A Jew who fled Nazis coined 'genocide' — anti-Zionists are hijacking his name

Raphael Lemkin gave the modern world its most terrifying word: “genocide.” A Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled the Nazis, he spent his life forcing governments to recognize that the deliberate destruction of a people was a unique crime — not just “war” or “atrocity,” but something worse. He helped drive the 1948 Genocide Convention, and he did it as a committed Zionist who believed the Jewish people needed a state after the Holocaust.

In recent years, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization has been (seemingly) hijacking Lemkin’s name to accuse that Jewish state of the very crime he fought to define — and some of the most powerful politicians in America, from both parties, are saying: enough.