‘Disqualifying’: Scott Galloway Pushes El-Sayed Hard On Using Gaza ‘Genocide’ Label

Scott Galloway, the marketing guru turned popular podcaster, spoke to Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, on his Raging Moderates podcast this week, alongside co-host Jessica Tarlov.

The wide-ranging conversation eventually turned to the Middle East, and Galloway pressed El-Sayed on his use of the term “genocide” to describe the Israel-Hamas war.

“As a Jew, I find it entirely unfair and not accurate to describe what’s happening in Israel as a genocide. My understanding of the definition of genocide is the purposeful extermination of a people based on their religion, their ethnicity, or their nationality,” Galloway began, adding:

Going from 15 million to nine million Jews in Europe was a genocide — 40%. Wiping out 70% of the Tutsi population, that was a genocide. A third of the Cambodian population- that was genocide. 3% of the Gazan population has been killed, and typically a genocide doesn’t involve shipping in polio vaccines, or 2,500 calories a day, or dropping leaflets, or leaving voicemails telling civilians to vacate an area where they have been purposely embedded in military targets. Do you understand why Jews such as myself find your description of what’s happening in Israel and in Gaza as a genocide disqualifying?

“So I understand why you would make the argument, but let me also push back. When people use dehumanizing language against a people, when they bomb their hospitals and their schools, when they attempt to displace them from where they are with the argument that, ‘Well, they’re all Arabs, these other people speak the same language, they might as well just be shipped over there’ — that seems to me to be deliberate targeting,” replied El-Sayed, adding:

So I would ask you: do you understand why somebody who’s been thinking about this question, looking at it, connecting the dots between the language that is used and the outcomes that were created, would then label it that way? I think the big question for me is, in some respects, people don’t want to use the word because of the moral implication of what ought to be done following it. But the question to me is: could we put the same effort into preventing it from having happened in the first place?

El-Sayed continued his answer, and Galloway eventually pushed back, saying, “The word does have meaning, and when you use the term genocide, I think it connotes the notion that whoever is committing this genocide is guilty of something so horrific that it justifies potentially a genocide against them.”

“And that it might be horrific. It might be horrific. It might be a war crime. It might be wrong. But when you use the word genocide, one, I think there’s absolutely no factual support for that term that qualifies for that term. And two, it creates a level of hostility towards Jews in this city where the diaspora feels vulnerable because I am part and supportive of an organization that is committing genocide,” Galloway added.

“And Scott, I’m going to— I’m going to— I’m going to point to a couple of things. You know, you and I have had a number of really great conversations. I think you and I probably think very similarly on a number of issues. Obviously, this one is one on which we disagree. Do we have to wait until more people get killed? Like, how many people do we say is enough to then call it a genocide?” El-Sayed replied, adding:

Because the whole point of calling it that is to stop it from happening in the first place. So it’s somewhat self-defeating in its own logic. Second, calling something a genocide does not justify a genocide.

Like, you can’t say that because one group committed a genocide, that a genocide ought to be justified against them. That is—you know, that is not the argument anyone’s making. I think everybody would agree that nobody should be in the business of killing Jewish people because they’re Jewish. That is a terrible thing. In fact, we built our whole system of international law because of the systematic murder of Jewish people. I just want us to follow that system of international law and do the things we need to do. And then finally, on the factual justification—neither you nor I are scholars on genocide. I leave it to scholars on genocide, in Israel itself, who’ve called this a genocide.

Watch the clip above.

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