The genocide lie (GenoLIE): An unconventional weapon of mass destruction - opinion

Hamas, a genocidal terror proxy of the criminal Islamic Regime in Iran, must disarm; 251 kidnapped human beings, including Holocaust survivors and children taken and held in standing violation of law and morality, must be returned; and perpetrators who infiltrated Israel to butcher, rape, burn alive, and abduct hundreds must face international justice.

Gaza, whose civilians and infrastructure are used as human shields and sacrifices by Hamas and internationally funded “aid,” must be disarmed, demilitarized, and de-radicalized; all those funding, enabling, and sheltering Hamas must be held accountable, instead of being cast as “honest brokers.”

Imagine international clarity that Hamas – a genocidal terrorist organization that deliberately and systematically uses human tragedy as strategy – cannot cynically invoke the very international law principles it systematically violates.

Instead, history will recall responses of silence, denial, justification, and attacks on Jews and the Jewish nation-state beginning on October 8. It will recall the tsunami, then normalization, then rewarding, of an ancient, ever-mutating lethal hatred anchored in lies, in response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

It will recall the unleashing of an unconventional weapon of mass destruction, the ultimate lie in the “progressive” antisemitism playbook: accusing Israel of genocide, even as it defended itself against Hamas’s pre-meditated war crimes and crimes against humanity to fulfill its openly declared genocidal intent.

There is no room for confusion about what genocide means.

The term “genocide,” as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention to which Israel was amongst the first signatories, requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. That “intent” is not a technicality. It is the legal distinction between genocide and other crimes.

But the term “genocide,” along with other international legal concepts created to protect precisely from these egregious violators, was systematically hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to “the Jew” among nations, and to fuel the conspiratorial lie that makes antisemitism a readily available weapon of mass destruction for terror and tyranny intent to destroy humanity and freedom.

War is hell. It is tragic, destructive, and devastating. But war itself is not a crime.

In the aftermath of World War II, rules were created to govern warfare between states, including distinction, proportionality, and precautions to protect civilians. These rules operate under the assumption that state parties, not rogue proxies of tyrannical regimes, would abide by those principles.

They gave tools to hold to account those who violate them, including by deliberately embedding military infrastructure among civilians, below and in hospitals and ambulances, in and under schools and mosques, using their own population as shields and sacrifices.

The verdict was proclaimed long before “evidence” alleging the crime existed, or was presented. Just as in the Dreyfus Affair, Israel was falsely seated in the international docket of the accused, required to defend and respond to blood libellous accusations, even while fighting for its life.

The October 7 massacre exposed the raging war front that impacts the ability to fight on all others: a battle for hearts and minds that “justifies” destruction of the Jew among nations. After conventional wars failed, the ultimate perversion of facts and law – in the form of the GenoLIE – could justify the genocide of the Jewish nation and their state.

The accusation of genocide is thus the most dangerous lie of ancient blood libel, in a modern rendition that deems “Zionism is racism,” and Israel is an “apartheid state.”

Each iteration of this evolving lie, that echoes and unites Soviet, Nazi, and Islamist propaganda, snowballs and fuels the overarching big lie that “the Jew” is uniquely evil, thus must be destroyed, “cleansing” the world of the pariah it was turned into.

But millennia of memory make clear: antisemitism is never a Jew problem. It is a problem of tyrannical regimes that successfully wield this weapon of mass destruction across the places and spaces they are intent to destroy.

Starting October 8, the tsunami, normalization, and rewarding of antisemitism that attacked and murdered Jews around the world exposed antisemitism as a symptom of the deliberate exploitation of the strengths of democracies and the institutions entrusted to preserve and protect them, including international institutions, media, universities, and media – to collapse their foundations from within.

That is why joining the GenoLIE campaign matters well beyond Jewish organizations and supporters of Israel.

The International Legal Forum has joined more than 50 organizations from around the world in exposing the interconnected pieces of this puzzle and restoring facts and law to their proper place.

This is about ensuring that law and institutions created and entrusted to uphold and protect do so equally and consistently, and that those that violently trample it are not cynical beneficiaries of false moral equivalency that collapses them.

Lemkin created the term genocide and the covenant to prevent and punish the crime of genocide to stop terror and tyranny from ever perpetrating heinous crimes intent to destroy.

Precisely the crimes of the barbaric terrorists and their tyrannical patrons and allies, who attacked Israel on and since October 7, openly declaring intent to destroy the Jew among nations – as a canary in the coal mine for the destruction of our shared civilization.