercely attack those who speak plainly. If President Bush were to send in the U.S. Army to “evacuate” the six million Jews in the United States to Israel, I have no doubt that the term “ethnic cleansing” would be among the calmer and more gentle terms slung about.
And yet, that is precisely what Ariel Sharon has ordered the I.D.F. to do to a Jewish population that at .66 percent is not significantly smaller in percentage terms than the 2 percent of the American population represented by American Jews.
The Gaza expulsions are an ethnic cleansing. It is possibly the most humane ethnic cleansing since Ferdinand and Isabella expelled 200,000 Jews from Spain, but it is, nevertheless, an ethnic cleansing.