There was a time when the word “genocide” stopped a conversation cold. Now, it’s a talking point — flung at whatever country the progressive Left wants to tar this week.
The word was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family to the Holocaust, including his parents. He built it to describe something specific and monstrous: the deliberate attempt to destroy a people — a nation, an ethnicity, a faith — as such. Not war. Not even war crimes. Annihilation as the goal.
We know what that looks like. Six million Jews, industrially murdered. Eight hundred thousand Rwandan Tutsis, hacked to death in a hundred days. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang — mass internment, forced sterilization, children stripped from families — a campaign both the Trump and Biden administrations designated as genocide. The Islamic State group’s butchery of the Yazidis.
That word is now being spent like loose change.
Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) declared the United Arab Emirates has “financed and enabled” a “genocide” in Sudan. Sudan’s civil war is a horror in which atrocities have been committed on both sides — the Sudanese Armed Forces, backed by Iran, Turkey, and Qatar, have carried out indiscriminate bombings and documented war crimes of their own. But Sanders isn’t demanding Congress confront Tehran or Ankara. He aims squarely at the UAE because, as he doesn’t fail to mention, it’s “one of Trump’s closest allies.”
It’s the same senator who proclaimed of Israel’s war against Hamas: “It is genocide.” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) introduced a resolution to formally accuse Israel of genocide, with 20 co-sponsors — including Progressive Caucus Chairman Greg Casar (D-TX) and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Notice the pattern. Sanders has leveled the accusation at exactly two countries: Israel and the UAE, arguably America’s two closest friends in the Middle East and its two most committed fighters of radical Islam. The UAE bled alongside U.S. special forces against al Qaeda in Yemen and ISIS in Syria, with American generals nicknaming it “Little Sparta.” That’s who Sanders singles out.
Or take Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who accused Azerbaijan of “implementing a genocidal campaign” against Armenians — when Baku was reclaiming territory the entire world, including Armenia’s own government today, recognizes as Azerbaijani. The death toll of the operation was under 300. Three years later, Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a U.S.-brokered peace at the White House. Some genocide.
The rot goes beyond lawmakers. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention — a nonprofit organization trading on Raphael Lemkin’s name — accused Israel of “genocide” within days of Oct. 7, while Hamas‘s victims were still being identified. It, too, branded Azerbaijan’s 300-casualty operation a genocide. This is an outfit that invokes the Holocaust’s greatest legal mind to accuse the Jewish state he championed — Lemkin was a Zionist — of the very crime he named.
And the sham pays dividends in real time. When House candidate Brad Lander — a self-described “liberal Zionist” — went on CNN’s Inside Politics and was pressed by Dana Bash on his habit of calling Gaza a “genocide,” his defense was to cite the assessments of “human rights experts” — including the Lemkin Institute. That’s the laundering cycle in one clip: an activist outfit issues the verdict, a politician cites it as expert authority, and cable news beams it out as settled fact. The word gets its credibility from Lemkin’s name; the institute lends that credibility to anyone who needs it.
Lemkin’s family has had enough. Last September, his relatives, joined by the European Jewish Association, filed a complaint with Pennsylvania authorities demanding the institute stop using his name, saying it was never authorized and is being exploited for an “anti-Israel agenda.” Pennsylvania has opened an investigation. To date, the institute has refused to change its name.
Here’s why this matters beyond politics. Genocide is the crime of crimes precisely because the bar is high: the intent to wipe out a people. Lower the bar to “war we disapprove of,” or “ally of a president we hate,” and two things happen.
First, the real ones get diminished. Every time “genocide” is slapped on a 300-death military operation, the word loses a little of the weight it must carry for Auschwitz, for Rwanda, for the camps of Xinjiang.
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Second, the alarm stops working. The entire point of Lemkin’s word was to trigger action — “never again” as an operating instruction, not a bumper sticker. But a world lectured daily that everything is genocide will eventually believe nothing is. When the next Rwanda comes — and it will — the boy who cried genocide will find the world checking its phone.
The progressive Left hasn’t discovered new genocides. It has discovered a weapon: a word with the Holocaust’s moral voltage, available free of charge to anyone shameless enough to use it. That it lands almost exclusively on America’s allies — while Iran, Turkey, and others arm actual war criminals without a peep — tells you everything about the accusers and nothing about the accused.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, which is hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Yorktown Institute.