Foreign Policy > Israel

Civilized People Must Extinguish Genocide

Genocide did not end with World War II. Jews are still the target, and all civilized people must fight back.

John Dale Dunn | May 2, 2026

Genocide is a word that is frequently used and has become a growing focus in response to ongoing global violence. Reports from around the world continue to describe unrelenting attacks on Jews and Christians, including terrorist abductions, torture, rape, and murder. These atrocities have brought renewed attention to the meaning of genocide and the need to confront it. One man, Edwin Black, is trying to help control it.

During World War II, a Polish Jewish attorney, Raphael Lemkin, began the project of accountability by coining the term “genocide” and working to prosecute Nazi crimes. During the war years—specifically 1943 and 1944—Lemkin began this work at Duke University and continued it with the U.S. Department of Justice, targeting the Third Reich.

When used to describe crimes against humanity, genocide must meet a specific legal definition accepted internationally: acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. When conduct meets that definition, the laws of many nations criminalize such acts. The difficulty lies in enforcement.

Politics has frequently interfered with enforcing anti-genocide laws against individuals or groups involved in such crimes or in promoting them. In the case of Jews, the perpetrators are well known. However, it is sobering to recognize that a significant number of United Nations member states actively support genocidal operations, with Jews often at the top of the target list. Other targets include minority religions and racial or ethnic groups subjected to organized campaigns of hatred and destruction.

Edwin Black, whose book, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, was a New York Times bestseller, and who hosts The Edwin Black Show, has dedicated himself to enforcing current laws against genocide. Recently, he wrote about those laws and how ineffective they’ve been in battling the current genocide against Israel. It’s a long and fascinating essay, with some key points.

Israel and the Jewish people are enduring a broad genocide right now, but the human rights community, including the broad coalition of Jewish and........

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