The boy who cried 'genocide'

There was a time when the word “genocide” stopped a conversation cold. Now, it’s a talking point — flung at whatever country the progressive Left wants to tar this week.

The word was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family to the Holocaust, including his parents. He built it to describe something specific and monstrous: the deliberate attempt to destroy a people — a nation, an ethnicity, a faith — as such. Not war. Not even war crimes. Annihilation as the goal.