The word “genocide” was supposed to make evil unmistakable. Today, it does the opposite.

Raphael Lemkin coined the term in to name the unthinkable—the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. Holocaust educators adopted it almost immediately as its organizing category, using it aggressively ever since. It sits on museum wall text, in the names of “genocide prevention” institutes and their funding streams and in state laws: many “Holocaust education” mandates in American states are, in truth, genocide education mandates. Legislators may find that framing unobjectionable. Holocaust educators should not — because the word they use casually has stopped meaning what it meant in 1944.

As a concept, genocide has collapsed—politicized, overused, inconsistently applied, and reduced to a technical legal classification adjudicated by courts whose compulsory jurisdiction neither the United States nor Israel acceptsand whose record invites shame. Once a term of moral clarity, it has been invoked so liberally, so casually, and so cynically that it now clarifies nothing.

In academic and activist culture — and especially where the two meet — moral authority runs on claims of victimhood. Genocide became its currency. Cultural appropriation is genocide. Gentrification........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)