If Everything Is ‘Genocide’, Then Nothing Is

We all know the left have long used 1984 as an instruction manual rather than a warning. What gets less attention is that they likewise use a satirical line from Lewis Carroll as a mission statement.

“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less” – Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking-Glass’.

Playing deceitful language games is one of the most effective, and therefore most dangerous, gambits the left have in their arsenal. Every time they find themselves losing on the battlefield of logic and reality, they pull the same tricks: redefine words to mean something other than what they actually do, then triumphantly declare themselves the winners. Gender, for instance: for more than half millennium since the word entered the English language, it meant one thing: the (male or female) sex. Then, in the 1960s, a creepy Kiwi paedophile academic simply changed the meaning, and now men in dresses are getting their dicks out in front of little girls in the ladies’ change room.

They’re doing the same with genocide. Under no reasonable use of the term is Israel even close to committing a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Undeterred, the left simply refuse to use words to mean what they actually mean.

We are tearing ourselves apart and poisoning young minds all because much of the debate about Gaza has lost sight of what genocide really means.

In 1948, when the nations of the world created the Genocide Convention, they gave this term a clear meaning that confined it to the worst of all possible crimes.

Most importantly, the Genocide Convention specifically mandates intent.

The mental element is crucial.

For genocide to exist there must be much more than killing. There must be an unambiguous intention to destroy a group of people.

Without unambiguous intent to destroy the group as such, there is no genocide, only the tragic, inevitable body count of war.

Collateral deaths in urban combat are dreadful. They are not genocide. Yet the term is now sprayed about like confetti at every Labor conference and campus rally, stripped of its legal meaning so that any Israeli military action can be branded with the ultimate crime. South Africa and its backers are even trying to persuade the International Court of Justice to water down that mental element, arguing that genocidal intent can be “inferred from a pattern of conduct” rather than proved by direct evidence. Canadian lawyer Blake Van Santen examined the Israeli statements they rely on and found none that constitute an unambiguous plan to destroy the Palestinian people. For intent to be inferred, it must be the only reasonable inference available. Self-defence and military necessity must somehow be ruled out entirely. That is a very high bar – and one the left is desperate to lower.

Facts remain stubborn things. The Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank has continued to grow and at an accelerated rate since 2023. That is the literal opposite of genocide. By contrast, the global Jewish population still has not recovered to its pre-1945 level. If the left were serious about the word, they might occasionally mention the extermination of the Moriori by the Māori in the Chatham Islands, a textbook case of one group systematically and intentionally destroying another. They never do. It does not fit the narrative.

When every war, every defensive operation, every civilian casualty is labelled genocide, the word itself becomes meaningless. The unique horror of the Holocaust, Rwanda and the genuine attempts to wipe peoples from the earth is diluted into just another slogan. Humpty Dumpty would be proud. The rest of us should not be.