Warren Kinsella and Heidi Berger sound the alarm on throwing around the term ‘genocide’

Normalizing the term risks emptying it of real meaning.
From left: Warren Kinsella, Heidi Berger, Rabbi Reuben Poupko, Ben Mulroney (PBL photography: Foundation for Genocide Education)

Coined by Polish-Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin in 1944, ‘genocide’ is a heavy term, yet increasingly wielded today as if it were light as a feather, and without consequence. 

Originally conceived to advance legal safeguards for groups targeted for destruction, it’s the modern weaponization and normalization of the word, a seeming shibboleth among anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic voices seeking to marginalize or stifle opposing voices in the Middle East conflict, that has Warren Kinsella and Heidi Berger sounding the alarm. 

“Genocide is the most serious crime there is” says journalist and lawyer Kinsella. “The mass murder of people on the basis of race, faith, and their nationality, there’s no greater crime, so that means that word should only be used in the most exceptional of circumstances. We have an obligation to history and to always tell the truth, particularly when the allegation is as serious as genocide,” he told The CJN. “But they’re throwing it around like confetti.”

The accusation gained more weight among anti-Israel cohorts following the January 2024 interim International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that South Africa had the right to bring a case against Israel, and that Palestinians had “plausible rights to protection from genocide.” 

The confusion surrounding the ruling fed a global narrative for months and continues to, so much so that it prompted newly retired ICJ president Joan Donoghue to take to public forums to correct the misinformation, telling the BBC three months after the ruling that the court never ruled that a genocide was, or is being, committed. Rather said Donoghue, the court merely emphasized that there was “a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.” 

In a recent Léger poll of 1,529 Canadians participating in online polling panels, 45 percent agreed that Israel is committing genocide “according to how you define what constitutes a ‘genocide’” in the Gaza Strip, while 23 percent disagreed, and 32 percent just don’t know. 

Those most strongly agreeing were Quebecers, while people from British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan most strongly disagreed. While 52 percent of those strongly agreeing were in the 18- to 34-year-old category, 48 percent of all respondents answered that they don’t follow the conflict, and the same number admit to having a poor understanding of it. Also, while the poll addressed both the Russia-Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, Israel questions regarding “genocide” garnered the most media attention.

The inherent dangers of weaponizing the term are horrific says Kinsella, as devaluing of language and normalization of hate has festered. “The danger of such rhetoric,” he says, leads to the horrors of Washington D.C., where two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead outside a Jewish museum event on May 21, and in Boulder, Colo., on June 1, where a group rallying for release of the hostages was firebombed, with one dead and many injured. Suspects in both cases shouted “Free Palestine” during and after their attacks.

“It’s a cult” said Kinsella, whose book The Hidden Hand detailing the worldwide propaganda campaign against Israel and the West will be published in the fall. “In a cult, the first objective is to manipulate language to propagate a lie, and that’s the basis of all propaganda. And that’s what has been done here. 

It’s all due “partly to antisemitic attitudes and partly because of laziness on the part of the mainstream media, and the inadequacy of social media owners to police their own rules,” he told The CJN. “This whole confluence of failures that have happened here to allow that word to enter the mainstream in a circumstance where it totally does not apply.”

Heidi Berger concurs and is sounding the alarm on the weaponization of the word ‘genocide’, as she and her small team of educators and partners strive to bring the stories and lessons of the Holocaust to every high school student across Canada.

“What we’re hearing from teachers and university professors is it’s very cool now to be antisemitic,” the founder of the Montreal-based Foundation for Genocide Education told The CJN, a week before her fundraising event bringing Kinsella and talk show host Ben Mulroney to a Montreal synagogue to talk about rising hate in Canada, propaganda and misinformation. “And it’s very cool now to say that Israel’s committing a genocide.”

“These students do not even know what the word means, don’t have a clear definition of it, and when we give a presentation on the Holocaust, we must be very careful. We talk about the roots of antisemitism and explain clearly what a genocide is, so they understand the word ‘intent.’”

According to the 1951 UN Genocide convention, to be classified as genocide, there must be clear evidence that perpetrators acted with specific intent to destroy a racial, religious, national or ethnic population in whole or in part. Intent is an essential element in the definition of genocide: the killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births; forcibly transferring children to another group and more, all with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…”

Berger says many teachers now balk at welcoming Holocaust presentations, “because right away, there will be students saying, ‘Isn’t Israel committing a genocide?’ The two get totally confused, and it’s been somewhat a problem for us.” There are appropriate responses to those questions and accusations, she says, but many educators are simply ill-equipped or unwilling to engage, with no mandatory Holocaust curriculum in Quebec, and only a recommendation from the government to employ the Studying Genocide teaching guide which the FGE collaborated on with Quebec researchers in 2022. The guide is currently being used in over 600 schools in Quebec and around the globe. 

“We explain to teachers, and are very, very clear about what a genocide is, and we explain to their students the difference of what they’re seeing on social media and the truth about genocide.”

Asked to refrain from political messages, Berger says “We’re very clear. We call Hamas a terrorist antisemitic organization that wants to obliterate the State of Israel and kill every Jew in the world, but we stop there, because we’re there to talk about the Holocaust based on survivors’ stories.”

A recent presentation by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor resulted in angry emails to the principal and the board by a couple of parents accusing the presenter “of weaponizing the Holocaust to platform Zionist views,” said Berger, who would not identify the English school in Montreal, “because we’re still in contact with them. We’re afraid that they’re not going to ask us back.” 

The speaker did not talk about Shoah survivors going to Israel, or Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews. “No. None of that,” she said. “It was just about being Jewish and being a victim of the Holocaust… Teachers tell us they don’t want to trigger students’ emotions. But we fight back. We call the school board, the principal, and we’ve been successful in getting called back.”

She says most schools are very welcoming, “but I want everybody to be aware of this alarming situation,” which includes questionable materials in classrooms, such as “history workbooks that compare the Gaza conflict to colonialism of First Nations in Canada. We contacted the editors, informed them about the false comparison, and revisions were made.” 

“My kid heard the term (genocide) incessantly at school,” high school parent Lori Coulombe told The CJN after the speaking event at the Montreal synagogue. “And this while he was working on a project about more than 150,000 people killed in Sudan since spring of 2023. Not one other kid in school knew about it. No one uses the word genocide there.” Indeed, in advance of the June summit in Canada, G7 leaders in April called that conflict “the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis,” citing atrocities, forced famine, widespread sexual violence, ethnically motivated attacks and reprisal killings. 

Berger says the reluctance of teachers and questionable materials are part of a “very concerning trend” to include pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel narratives as part of the school curriculum, “under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion. What’s effectively happening is a politicization of our schools to indict Israel’s genocide. So we have to be very much on top of this, and obviously, we are.”

She says normalizing such language risks emptying it of real meaning. “Personally, as a daughter of Holocaust survivors, it’s how they’re throwing around the word. But it’s also a huge fear that we’re going to see more parents of students writing these letters and saying they don’t want Holocaust presentations in our schools, but demand presentations on the ‘Holocaust’ being committed in Gaza. That, to me, is a dagger in my heart.”

Her foundation has felt the brunt internally, when partners who participated in school visits about their own community’s genocide demanded a purity test of the FGE. She wouldn’t specify who, only that “they wanted a declaration on our website that Israel is committing a genocide. We weren’t going there, at all, so they abandoned us, and in doing so, hurt their own community.” 

The general atmosphere in Montreal is not looking any better, in terms of the response to the October 7 terrorist attacks: increased anti-Israel, anti-western, and antisemitic hate expressed in the city; and persistent problems on university campuses like McGill and Concordia. Last November, Concordia quietly shuttered the esteemed Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, which had earned high praise globally for its vital work since 1986, citing budgetary constraints.

That’s why there’s a sense of urgency that the FGE is impressing upon the current Quebec government, specifically to promote the teaching guide. If you call everything a genocide, goes the lesson, “then nothing’s a genocide. Exactly, and they understand that. The guide was a baby step, but it’s all baby steps,” Berger told The CJN.

Premier François Legault’s administration is widely considered warm to Jewish community concerns, particularly over the last two years, but is facing dismal electoral prospects in 2026, something Berger recognizes. “While they’re still here, we’re working very hard on having a public announcement made by the minister of education saying that this guide is available, to promote it, to help teachers throughout the province to teach about genocide. We’re making good headway. This is our next baby step.”

On Oct. 8, 2023, before Israel responded to the terrorist rampage in southern Israel, the term genocide was already blazing through the West in full speed, says Kinsella. 

“To fight this propaganda war, and use of the word ‘genocide’ on multiple fronts, we need to track and confront it, go after social media to enforce their own rules, and bird-dog it in mainstream media, telling them they can’t use that word in the reckless way that they’ve been doing and using Hamas as a principal source. Politicians also need to be pushed to be much more judicious and careful in the language they use.” 

It’s not fixable next week says Kinsella, whose first introduction to violent antisemitism was decades ago in a Calgary bar while performing with his punk band ended in a bar fight, he told a group at Beth Israel Beth Aaron synagogue in Côte Saint-Luc. “I stood up to it then,” he told The CJN, “and we need to stand up to it now.”

“In universities and educational institutions, it’s been a slow and subtle but effective takeover over a 20-year period. And it will take quite a few years to bring back public sector unions and some media organizations, but we have no choice, because the bad guys have very successfully propagated the notion that mass murder is happening. The problem is more marked among Gen Z, from 18 to 24, and millennials to a lesser extent. I mean, there are people in those groups saying the Holocaust didn’t even happen. How did that happen?”

Kinsella told the group in conversation with radio host Ben Mulroney, that during the pandemic some young people retreated more into the online world and Iran was waiting for them, something he covers in his The Campaign documentary coming out with his book this fall. That, and the well documented influence of Qatari affluence on western campuses was all very effective.

“Exactly 18 months before October 7, 2023, social media accounts popped up throughout the Muslim world—most of them featuring occasional benign soccer and kitten videos—in Arabic. On October 7 they came to life, thousands of these inactive profiles became active in English, promoting October 7 denial and hate, supercharged by bots and hashtags coming out of Iran.” This, says Kinsella, along with thousands of protests hitting the streets worldwide before Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, was no organic phenomenon.

Those who campaign against Israel and Jewish voices across the West, he said, “have spared no effort attempting to indoctrinate young people, get into school boards, get into curriculum. That’s why what the FGE does is so important: We need to communicate the truth about historical fact and help young people draw lessons about it for the future. Remember, Gen Z’s search engine of choice is not Google, it’s TikTok, which is still headquartered in the People’s Republic of China.”

“Young people need to learn to ask themselves, ‘Hey what if I got it wrong’?” That’s what I would like to happen and that’s the only good thing I learned in law school. To always ask yourself, ‘What if I’m wrong’?”

Author

  • Joel Ceausu headshot

    Joel has spent his entire adult life scribbling. For two decades, he freelanced for more than a dozen North American and European trade publications, writing on home decor, HR, agriculture, defense technologies and more. Having lived at 14 addresses in and around Greater Montreal, for 17 years he worked as reporter for a local community newspaper, covering the education, political and municipal beats in seven cities and boroughs. He loves to bike, swim, watch NBA and kvetch about politics.

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