Every civilization eventually reaches the point where words stop describing reality and start serving politics.
The first casualty is precision.
The second is truth.
No word illustrates this collapse better than genocide.
Before discussing Gaza, before debating casualty figures, before arguing over proportionality, there is an intellectually prior question that every serious person must answer.
What do we mean by genocide?
That question is almost never asked.
Instead, the accusation is simply asserted, repeated, hashtagged, and treated as though repetition were evidence.
Yet genocide is not a slogan.
It is perhaps the gravest accusation recognized in international law.
The Genocide Convention was drafted in the shadow of the Holocaust to describe something extraordinarily specific: the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. The distinguishing feature is not merely death, suffering, or destruction. It is specific intent to destroy the group itself.
That demanding standard is precisely what gives the word its moral authority.
Remove the requirement of intent, and genocide ceases to be a legal concept. It becomes a political adjective.
Today, however, the word is increasingly stretched far beyond its original meaning. People invoke it in contexts involving structural injustice, cultural destruction, historical grievance, or devastating wars. People are free to argue for broader philosophical definitions if they wish. But they are not free to quietly substitute those broader definitions for the legal one while pretending nothing has changed.
That is not reasoning.
It is changing the rules of the game after it has begun.
And once words become infinitely elastic, evidence becomes optional.
Which brings us to Israel.
On October 7, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Entire families were murdered. Civilians were tortured, raped, kidnapped and executed. Communities were overrun. More than two hundred hostages were dragged into Gaza.
Adjusted for population, the attack was roughly equivalent to 40,000 Americans being murdered in a single morning.
Imagine, for a moment, that the victims had not been Israelis.
Imagine that armed Canadian militias crossed into Michigan, massacred forty thousand Americans, abducted hundreds more, and retreated into southern Ontario under the protection of a government that promised to repeat the attack “again and again.”
