Genocide and the Corruption of Language

How the escalation in rhetoric makes it hard to think coherently

When the allies defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps, the US army took measures to document what they had found. They knew that people would disbelieve eye witness testimony unless it was backed up by photographs and film. The world was shocked and shamed by what was revealed. They invented a new word to describe what had been done to the Jews of Europe. That word was genocide.

There are those who insist that the Shoah was an event that was unique in its barbarity in human history. In many ways it was, but people have subsequently recognized that earlier events also warrant the name of genocide. Among these was the killing by the Turks of millions of Armenians during the first world war and the murder by starvation of three million Ukrainians by the Soviets under Joseph Stalin.

The application of the term genocide to these other state crimes is widely accepted, but it is not without controversy. The Turkish government has always rejected the claim that their forebears were guilty of genocide against Armenians. And needless to say, the Russian government denies that the Soviet Union committed genocide against the Ukrainians.

In all three of these cases, mass murder was at the core of what made these events genocidal. In more recent times additional atrocities have been given the label of genocide, including the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda and of Muslims in the Bosnian war in the former Yugoslavia.

The moral opprobrium associated with the term genocide makes it a rhetorical tool which people want to use when they denounce the conduct of a government or organization they oppose. Unfortunately this has the effect of debasing the term as it is used more and more often to describe lesser crimes, or even just behaviour that is terrible but not criminal. Unfortunately, the wide use of the term in circumstances where it is not applicable gradually obscures its real meaning and makes it less and less useful as a way of talking about what is happening in the world around us.

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A couple of days ago, someone posted a picture in a Facebook Group I follow. The picture was from a demonstration held last week in Toronto in which someone was holding a sign that said, “Genocide first. Reconcile later”.

Image: Demonstration held in Toronto Last Week

People on the Facebook thread, who are familiar with the genocidal ambitions of Hamas, took this sign to be an endorsement of genocide against Jews. Given what we have just been through in southern Israel, that seems to make sense. On October 7, 2500 Palestinians poured over the border into the Gaza envelope. Some of them overran Israeli bases, disabled Israeli surveillance and communications, and killed and captured soldiers. Others entered the Israeli communities along the border and systematically tortured, raped and murdered the people they found there.

To our eyes, this behaviour is very similar to that of the Nazis. The Nazis had dedicated units that followed the army as it advanced into Eastern Europe. These units’ job was to round up Jews and murder them. To most of us, it is clear. Hamas advocated genocide against Jews and when it got the chance it put its genocidal plans into action.

But I don’t think that’s what the person holding the sign meant. In spite of the genocidal behaviour of Hamas that sparked the war, the demonstrator in the photo is convinced that it is Israel that is committing genocide. How can this be?

Back in August, I had an exchange on Facebook with someone who casually accused Israel of genocide. This person posted a picture of the front cover of a book written by Ilan Pappe. The book is called “The Biggest Prison on Earth.”

Pappe is an Israeli historian of questionable credibility who has dedicated his career to demonizing Israel. He left Haifa university under a cloud after supervising a student thesis which contained inaccurate claims about Israel’s actions. Today he holds a position at a university in the United Kingdom.

I wrote about the exchange in one of my earlier articles which you can read here. I bring this up again, because I think it’s important to understand just how alien the world view of these demonstrators is from our own.

We witnessed an act of actual genocide on Oct 7. It has been extensively covered in the news and the marchers have no excuse to be ignorant of what happened. Like the US army entering the death camps, the Israeli authorities were careful to document the horrific scenes they found in the Gaza envelope, lest people deny that they happened, as people have already begun to do.

Less than three weeks later we see this demonstrator marching against Israel’s campaign to defend itself from this genocidal attack. Grotesquely this marcher carries a sign which shows that he believes that it’s obvious that Israel is committing genocide. It doesn’t occur to him that people might think his sign is an incitement to murder Jews. Apparently his belief in Israeli guilt is so powerful that it erases the recent murder of 1400 Israelis and visitors from his awareness.

All over the world people are marching, enraged not at Hamas, but at Israel for fighting back against Hamas. Perhaps it’s corruption of the language which makes it possible to convince people that Israel is guilty of genocide, while actual genocide against Israelis goes unnoticed. People seem not to know what the word means. But they are very sure that Israel is guilty of it.

Our Jewish community organizations are speaking out against the outbreak of hostility against Jews, fueled by the libel that Israel is committing genocide. In this part of the world, elected leaders are saying the right thing and denouncing the outbreak of Jew hatred fueled by this rhetoric. But I think we must recognize that the conviction that Israel is guilty of genocide is fueling hatred toward Jews all over the world.

This is not just a case of rhetorical hyperbole. It is a deeply rooted delusion that is driving hostile behaviour that we see in the large demonstrations in western capitals. The people carrying the signs in the image above are full of righteous anger. They think Israel and the people who support it are the monsters, not the bloodthirsty Hamas killers who ravaged innocent Israelis 25 days ago. Israel is in a struggle for survival, but the security of Jews in the rest of the world is also hanging in the balance.