Patrick Lawrence: Yes, It’s a Genocide

By Patrick Lawrence / ScheerPost, August 4, 2025

Correct nomenclature, as I have long argued, is essential for our understanding of things, people, events. Unless we name something properly we will not know how to judge it or what the right course of action may be in response to what it does. This is why our public discourse is so mixed up in the matter of what to call things: Naming something rightly is powerful; so is naming something wrongly, or refusing to name it all.

We are now urged — and required by law in many jurisdictions — to accept a definition of “antisemitism” that is beyond preposterous. With the assistance of various committees and Jewish groups, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has crafted a “working definition” of this term that, to sum up its many clauses, makes criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic. This is an absurd misnomer — purposeful and very consequential.

Roughly three dozen states now accept the IHRA definition; as Chris Hedges reported this week, New Jersey is currently debating a law to this effect. An increasing number of institutions, notably but not only universities, are also using the IHRA definition. As Hedges asserts in the above-linked piece, this is a straight-out attack on free speech. Taking the IHRA definition to its logical conclusion, we are headed in the direction of thought control.

There are other cases — many, indeed — wherein the accepted nomenclature is critical. If you do not call the United States an empire you won’t be able to see why and how it has become, for some decades now, the No. 1 most violent, destructive and disruptive force in global affairs. And since we are not supposed to see any such thing, you cannot call the United States an empire and expect to be taken seriously in what is quaintly known as — another misnomer — polite company.

We come now to the question of Israel’s terror campaign in Gaza (and its escalating terror campaign in the West Bank). What shall we call these daily depravities? Do we or do we not witness a genocide?

If there is a more contentious case of getting the name right, I cannot think of it. Call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide and you will understand the Zionist state one way and there will be legal ramifications; reject this term and you are wading around in “the right to defend itself” and other such notions — all of them as flimsy as that IHRA definition of antisemitism — and there will be no legal ramifications. It amounts to enabling justice or apologizing for limitless impunity.

I have never found the world to be very honest with itself. And it has been grossly dishonest since the autumn of 2023. For maybe 21 of these past 22 months, many people have insisted that Israel’s daily barbarities against the Palestinian people amount to a genocide. But the Gaza crisis has brought populations across the West face to face with their political impotence. In the seats of global power and among the media that serve them, Israel’s military aggressions and abuses of international law have gone unnamed. The consequences of this refusal can be measured any number of ways. The deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians — and we can count this a conservative figure — are one of them.

Whether or not Israel is guilty of conducting a genocide should not be a question as the reality of its conduct enters its 22nd month. But it has been made a question, and at last this question-that-is-not-a-question begins to lose its power, its utility as a curtain drawn over Israel’s atrocities. This marks a significant advance, needless to say, in the right direction.

I have never found The New York Times to be very honest with itself, either. But when the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record takes to publishing opinion pieces (plural as of this week) that forthrightly accuse the Israelis not only of genocide but of genocidal intent, it is safe to conclude something of significance is in the hot summer winds.

We must be careful not to overstate what may come of a now-evident shift of opinion on Israel in high places — what and when. But in my read we are amid a sea change, a prelude to concerted action — legal, diplomatic, political, economic — against the Zionist regime.

Let us begin at the beginning. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Authentic justice, to put this point briefly, is not near. But the honest naming of things brings the end of Israel’s barbarism nearer. Let us not miss which way those summer winds are blowing. They blow in the right direction. And we can expect more gusts. https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/patrick-lawrence-yes-its-a-genocide/