Alan Kessel: Genocide, weaponized: How a legal term became a political bludgeon 

Important distinctions between crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, and the indiscriminate use of the latter by a former Global Affairs colleague:

…Where genocide targets a group for destruction based on its identity, crimes against humanity focus on widespread or systematic attacks on civilians regardless of group status. The distinction mattered then, and it matters now. When every war crime is labelled genocide, we lose the ability to distinguish between wrongs. And when everything is genocide, nothing is.

This matters especially in the context of Israel, where accusation often precedes investigation, and where “genocide” is used not as a legal charge but as a political judgment—a way of delegitimizing the state itself, not analyzing its conduct. This distortion becomes even more alarming when one considers that both Hamas and the Iranian regime have explicit, stated goals: the destruction of the State of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. To conflate Israel’s response to such existential threats with genocide not only reverses the reality, it erases the intent of those who actually espouse genocidal ambitions. That inversion should trouble anyone who believes in law over propaganda.

More dangerously, it creates fatigue. When the word is used indiscriminately, it loses power. When we label complex, tragic conflicts as genocides without evidence of intent, we weaken our collective capacity to respond when the real thing happens, from Rwanda to Srebrenica to the Yazidis in Iraq. Lemkin gave us a word to name the worst of human crimes. We should not turn it into a slogan.

Words matter. Law matters. Lemkin knew this, and Sands reminds us of it. The victims of actual genocides deserve the dignity of truth, not the distortion of their suffering for contemporary political ends. If we are to honour Lemkin’s legacy, we must use his word with the care, clarity, and weight it demands.

Source: Alan Kessel: Genocide, weaponized: How a legal term became a political bludgeon