Terminology And Redefining 'Genocide'

Terminology Matters: Genocide

Olivier Melnick

For reasons that upset me more than they escape me, many liberal thinkers and neo-democrats are trying hard to describe some of the events taking place in Gaza under Benjamin Netanyahu and in America under newly re-elected President Trump as Nazi-influenced. The Holocaust and the Death Camps are being mentioned regularly, not in an attempt to deny their existence–a positive in and of itself–but to compare current events to the most horrific genocide in the history of mankind. This has to stop!

Israel has been repeatedly accused of committing genocide in Gaza. Within a week or less after October 7, 2023, soon after the world initially expressed concern and sadness about the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the narrative started to change, and it shifted very quickly toward accusing Israel of killing innocent Palestinians at a genocidal level.

Nobody agrees on what constitutes genocide by numbers. Some will argue that 25% or more of a people group has to be destroyed to constitute genocide, but it is unclear., The UN Genocide Convention states: “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

In other words, numbers are not necessarily taken into consideration, but the keyword here is intent. In the case of Israel, if numbers were taken into consideration, the 25% death toll would not be reached by a long shot. Measured by intent, Israel is even in a better place as the Jewish state has gone above and beyond to protect and save lives. Israel’s moves against Hamas or other terrorists go against conventional warfare in so many ways. The IDF always warns civilians of impending attacks on buildings or neighborhoods with ample time for people to vacate. It is Hamas that keeps people in. Who is committing genocide now?

But it is not just Israel; America under Trump is also accused of all kinds of ills connecting President Trump and his administration to a neo-Nazi methodology and a neo-Holocaust agenda. Before anyone attempts to describe contemporary decisions, events, and executive orders as Nazi or Holocaust-related, please see if these events include any of the following criteria:

• Forced labor
• Starvation
• Electrified fences
• Beatings
• Torture
• Random Shootings
• Tattooed identification number
• No bathrooms
• Firing squads
• Diseases
• No doctors

And that is only a few of the elements you would find in Nazi concentration camps. These camps were designed to corral Jews in large numbers and create a war, forced-labor contingency. The work conditions and lack of food and hygiene were such that they quickly became death camps, and that is even before the full implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” with the running of places like Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the death camps were implemented, you could add these to the list:

• Mass shooting in Jewish-dug communal graves
• Gas chambers
• Crematoria
• Gruesome experiments on inmates, including babies and pregnant women
• Collecting gold teeth from cadavers
• Long death marches in the snow

Yet, one of the most obvious differences between the Nazi Death Camps and ICE’s detention centers or illegal alien expulsion is how people got inside the camps. During the Holocaust years, the Nazi war machine was systematically rounding-up Jews outside of Germany, all over Europe through the railway system. They [the Nazis] went out of their way to gather Jews, put them on trains and send them to the camps. Let me repeat myself…the people were hunted down to be put in forced labor camps and later in death camps…They were not sent back to their countries of origin; THEY WERE HUNTED DOWN and brought back to their inevitable deaths. In that sense, the Holocaust was unique.

In the case of today’s mass deportations, illegals are not taken to their death but sent back to their place of origin. They are not starved, beaten, tortured, shot, tattooed or gassed. So, please STOP with the comparisons!

When trying to compare any of what happens today to the Holocaust, it seems that the real hidden agenda is to get the uneducated masses to empathize with the “new victims,” ignoring historical truth. How ironic that the only event remotely comparable to the Holocaust on a much smaller scale–the Hamas Pogrom of October 7 in Israel–is completely ignored!

1,200 people were murdered by Hama, but Palestinians want the Jewish State to become free Palestine from the River to the Sea, in other words, 100% free of Jews. Now, that’s GENOCIDE, but unfortunately, it doesn’t fit the current narrative.