The late Jewish lawyer and human rights activist Raphael Lemkin would be rolling in his grave if he found out that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention had appropriated his name, despite having no connection to him or his family and failing to get permission to use it. Worst of all, the organization spits on Israel every chance it gets, using Lemkin’s name to legitimize its nonsense.
This year marks 80 years since Lemkin introduced the term “genocide” to describe Nazi Germany’s attempted extermination of the Jews in his 1944 book, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” His work led to the United Nations adopting the Genocide Convention in 1948. Lemkin was also a staunch Zionist.
Nevertheless, the Pennsylvania-based non-profit that uses his name fills its Twitter account and website with what can only be described as rhetoric straight from Hamas’s public relations department.
On Oct. 13, 2023, mere days after Hamas’s brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis and before Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, it issued a “Genocide Alert,” condemning what it said was an “endorsement” on the part of western leaders for Israel “to effectively commit genocide.”
On Oct. 18, 2023, also before Israel’s ground invasion, it called on the International Criminal Court to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide. No mention, of course, of the Hamas terrorists who had literally tried to commit a genocide against Israeli Jews less than two weeks earlier.
Last August, the institute condemned Israel for eliminating Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. In a statement, it said that, “Many analysts speculate that this was a purposeful attack by Israel to incite” what they believe would be “an all out regional war in the Middle East.”
The reality is that killing Haniyeh was equivalent to the United States taking out Osama bin Laden. Yet the Lemkin Institute wanted to portray it as some sort of a war crime perpetrated by bloodthirsty Israelis.
In a Sept. 18 tweet, the institute said it “condemns Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanese people,” referring to targeted attacks against pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah terrorists. This made it sound as though Israel went on rampage, killing innocents, which was simply not the case.
According to the Lemkin Institute, Hezbollah is merely a “political party and a service provider for southern Lebanon,” while Israel is a “genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a western world that is, in large measure, too racist and Islamophobic to care.” There was, of course, no mention from the institute of Hezbollah’s unprovoked rocket attacks against Israel on a near-daily basis.
This exemplifies a broader trend of appropriating Jews, or a Jewish name, for ideological cover.
A recent Free Press article about a Palestine convention in Chicago described how Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is ostensibly being used by anti-Israel agitators “to deflect any accusations of antisemitism” — because it has the word “Jewish” in its name.
In November 2023, Columbia University banned the local chapter of JVP due to its “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” on campus. According to NGO Monitor, the group has shown support for a long list of Palestinian terrorists.
Judith Butler, a member of JVP’s advisory board, openly justified October 7 as “armed resistance.” Apparently, this white American gender theorist thinks she’s holier than Gaza’s top Islamic scholar, Salman al-Dayah, who has condemned the Hamas terror attack. It probably doesn’t need mentioning that JVP is ardently anti-Zionist.
Meanwhile, some are exploiting their Jewishness as convenient cover in Canada, too. On Dec. 3, a protest took place on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, involving several groups with “Jewish” in their names: Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, Independent Jewish Voices Canada and the Jewish Faculty Network.
Nineteen mainstream Jewish organizations condemned the protesters, saying that, “Their actions represent an egregious distortion of Jewish values and a calculated attempt to hijack Jewish identity to serve a hateful anti-Zionist and antisemitic agenda.” They said the activists, who hold the views of a tiny minority of Canadian Jews, “trivialize genocide and vilify Israel” and “foster the very antisemitism they claim to oppose.”
As the groups have the word “Jewish” in their names, it would stand to reason that they would be just as concerned about the welfare of Jews as they are of Palestinians. Yet were they demonstrating loudly (or even softly) when Jews were attacked in Canada or elsewhere around the world? Where were they when Jewish schools, synagogues, shops and other businesses were vandalized, firebombed or shot at?
The Ottawa protesters also “invoked Jewish holy texts such as the Torah and the Talmud,” according to one report. This is so you can tell they’re really, really Jewish. It’s strange that they feel the need to do this, since no pro-Israel rally invokes any Jewish holy texts.
All too often we see Israel-haters dusting off their Jewish membership card to use as a shield against criticism, or appropriating Jewish names to lend credibility to their causes. The public should not be fooled.
National Post