Abdul El-Sayed told a reporter last week that scrutiny of him is “the same thing that they did to JFK when he ran for president… the notion that because he was Catholic, that somehow he had dual loyalty.”

I have written about JFK. That claim is a grotesque perversion of history.

In 1960, no Catholic had ever been elected president. Al Smith’s 1928 landslide loss was driven in large part by Protestant fears—rooted in centuries of Reformation conflict and reinforced by nativist suspicion—that a Catholic president would answer to the Vatican rather than the Constitution. JFK met it head-on in Houston in 1960, pledging absolute separation of church and state, and the charge collapsed because there was nothing under it.

That is not what is happening with El-Sayed.

Being Muslim is not the disqualifier. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, serves as Minnesota’s attorney general. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib serve in the House. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York City. CAIR’s own 2026 directory counts roughly 255 Muslim elected officials nationwide, including four in the House and dozens in state legislatures. Voters have repeatedly elected Muslims to state and federal office without treating their faith as disqualifying.

The issue is not prayer; it is politics, associations, and family ties to an ideology that rejects the secular liberal order El-Sayed claims to defend.

El-Sayed flatly denied on Meet the Press any family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the U.S. listed this year as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity for material support to Hamas.

His half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, has posted otherwise. In 2012 she wrote: “My family has long been MB,” though she added that it “navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively.” In 2013 she wrote that she had “family jailed for being a part of it.” She also wrote of her mother’s early-1970s Brotherhood activism in college. Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, later worked for the U.S. arm of a charity network Treasury designated in 2004 for supporting al-Qaeda; she was never charged.

El-Sayed calls the posts “hearsay” and distances himself from his mother by saying he wasn’t raised by her. But his flat denial and his sister’s own words can’t both be right.

There is more. El-Sayed confirmed on camera that his sister-in-law was on the federal terror watchlist. She sued, a district court ruled in her favor, and an appeals court reversed. The FBI won’t say where she stands now. No one accuses him of any role. His father-in-law is a longtime board member of the Islamic Society of North America.

None of these questions are about how he prays; they are questions about reported links to an organization whose Egyptian branch the United States has now formally labeled for supporting terrorism.

After a man rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel synagogue near Detroit in an attack authorities treated as targeted at Jews, El-Sayed’s response included the line “hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized under pressure from Jewish Democrats, saying he should not have offered “context” that trampled on the victims’ pain. That is not the language of someone simply defending religious freedom.

He has also campaigned repeatedly with Hasan Piker, who in 2019 said “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed later called the remark “dumb” and said America did not deserve the attacks, but the association remains. Voters are entitled to notice who a candidate chooses to platform.

JFK faced prejudice against his faith. El-Sayed faces reporting on his family’s documented embrace of a group now designated by the U.S. government for supporting Hamas, his own comments after an attack on a synagogue, and his political alliances. Equating the two is not a defense of religious liberty. It is an attempt to weaponize a real historical injustice in order to shut down legitimate questions about radicalism and national security. The Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. It does not require voters or journalists to pretend that family ties to a designated terrorist organization, or responses to domestic terrorism, are off-limits simply because the candidate is Muslim. History is not a prop for that evasion.

A few notes on a big loophole in prescription drug advertising that regulators know about and still haven’t closed.

Count the claims in this 25-second TV ad from the telehealth company Ro.

“Fastest-working GLP-1.” “Half the price.” “FDA-approved.” “Lose 20% of your weight.” A formula that “hits not one but two hormones.”

Then find the side effects.

Look closely or you will miss them. At the bottom of the screen, for about five seconds, small type says GLP-1 medications “may have serious side effects” and “Do not use if you or your family have a history of a type of thyroid cancer called MTC or MEN 2.” The ad then refers viewers to their doctor for the rest.

There is no list of side effects. The claims are spoken and repeated to drive the pitch. The risk is a couple of lines of small print you have to read if you see them.

I’m including one of the television spots here for those of you living outside the U.S., who are spared the deluge of pharmaceutical TV ads that we in America have to sit through.

I wrote the book on how this industry works. PHARMA, my history of the American drug business, came out in 2020. When I debated profits and the drug industry at Oxford last year, I presented a fact that still stops most people: America is one of only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. The other is New Zealand. I’ve been a critic for a long time and I think DTC advertising should end.

Start with how odd it is. Only a doctor can prescribe these drugs. But since 1997, when the broadcast rules were loosened, companies have spent billions to create demand among people who cannot buy the product directly, hoping they will contact their physician and ask for it by name.

There was a trade-off in the rules. If an ad names a drug and says what it treats, the company must give viewers the major risks, and they have to be in the spoken part of the ad, not just in print. That’s why pharma ads end with the fast, mumbled list of side effects. The exceptions are narrow. A company can name a drug without saying what it’s for, though not if the drug carries a boxed warning. Or it can discuss the condition without naming the drug. Either way, it is exempt from warning the public about adverse effects.

Telehealth companies drove a truck through that second exception. Sell the “service.” Say “GLP-1” instead of the brand. When the voiceover never names the drug, the company, not the regulators, decides how much risk to show. Ro chose a few lines of small print for a few seconds.

Look at what this ad does anyway. It touts a number, a speed claim, a price claim, and a description of how the drug works. It leans on “FDA-approved” as a trust badge. The FDA-approved labels for these drugs carry the FDA’s most serious warning, a boxed warning often called a black box, about thyroid C-cell tumors found in rodents. Whether that risk exists in humans is unknown. The ad’s small print alludes to it. It never lists the common side effects, which the labels give as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and constipation. Nor does it name the serious ones the labels list: pancreatitis, gallbladder disease, kidney injury from dehydration, severe stomach problems, serious allergic reactions, and low blood sugar.

Compare the economics. Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill ad needed 90 seconds in this year’s Super Bowl, partly because nearly half of it was the required side-effect language. Ro’s 30-second Super Bowl ad, also starring Serena Williams, handled risk differently: a box of small print for about five seconds near the end. It points viewers to a website, mentions a type of thyroid cancer, and says that in rodents these drugs cause thyroid tumors and the impact in humans isn’t known. That’s more than the 25-second spot above offers, but none of it is spoken.

This is not small money. Hims & Hers, which has sold compounded GLP-1s, spent $815 million on advertising in 2025, up from $390 million in 2023, according to its own 10-K.

To be precise, this Ro spot is for FDA-approved drugs, not compounded ones. So this isn’t only a compounder problem. It’s a telehealth problem. Compounded versions, which have never been evaluated by the FDA for safety or effectiveness, raise the same question.

Telehealth companies also spend real money on celebrities. Tennis icon Serena Williams stars in this ad. Charles Barkley has appeared in others for Ro. The company says Williams is a paid partner and discloses a family investment in the company. That’s fair. But every one of those stars is there to make the drug look easy, and none of them is there to tell you the risks.

Washington knows about this. Before the 2025 Super Bowl, Senators Durbin and Marshall warned that the Hims & Hers ad “risks misleading patients by omitting any safety or side effect information.” Since September 2025 the FDA has sent waves of warning letters to telehealth companies over their marketing of compounded GLP-1s, and this spring it asked Congress for more power to go after DTC ads that lack fair balance. The TV loophole itself is still open.

My preferred fix is to end direct-to-consumer advertising altogether. The AMA called for a ban in 2015. But the industry has lobbied heavily to keep it and has a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. So here is the floor:

If an ad describes a drug’s results, speed, mechanism, or price, it is a drug ad. Naming Ro instead of the drug shouldn’t matter. It carries the same fair-balance risk disclosure, including the major risks said out loud.

Ads touching compounded drugs must say plainly that the FDA hasn’t approved them.

Risk information must be as audible and readable as the promise, not buried in fine print.

An ad should not be able to borrow the FDA’s approval and skip the FDA’s warnings. Tell viewers the risks out loud or take the ad off the air.

A week ago Sunday the UK Greens became the first major political party in Britain to formally declare that “Zionism is racism,” passing a motion at their annual conference by 1,022 votes to 813. It is more than simply a virtue-signaling slogan. It declares the party “anti-Zionist,” says Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism,” backs boycott, divestment and sanctions and a full arms embargo against Israel, and calls for “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine,” with Jerusalem as its capital.

What that means in practice is a world in which Israel, home to the largest Jewish population on earth, no longer exists.

We have covered this fight before, and we know how it ends, because the world has already been here. We will get to 1975 in a moment. First, the facts of what happened in Brighton, because some of them have been lost in the noise.

The vote came from a small slice of a large party. The Greens put their membership at about 230,000, up sharply in a year. Fewer than 1% of members voted on the motion proposed by Lubna Speitan, a British-Palestinian artist and activist on the steering group of Greens for Palestine.

The Green Party is not some fringe group. It took 6% of the national vote in 2024, holds five seats in Parliament, controls three London councils and, since May, has two directly elected mayors. The Greens are led by an ultra-left Jewish politician, Zack Polanski. Even he realized the motion was likely a bridge too far and tried and failed to soften it before the final vote. Two amendments he backed, one adding protections for Jewish members and one removing the single-state language, were rejected. He then skipped the final vote to campaign in a by-election.

Calling Zionism racist does not simply indict a government’s policies, which is fair game and happens every day in free societies. It indicts the idea that Jews, alone among peoples, have no legitimate claim to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, about two-thirds of British Jews describe themselves as Zionists. The party has, in effect, told them what it thinks of them.

What follows is what the motion says, who wrote it, what happened in the days after the vote, and why it should matter to Americans as the DSA and some far-left Democrats approach the midterms with increasing electoral clout.

We have been here before

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It passed 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions. Twenty-five states sponsored it, led by Arab and Muslim countries and backed by the Soviet bloc. That motion was pushed through at the height of Cold War maneuvering, in part to counter Washington’s campaign against Moscow’s terrible treatment of Soviet Jews. It was one of the most disgraceful chapters in the UN’s long record of documented anti-Israel bias.

Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, answered from the podium by holding up the text and tearing it in half. He noted that the vote fell 37 years after Kristallnacht. The U.S. ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned that the UN was about to codify antisemitism into international law. “A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” said Moynihan.

The resolution stood for sixteen years, the official position of the United Nations that the Jewish claim to a homeland was, in effect, bigotry.

What ended it was the collapse of the Soviet Union and a determined American campaign. In September 1991, President George H.W. Bush told the General Assembly that equating Zionism with racism “is to reject Israel itself.” Secretary of State James Baker worked the diplomacy, and Moynihan, by then a senator, pushed hard. Israel made repeal a condition of its participation in the Madrid peace conference. On December 16, 1991, Resolution 46/86 revoked the 1975 determination by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 members not voting.

That seemed to be the end of it. The world measured the “Zionism is racism” formula against a genuine definition of racism and rejected it by better than four to one among those countries that voted.

There was, however, a catch. The repeal was a single sentence, drafted short on purpose so that hostile amendments could not hijack it. It withdrew the determination without ever stating that Zionism is not racism. So the idea was set aside but not refuted explicitly. Thirty-five years later, the Green Party is the first to have picked it back up.

What did those sixteen years cost?

The UN resolution was not law. It could not close a synagogue or defund a school. The damage came from what other institutions did once the world’s largest international body had stamped the formula with legitimacy. The harm landed at institutions with registers, budgets and meeting rooms, where someone holding a rulebook could declare a Jewish student society racist on its face and act on it. That happened, for instance, at eight British student unions that adopted “Zionism is racism” resolutions. Several, including those at the University of York and the University of Salford, struck Jewish societies from their registers or restricted their activities. In Canada, the Ontario student federation voted not to admit Jewish student groups, and the student federation at the University of Ottawa moved to stop the Jewish students’ organization from meeting on campus, both on the ground that Zionism was racism. The United States stayed away from a 1978 UN anti-racism conference because of the way it targeted Israel and Zionism. The formula had to be fought off again in 1985 at the Nairobi conference that closed the UN Decade for Women.

That is the fallout to watch now. The Greens run Hackney, where they hold 42 of 57 council seats, and Lewisham, where they hold 40 of 54, and they lead Waltham Forest. Their mayors, Zoë Garbett in Hackney and Liam Shrivastava in Lewisham, took office in May. Those councils fund community groups, license and plan around community buildings, and make decisions that touch schools. The party that runs them has just voted that the ideology most British Jews hold is racist, and it declined to protect members who attend synagogues that call themselves Zionist.

Will Green MPs and council leaders still meet communal leaders whose institutions the party’s policy now calls racist? How will Green-led councils deal with Jewish faith schools under their responsibility? How will they work with cross-communal projects that have Jewish participants?

Those are not rhetorical. They are the questions a Jewish headteacher, a synagogue chair or a charity trustee in Hackney or Lewisham is entitled to put to their council now.

The Greens also voted down an amendment that would have barred the motion from being used to discipline anyone for belonging to synagogues, community centers or other Jewish groups that call themselves Zionist or are expressly in favor of the existence of the state of Israel.

Although the party says nobody will be punished for believing in Zionism, Jewish leaders point out that when members were offered the chance to write that promise down, they declined.

In a video that spread on X around the vote, Speitan is shown at a protest saying she and others will continue until they dismantle Zionism from the world, and that the “Zionist, racist, colonial settler oppressors” will be “hunted in the same way as the Nazi oppressors were.” She adds, “It won’t happen without force.”

On a separate Zoom call she suggested synagogues that support Israel should be “confronted.”

While the party tries to diminish Speitan’s influence on the steering group of Greens for Palestine, it is hard to do so when it comes to Mothin Ali, co-deputy leader since September 2025.

Ali was a major supporter of the motion. He told Middle East Eye that Zionism, as the motion defines it, is an “ethno-nationalist state” that is responsible for “ethnic cleansing.” On the day Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel, October 7, 2023, Ali posted that “white supremacist European settler colonialism must end!” He apologized after a social media uproar.

The fallout from the Green’s vote has been immediate and came from nearly every direction. Within hours, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar barred Polanski from entering Israel. The foreign ministry said it now viewed the party as giving legitimacy to terrorism. President Isaac Herzog said those who call Zionism racism endanger Jews and Israelis everywhere, and opposition leader Yair Lapid said the racism lay with the Greens, not with Zionism. In Britain, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis called the motion “poisonous antisemitism” and a threat to British Jews and to Britain. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust said it would make the Greens the first electorally significant party in living memory to adopt what appears to be an overtly antisemitic platform.

Even Prime Minister Andy Burnham, no friend of Israel, called the decision “completely wrong” and urged Green leaders to reverse it. Labour chair Bridget Phillipson called it fundamentally wrong, and the Conservatives called the Greens toxic to their core.

In an article for The Free Press on October 6, former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that the Greens had “crossed a line” and the vote amounted to “overt anti-Jewish discrimination.”

The motion even caused dissension inside the Green movement. The European Green Party said it “unequivocally” distanced itself. The co-leader of Germany’s Greens called the motion intolerable and unacceptable. The Scottish Greens defended their English and Welsh sister party’s right to the motion while saying they take no position on two states. And inside the UK party, the deputy leader of the Wales Green Party quit.

Then came the ballot box. On October 8, Polanski finished second in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election for the seat Keir Starmer vacated. Was some of the blame due to the Zionism vote? Some political commentators in the UK say yes. The by-election loss leaves a question hanging over the Greens: will Mothin Ali succeed Polanski as party leader. The chair of the Jewish Greens has called on Polanski to resign over a “dereliction of duty.” Polanski only says members will decide, and a leadership vote is due next year.

Why should Americans care?

It would be easy to read this as a British story, a quarrel inside a party with which most Americans are not very familiar. It is not, because the same dynamic is already running in the American left, and one of its institutions has already gone further than the Greens on paper.

The DSA already voted for it. At its 2025 national convention in Chicago, the Democratic Socialists of America, which has roughly 78,000 members, approved a resolution titled “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” by 675 to 524. It describes Zionism as a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project, makes affiliation with AIPAC, J Street or Democratic Majority for Israel incompatible with membership, and makes statements such as “Israel has a right to defend itself” grounds for expulsion.

Local DSA chapters have gone further than the national body. Twin Cities DSA’s 2025 resolution committed the chapter to being anti-Zionist “in principle and praxis,” required endorsed candidates to back boycott, divestment and sanctions, and said members who advance Zionist interests, including through groups like the Jewish National Fund, face expulsion. That is the mechanism from 1976 in miniature: an organization with a register and a rulebook deciding who is in.

It matters because of the rise of far-left anti-Israel voices in the DSA and the Democratic Party, including New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and others.

Why the Greens matter as a case study. The motion passed because a small, motivated group of activists won a vote inside a fast-growing party at a conference of roughly 1,800 voters, over the objections of four of the party’s five MPs. The DSA convention worked the same way: delegates, not rank-and-file members or voters, decided, and the people who had to live with the result were the elected officials. Polanski’s week shows what that might cost when the electorate finally weighs in. Mamdani’s turbulent week after the Green’s vote demonstrates what it costs when the base thinks you have not gone far enough.

The question for American readers is not whether any of these four will say the words “Zionism is racism” tomorrow. It is whether, the next time an activist-controlled convention, a campus senate or a city’s equity office is handed that resolution, anyone will have the standing, and the nerve, to say that Britain already ran this experiment, and so did the United Nations, and it must be rejected.

Sixteen years is a long time to be told that your claim to a homeland is bigotry. It took the world that long to climb out of that hole once, and it needed the collapse of an empire to do it. Now a party in the country that gave the world the Balfour Declaration has climbed back in, and its supporters celebrated when they did.

The Greens say they are an anti-racist party. They are entitled to argue that Israeli policy is wrong. What they are not entitled to is the claim that the movement most British Jews call their own is racism, and that nothing follows from saying so. History says something follows. The only open question is who pays first and whether American far-left progressives will follow suit and embrace the same bigotry.

By Gerald Posner

The word “genocide” has been attached to only one side of this war: Israel. The event that started it, the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel three years ago this Wednesday, appears in discussions of genocide mostly as backstory.

This past August I wrote a rigorous primer that examined the word genocide under international law, what is required to satisfy its explicit standards, and why Gaza did not meet that test. That piece carried the irreverent title, Genocide for Dummies, but that undersells a serious legal analysis that went viral.

Writing it got me thinking about a narrower and very different question: If the 1948 Genocide Convention’s list of prohibited acts and “special intent” requirement were applied to October 7, did Hamas commit a genocidal act on that day?

The international organizations that have weighed in with opinions on genocide—the UN Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Amnesty International, and the Israe…

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A shorter note today — not a full Just the Facts piece, just something on my mind after a weekend spent reading two new lawsuits that a lot of you, given how many of you follow my occasional reporting on Nazi-looted art, will find worth your time.

In my writing on Nazi-looted art and restitution — including my own decades-long search for the missing Raphael “Portrait of a Young Man,” looted by Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland who was hanged at Nuremberg — I have never come across a case as legally and morally difficult as the one just filed against the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.

Actually, two lawsuits were filed this week in California, prompted by that state’s sweeping 2024 law designed to help families reclaim Nazi-looted art, along with the federal Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act signed into law earlier this year. I have spent the weekend reading the lawsuits. The Babbitt family’s suit was filed just two days before the two-year window that law gave …

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Welcome to the new paid subscribers who have joined Just the Facts recently — glad to have you, and I hope some of you can join me live for this month’s Ask Me Anything.

The September AMA is next Thursday, September 24, at 6PM ET — live text chat, exclusively for paid subscribers. After trying a few different days and times over the past several months, it looks like the last Thursday of the month at 6PM works best for the most people, so that's likely where I will keep it going forward — barring a breaking story that gets in the way.

There’s a lot to get into this time:

• My piece on why I no longer trust the New York Times

• The latest version of “Genocide for Dummies”

• Ongoing journalism updates on the conflict with Iran

• Where AI is headed — and what it means for journalism and beyond

• And whatever else is on your radar

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When I was a law student in San Francisco in the late 1970s, I never imagined that over what became a 40-year journalism career, I would write eleven opinion pieces for The New York Times, plus four more for its Sunday Magazine — ranging from Nazi war criminals to political assassinations to secret Vatican files to, most recently, the government’s failures after the Trump assassination attempt. It was during those law school years that I started a habit: when I needed a single reference point, the reporting in The New York Times was what I treated as determinative. The San Francisco Chronicle was the local competition, but the Times carried a different kind of authority. “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—its famous slogan, still tucked into the upper-left corner of the front page—did not seem like an empty boast.

When I moved to New York to practice law, and later as a journalist, that was how I worked for decades. The Times was one of my first stops for general news and analysis. It …

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I spent thirty-eight minutes last week debunking September 11 conspiracy theories one by one with Shabbos Kestenbaum on PragerU’s The Brief. Many of you are familiar with the most popular ones: Jet fuel cannot melt steel; WTC 7 was brought down by explosive charges; a missile struck the Pentagon; dancing Israelis are evidence the Mossad was behind the terror attack.

I have had some variation of that conversation since 2003, when McGraw-Hill published my New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept. That book raised serious and some still unanswered critical questions about whether some senior Saudi royals and Pakistan’s air force chief might have had foreknowledge about the attack. At the same time, I made it clear that nineteen Islamist terrorists were solely responsible for carrying out the attack that day. The documentary evidence is overwhelming. All the hijackers had passports, visa applications, immigration records, flight school enrollments, rental car agreements, motel receipts…

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Many of you who read Just the Facts know my 2003 book, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. It reached #2 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list that fall. Its final chapter, “The Interrogation,” broke the story of what Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah told CIA interrogators shortly after his capture. There’s front-page news today that brought me back to it —and what the coverage is missing.

A military judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, has set a June 5, 2028 trial date for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three of his Guantánamo Bay co-defendants, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Schrama rejected prosecutors’ request to begin in January 2027, ruling that it left too little time to resolve the pending motions to suppress evidence derived from CIA interrogations. A trial date was set once before, for January 2021. It came and went. A fifth original co-defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was severed from the case in 2023 after …

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Someone I’ve known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. I like him and run into him regularly in the neighborhood. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. The other day, he told me he respected my article in The Free Press, in which I said I’d leave my longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, if it stood behind a virulently antisemitic Palestinian novelist. Then, out of the blue, he asked me a question in the tone people use when they already assume the answer.

“Do you think there’s a genocide in Gaza?”

No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Then he explained why I was wrong. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Everybody knows that.

That was the whole of it. He did not cite a study or a court ruling, not even a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that “everybody knows” is where investigations begin, not where they end. I am also a lawyer by training, which means that when I look at the Genocide Convention, the tribunal judgments, and the legal threshold the word actually requires, I am not reading them as a journalist translating a foreign language. I know what the standard is, I know where it comes from, and I know how rarely — and how carefully — international courts have applied it.

A word about what this piece is and is not. I am not writing as an advocate, and this is not a polemic. I have no brief to defend and no side to win. This is not an attempt to rebut every argument made for the genocide charge, or to address every piece of evidence offered. It is a primer — the kind of thing you should read before you enter that argument, so that when you do, you know what the word requires, what the recognized cases look like, and what standard a competent court is required to apply. I call it as I see it. That has never made everyone happy. It is the only way I know how to work.

I left that neighborhood encounter thinking that what this argument needs is not another 12,000-word essay by a military historian or a dueling-statistics deep dive that nobody finishes. It needs a manual. Something short, plain, and honest.

That’s when I thought of an informal Genocide for Dummies.

The title will annoy some people, and I want to address that before they stop reading. Genocide is among the gravest words in the human vocabulary, and I am not using it lightly or ironically. I am saying that the word is now routinely used by people who cannot define it, at a threshold they have never examined — and that the most honest response is a plain-language explanation of what it requires.

I am old enough to remember how one of the great publishing franchises in American history began. In November 1991, a publisher called IDG released a book that bookstore owners were sure would insult the people buying it. DOS for Dummies, by a computer columnist named Dan Gookin, had a first print run of 7,500 copies. It sold more than a million in its first year and launched a series that has since produced well over 2,000 titles.

The premise was radical in its modesty. Take something intimidating and strip out the jargon so it can be explained to someone who knows nothing, all without treating them like they’re stupid.

Genocide is a word almost everyone now uses and almost no one can define. So, let’s do it the Gookin way.

What the Word Actually Means

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term in 1944 after losing dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, built it as a prosecutor’s tool: precise, bounded, demanding. The word itself announced its purpose — genos, the Greek for tribe or race, fused with caedere, the Latin for killing. He would not recognize what has happened to it. Four years later, the UN adopted the Genocide Convention — and from the start, its drafters drew a clear boundary. The original Secretariat Draft — UN Doc. E/447, 1947 — explicitly noted that heavy civilian losses in war “do not as a rule constitute genocide.” That was the domain of the laws of war. The Genocide Convention addressed something different: the intentional destruction of a group as such.

Article II is the whole ballgame — one sentence that has been parsed in courtrooms for seventy years. Genocide means any of five acts — killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, preventing births, forcibly transferring children — committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.

Everything hinges on those last words. Lawyers call it dolus specialis — special intent. The bottom line is that it is not enough to kill a great many people from one group. It is not enough to kill them carelessly, disproportionately, or unlawfully. You must kill them because of what they are, with the object of erasing the group.

And there is a second requirement people skip past, which is where nearly every public argument about Gaza goes off the rails. When intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct rather than proven by an order or a plan, the International Court of Justice has held — in Bosnia v. Serbia in 2007 and Croatia v. Serbia in 2015 — that the inference of genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available.

Not the most emotionally satisfying one. There is no vote for what majority prefers. It must be the only one available. If another reasonable explanation for the pattern exists, the charge fails. That is not an Israeli talking point. It is black-letter international law, and it exists for a reason: to keep the gravest crime in the legal canon from collapsing into a synonym for “war I find abhorrent.”

The Real Ones

Cases that define the legal boundary are fewer than most people assume. They are instructive not only what is on the list, but for why.

The Holocaust. Six million Jews. Roughly two-thirds of European Jewry. An industrial apparatus built for no purpose other than killing — death camps, timetables, rail schedules ultimately diverted from a war Germany was losing to keep the transports running. The killing was not a means to a military end. The killing was the end.

Rwanda, 1994. Between 500,000 and one million dead in a hundred days. Most credible estimates put the share of Rwanda’s Tutsi population killed at somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters. Neighbors with machetes. Radio broadcasts calling Tutsis inyenzi — cockroaches. It produced the first conviction for genocide ever handed down by an international tribunal: Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba commune, in 1998 — a case that also established, for the first time, that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide.

Srebrenica, 1995. Around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, murdered in a matter of days. Note the number. It is a fraction of Gaza’s toll. And the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found it was unambiguously genocide, a ruling later confirmed by the International Court of Justice. That was because Bosnian Serb forces separated a group by ethnicity and sex, removed them from a captive civilian population that was otherwise bused away, and executed them as such. Small numbers, unmistakable intent. That’s the lesson worth holding onto: the case turns on what was intended, not on how many died.

Cambodia. Here is where it gets instructive. The Khmer Rouge killed roughly two million people — nearly a quarter of the country. The Killing Fields are shorthand for atrocity itself. And when the UN-backed tribunal finally rendered judgment in 2018, upheld on appeal in 2022, the genocide convictions covered only the Cham Muslims and the ethnic Vietnamese. The vast majority of the dead — Cambodians killed by Cambodians — were victims of crimes against humanity and extermination. Not, legally, genocide.

Many people have trouble digesting that. Two million dead, a quarter of a nation, and the tribunal still declined to call the bulk of it genocide, because the Khmer Rouge were destroying a class and a political order, not a protected group as such.

That distinction is not a technicality. The Genocide Convention’s drafters considered including political groups in the definition and deliberately left them out. Destroying a party or a class is not genocide. The law is narrow on purpose, and Cambodia is what that narrowness looks like in practice: the worst killing of its era, and most of it fell outside the word.

Sudan, the case my neighbor half-remembered — is the contested one. Colin Powell called Darfur genocide in 2004. A UN commission the following year found crimes against humanity but not genocidal intent. The International Criminal Court later charged Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s long-serving dictator — the first sitting head of state it ever charged with genocide, in warrants issued in 2009 and 2010. The ICC does not try people in absentia, and when al-Bashir subsequently visited several ICC member states, no one arrested him. He has been held in Sudanese custody since 2019 on domestic corruption charges. When Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023, Bashir left Kober prison — the army said he had been transferred to a military hospital before the fighting; some accused the military of releasing him deliberately. He was subsequently held at a military base and later transferred to Merowe, a town on the Nile some 330 kilometers from Khartoum, for medical treatment. His precise status and whereabouts as of this writing cannot be independently confirmed. The ICC case has never gone to trial.

Darfur belongs in the argument column, not the settled one — and it cuts both ways, because the absence of a verdict there reflects the Court’s enforcement weakness, not an acquittal.

Now Apply the Test to Gaza

Gaza’s prewar population was roughly 2.2 million, up about 70 percent from the 1.3 million who lived there in 2005, when Israel removed all Jewish settlers, withdrew its troops, and transferred internal administration to Palestinian control. That sits awkwardly beside the “seventy-five years of genocide” claim that often travels with the “open-air concentration camp” framing. A population undergoing continuous extermination does not grow by 70 percent.

I use that figure carefully, because it answers only the cumulative, “seventy-five years of genocide” version of the claim, and not the argument about this war. So let’s take this war on its own terms.

As of 2026, the Gaza health ministry’s reported death toll since October 7, 2023, was in the low seventy-thousands. An Israeli military official reportedly acknowledged a figure of roughly 70,000 in January. A peer-reviewed mortality survey — the Gaza Mortality Survey, led by Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, and published in The Lancet Global Health in February 2026 — estimated 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025, along with some 16,300 non-violent and excess deaths from the collapse of the health system. The health ministry’s running total as of early 2026 stood in the low seventy-thousands.

Take the highest number. That is roughly 3.4 percent of the prewar population, over more than two years.

Rwanda’s killers murdered on the order of 70 percent of the country’s Tutsi population in about a hundred days. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is arithmetic, and it is the difference between a war and an extermination.

There is also the question of capacity. Israel possesses one of the most powerful air forces in the region. A state intent on destroying a population of 2.2 million would not need two and a half years to kill three percent of them.

Israel says it killed about 20,000 Hamas combatants. Discount that claim as much as you like — the same independent survey that validated the health ministry’s numbers found that women, children and the elderly accounted for 56 percent of violent deaths. That means something close to 44 percent are military-age men — a category that is not automatically synonymous with combatant — but in a territory governed by an armed Islamist movement that recruits from exactly that demographic.. That ratio is grim. It is also not the demographic fingerprint of a campaign to erase a people. When the object is the group as such, the dead look like the group — all of it, in proportion. Here they do not.

Then look at conduct, which is where the “only reasonable inference” standard bites. Evacuation warnings. Aid corridors, however inadequate. Humanitarian pauses negotiated in 2024 specifically to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of Gazan children against polio. Repeated ceasefires. Hostage exchanges negotiated with the very people you are supposedly exterminating. And a ceasefire in place since October 2025, with Gaza’s population still there.

Genocides do not stop voluntarily. They end when someone stops them and they do not pause to negotiate with the people they intend to erase.

The Enemy Has a Name

There is a question the statistics above cannot answer on their own, and almost nobody thinks to ask it: who, exactly, is Israel at war with?

Genocide requires intent to destroy a protected group as such — national, ethnic, racial, religious. Not a government or army or a political movement. That is why the Khmer Rouge, who killed a quarter of Cambodia, were convicted of genocide only as to the Cham and the Vietnamese. So, the threshold question in Gaza is whether the belligerent Israel is fighting is Hamas or the Palestinian people. Most of Israel’s own conduct supports the former inference.

Start with the most obvious fact, which is so obvious that it disappears. Israel negotiates with Hamas—repeatedly, publicly, through Qatari and Egyptian mediators—over ceasefires and hostage exchanges and the return of bodies. There is a ceasefire in force as I write this. Nobody negotiates a truce with a people it intends to erase, because the point of erasure is that there will be no one left to negotiate with. The Wehrmacht did not broker prisoner exchanges with the Jews of Warsaw. The Interahamwe did not sign agreements with the Tutsi. In every case on the recognized list, the perpetrator’s relationship with the victim group was total and one-directional. Here it is bilateral, mediated, and ongoing.

Second, South Africa, which brought the genocide case against Israel before the ICJ in December 2023, identifies “Palestinians” in Gaza as a substantial part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group that extends far beyond Gaza. Roughly two million Arab citizens live inside Israel, vote in its elections, sit in its parliament, and have served on its Supreme Court. Some three million Palestinians live in the West Bank. If the intent were to destroy Palestinians as such, one might expect the campaign to reach the group wherever it is found. That is what happened in the actual genocides: the Nazis pursued Jews across a continent, into countries they did not govern; the Hutu Power militias hunted Tutsi from one prefecture to the next.

The Genocide Convention says, “in whole or in part,” and tribunals have held that a geographically limited portion of a group can qualify — Srebrenica was one town. The absence of any campaign against Palestinians in Haifa or Nazareth therefore does not by itself defeat the charge. It does, however, make the claim considerably harder. Why would a state supposedly bent on destroying a people be content to concentrate its military actions only where Hamas governed and attacked from? Under the ICJ’s test, that alternative cannot simply be wished away.

Third, some Palestinians in Gaza publicly make the distinction themselves. In March 2025, hundreds took to the streets of Beit Lahia and Deir al-Balah in the largest anti-Hamas demonstrations since the war began. One protester told CNN that he was oppressed by both the occupation army and Hamas, and that Hamas launched October 7 while Gazans paid the price. Reporting through 2024 and 2025 documented widening anger at a movement that fought from tunnels while civilians absorbed the response.

Those protests do not tell us what all Gazans think, and the victims’ perceptions do not determine the perpetrator’s intent. They establish something narrower: some Gazans distinguish Hamas from Israel’s war against Hamas even while condemning Israel’s occupation and attacks. That distinction is consistent with the alternative inference that Israel’s object was to defeat Hamas, not to destroy Palestinians as such.

The ICC warrants against Netanyahu and his then–defense minister Yoav Gallant allege that Israel’s conduct during the offensive constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. But assuming for the sake of argument that what is alleged in the ICC warrants was correct, look at what they do not say. The prosecutor assessed the same evidence everyone else has examined, before the same court that would have to sustain the charge, and he did not charge genocide. He is far from anyone’s idea of an Israeli apologist, and yet he had the option.

This is the distinction the chant of genocide obliterates. There is an enormous legal and moral difference between a state that fights a war brutally, and one that sets out to eliminate a people. The first describes a great many wars, including wars fought by countries whose citizens are now doing the chanting. The second describes a small handful of adjudicated cases in the modern era, and Gaza does not fit their pattern.

The Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017 produced devastation — a city largely destroyed, thousands of civilians killed, an enemy entrenched in residential blocks — and no serious legal analysis called it genocide. The difference was not the destruction. It was the enemy.

Fighting Hamas in Gaza kills Palestinians. That is a fact, and I am not going to soften it with a euphemism. But killing Palestinians while fighting Hamas and killing Palestinians in order to destroy Palestinians are different acts with different names, and the entire architecture of international criminal law rests on keeping them apart.

The Body That Said Otherwise

If you have heard one authority cited for the proposition that Israel is committing genocide, it is this one, and it is worth knowing exactly what it is.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel was created by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021. It has three members. It was not a court. It could not convict anyone, subpoena anyone, or compel the production of a document. It investigated and issued reports. Its chair was Navi Pillay, the South African jurist who served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda — she sat on the trial chamber that convicted Akayesu in 1998. All three commissioners announced their resignations in July 2025, citing age and other commitments; their departures took effect in October and November. (The reconstituted panel has since reiterated the genocide conclusion in a June 2026 report. The same structural problems — low fact-finding threshold, no Israeli participation, contested or compromised membership — apply to the new panel too).

The Commission’s credibility had already taken hits before its final finding landed. Commissioner Miloon Kothari sparked widespread condemnation in 2022 when he claimed that social media was “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby” and questioned why Israel was allowed to be a UN member at all — invoking one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in circulation. Pillay defended his comments and dismissed antisemitism concerns as a diversion. I raise this not to invalidate the Commission’s legal analysis — a flawed messenger can still carry a valid argument — but because it bears on the question of whether a panel constituted this way, applying a criminal-law test at a fact-finding threshold, without any Israeli participation, and with this track record, deserves to be reported as having rendered something close to a verdict. It did not. It rendered a finding, from a compromised body, that a court has not yet been asked to confirm.

On September 16, 2025, the Commission issued a seventy-two-page legal analysis concluding that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five genocidal acts in Article II: killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births. It treated statements by senior Israeli officials as direct evidence of genocidal intent. Israel, which refuses the Commission access, called the findings scandalous and false.

Here is the part that people quoting this report usually leave out: genocide accusations were circulating within twenty-four hours of the first Israeli air strikes, before the IDF set foot in Gaza. A timestamp does not disprove a genocide. But it raises a legitimate question about epistemics, about how much evidence some accusers believed necessary before reaching the gravest conclusion available.

There are three places where the report fails to carry the weight now being loaded onto it.

The first is the burden of proof. The Commission’s own stated threshold is “reasonable grounds to conclude,” the lower standard used by human rights fact-finding bodies. It is not a criminal-trial standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor is it the ICJ’s standard for state responsibility, which requires that allegations of exceptional gravity be proved by evidence that is fully conclusive. What you have, then, is a criminal-law definition applied at a fact-finding threshold, with the result reported in the press as though a court had ruled. It has not.

The second is that there was no adversarial testing of the evidence. The “only reasonable inference” rule is most rigorously applied when a chamber weighs a claimant’s evidence against a respondent’s, with cross-examination and a defense case. The whole function of the rule is to force a tribunal to consider the explanation the accused offers and then reject it on the record. The Commission had no Israeli submissions. Israel’s refusal to participate was its own choice, and it does not erase the evidence the Commission gathered. But it does mean that a test designed to eliminate reasonable alternatives was conducted without the accused presenting them. That is a structural limitation, not a partisan objection.

Critics of the report press this into a sharper claim: that across seventy-two pages the Commission never seriously reckons with the fact that the Israeli army was fighting a force of roughly thirty thousand operating from a fortified network of hundreds of kilometers of secret tunnels built deliberately beneath hospitals, schools and residential blocks. The report describes the civilian devastation in exhaustive detail; it does not test the military explanation against that context with comparable rigor. That matters because the deliberate use of civilian infrastructure as shield military operations is itself a war crime under Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions — meaning the Commission was analyzing the consequences of one unlawful act without accounting for the unlawful act that preceded it. The Commission’s failure to engage it is not a minor procedural gap; it is a structural omission in a document purporting to apply the “only reasonable inference” standard.

The third is what the Commission infers about intent. The “only reasonable inference” rule applies only when intent is being inferred from conduct. The ICJ said so in Croatia v. Serbia: the pattern-of-conduct analysis is what a court turns to in the absence of direct proof of intent, such as the expression of a policy to that effect. The Commission’s position is that the statements by senior Israeli officials supply the direct evidence. Two days after the October 7 terror attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

The dispute is over what that statement meant. Was Gallant calling for a merciless war on Hamas, to eliminate the Islamic terror group once and for all? The grammatical antecedent in his sentence is Hamas. The Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty, and South Africa instead said he meant it about Palestinians collectively. It treated that ministerial rhetoric—only 48 hours after the Hamas terror attack—as direct evidence of state policy of genocide. The Commission turned the idea that Israel was fighting an enemy that behaved like animals into Israel fighting a population it regards as animals.

Beyond Gallant’s statement, the Commission cited Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek — “Remember what Amalek did to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember” — repeated in a letter to soldiers days later. The biblical story concludes with God’s command to spare no one. But Netanyahu was invoking a 3,000-year-old tradition of comparing an existential enemy to Amalek, not issuing an operational order. The full speech explicitly identifies Hamas as the target. The verse appears in the permanent exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, and on a Holocaust memorial in The Hague — in both contexts a warning of vigilance, not a command.

The Commission treats both Netanyahu’s and Gallant’s statements as direct evidence of an expressed state policy of destruction — adopted, transmitted through a chain of command, translated into operational orders. That leap is not supported by the operational record, which is the better evidence of what a government intended: the many evacuation warnings and humanitarian corridors, facilitated aid deliveries and medical evacuations, pauses in fighting to give children the polio vaccine, the ceasefires, the hostage negotiations. A West Point urban warfare scholar embedded with the IDF four times, reported watching missions delayed or canceled because children were detected nearby — a pattern inconsistent with exterminatory intent.

Some warnings were late or inadequate. But orders that were issued and carried out still matter. Rhetoric is not an operational order. If it were, half the governments on earth would be in the dock.

Tunnels and human shields explain why a hospital gets struck. They do not explain restricting food. The charge that Israel used starvation as a method of warfare — pursued by the ICC prosecutor, cited by the Commission, and reported by international aid organizations whose impartiality has been extensively contested — is a serious one that military necessity does not answer. Even if that charge is sustained by a competent tribunal, it will represent a genuine crime. What it will not represent, absent specific intent to destroy Palestinians as a group, is genocide. Those are different charges with different names, and collapsing them does not make the smaller one bigger. It makes the larger one meaningless.

One of the Commission’s most cited examples is the December 2023 shelling of Gaza’s main fertility clinic, the Al-Basma IVF Centre, which reportedly destroyed about 4,000 embryos. Israel has not confirmed that it struck the facility. For the attack to constitute genocide under Article II(d), the facility would have to have been targeted as part of an intent to prevent births within the group (Palestinians). The Commission inferred that intent from the effect. But without evidence about target selection, an errant shell in an urban battlefield during heavy ground fighting remains every bit as reasonable an alternative—and under Bosnia v. Serbia, a reasonable alternative is all it takes for the inference to fail. Effect alone cannot establish the required intent.

A reconstituted panel has since reiterated the genocide conclusion in a June 2026 report. The same structural problems — low fact-finding threshold, no Israeli participation, contested or compromised membership — apply to the new panel too.

The Rest of the Case

I think the Commission weighed its evidence with its conclusion already in hand. But its conclusion has also been reached independently by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, a majority of the genocide scholars who voted — and serious people, including some Israeli Holocaust historians.

Among the scholars who changed their minds publicly is Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Holocaust historian at Brown University, who declared in a July 2025 New York Times op-ed that he saw genocide in Gaza. Bartov’s piece drew a direct rebuttal from John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, who has been embedded with the IDF in Gaza four times. Spencer’s answer to Bartov’s title — “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” — was “I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza.” Spencer’s credibility rests not on legal analysis but on direct observation: he reviewed IDF orders, watched the targeting process, and saw missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. His conclusion was that nothing he observed resembled genocidal intent.

The often-cited IAGS resolution was widely reported as representing "86 percent of genocide scholars." The actual picture is significantly narrower. Of the association's approximately 500 members, 28 percent voted; of those voters, 86 percent supported the resolution. That works out to roughly one quarter of the full membership actively endorsing the finding. The threshold required to hold the vote was just 20 percent of members in good standing — a status achieved simply by paying annual dues. Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who describes herself as a founding member of what became IAGS, said the resolution did not reflect the majority of genocide scholars and that membership was no longer limited to serious scholars of genocide.

The membership numbers bear that out: IAGS’s directory stood at roughly 150 members in October 2023, tripling to around 440 by the time the resolution passed. Nearly 200 genocide, Holocaust, and legal scholars — including former U.S. Justice Department war crimes prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum — signed a letter demanding retraction on the ground that the resolution never seriously established special intent and never engaged the alternative explanation the law requires the claimant to eliminate. Across three pages, Hamas appears only in two brief subordinate clauses.

That means “the experts have ruled” is carrying far more weight than it can bear. When a fact-finding body applies a criminal-law definition at a fact-finding threshold with no defense in the room, and a scholarly association passes a resolution supported by roughly a quarter of its full membership, you do not have a verdict. You have a prosecutorial brief, contested by serious people, awaiting a tribunal that has not yet ruled and will not for years.

And the tribunal everyone invokes has not decided anything on the merits. The ICJ’s January 2024 order was provisional — an interim safeguard issued long before the court has weighed the full evidence on either side. In the months that followed, the order was almost universally reported as finding a “plausible case of genocide.” It did not. In a BBC HARDtalk interview on April 25, 2024, the court’s then-president Joan Donoghue — an American lawyer who presided over the South Africa hearings — corrected that reading directly. “It did not decide,” she told interviewer Stephen Sackur, “and this is something where I’m correcting something that’s often said in the media — it did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” What the court found, she explained, was that Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide, and that South Africa had standing to present that claim. “The shorthand that often appears — that there’s a plausible case of genocide — isn’t what the court decided.”

Donoghue’s clarification landed like a grenade. Those who had built arguments on “the ICJ found genocide plausible” scrambled to explain that she was wrong about her own court’s ruling — a remarkable position. Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, argued on X that a plausible right to protection from genocide necessarily implies plausible genocidal acts, and that Donoghue’s clarification was therefore “revisionist.” It is the argument of a man telling the presiding judge she misread her own order.

Something else worth noting before the ICJ renders judgment: several countries that have intervened in support of South Africa's case have asked the court to loosen the standard — an implicit concession that under Bosnia v. Serbia, as currently applied, the case against Israel is unlikely to prevail. Brazil wants a novel "balanced approach" to genocidal intent. Belize argues there is "no requirement" that a state act exclusively with genocidal intent. Chile prefers "a fluid concept of intent" based on holistic evidence. The consequences would extend well beyond this case. The ICJ is considering the standard question in Gambia v. Myanmar, and that whatever threshold the court sets there becomes the new global floor. At least 90 countries have enacted universal jurisdiction over genocide. A lower standard does not protect one population. It changes the rules for every state, every official, and every future case — including against the United States and its allies.

In May 2026, the court set South Africa’s reply for November 22, 2027, and Israel’s rejoinder for May 22, 2029. Bosnia v. Serbia took fourteen years from filing to judgment. A verdict in the Gaza case this decade is highly unlikely.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Words are instruments. Lemkin created this one in 1944 to do a specific job, and it only works if it stays sharp.

If genocide means any war with terrible civilian casualties alone, then it means nothing, and the next time a group is marked for erasure — and there will be a next time — the alarm will already be worn out from overuse. That is not a semantic concern. That is the mechanism by which “never again” fails.

So here is my falsifiable standard, offered to my neighbor and to anyone else. Show me direct evidence of intent to destroy Palestinians as such — whether through explicit statements of policy, a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference surviving contact with the alternative explanation, or both. Show me that the alternative explanation — a brutal war against an armed enemy embedded in a civilian population — has been considered and eliminated rather than simply wished away. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict.

Bring me those and I will write the correction myself, under my own name.

Until then, understand what you are doing when you repeat the word as though it were a talisman that turns Israelis into modern-day Nazis. You are not making an argument. You are casting a spell — and hoping that if enough people say the word, it will become true.

It doesn’t work that way. It never has.

Every few years, the private record of a powerful government official suddenly becomes public. Not because the official chose to publish it or because a memoir was due. The notes surface because they were preserved by a system the writer did not fully control — and because someone armed with a subpoena or a Freedom of Information Act request finally went looking.

The public then reads words never intended for the public.

The latest example is Anthony Fauci.

Most of you have read about the 1,100 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era entries, covering December 2019 through the end of 2022. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told FOX News that the files were found on scattered government servers. It took eight months, he said, to find all of it.

Diary is the wrong word for what has emerged.

A diary suggests a journal kept in a bedside drawer — something its author alone creates and possesses. Fauci’s record is different. He wrote candidly, sometimes daily, using government infrastructure. The su…

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Somewhere in Germany this morning, someone typed a family name into a search box and learned, in about the time it takes to read this sentence, that a grandfather or a great-uncle had once carried a Nazi Party membership card. It is happening millions of times over. For eighty years the plain fact of who actually joined Hitler’s party lived in millions of paper cards that almost no one could reach. This year, at last, it became searchable online — and almost immediately a fight broke out over who is allowed to use it.

I have a particular reason to write about this now. In 1994 and I spent time inside the Berlin Document Center vault where those cards were kept, and I reported on them for The New Yorker. I argued that a record this important should be open to everyone. It has taken thirty-two years for that to come close to happening — and in the end it took a German newspaper and artificial intelligence, not any government, to do it.

The piece I published then, “Secrets of the Files,” …

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Note: as I finish this piece Wednesday night, Graham Platner has just dropped his Maine Senate bid amid a sexual assault allegation. That's a real story, but it's a different one from the story below. Platner was never a DSA candidate, and he isn't leaving the race because Democratic voters rejected him — he's leaving because his endorsers fled overnight, not because of an ideological reckoning. What follows is about something else: a disciplined, organized movement that is winning clean primary votes against sitting incumbents, and doing it again and again.

In the spring of 2010, as Tea Party insurgents began knocking off Republican incumbents in primaries, the party establishment reached for a familiar reassurance. GOP leaders repeated the idea that the Republican party was a big tent, welcoming the movement as an infusion of energy that could be absorbed, and managed. Ohio Congressman John Boehner said “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the…

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There is a viral video making its way across social media this week that every Democrat who cares about the future of the party should be required to watch. It runs about three minutes. It is not comfortable viewing.

In it, Scott Wiener — California state senator, frontrunner for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, gay Jewish progressive with one of the most consequential LGBTQ legislative records in American history — sits with his back against a wall at an Irish sports bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, watching a World Cup match. An activist named Jesus Coba has cornered him. For three minutes, Coba screams, demands, and harangues. He repeatedly calls Wiener a Zionist. He tells him to get out of his neighborhood. He demands, again and again, that Wiener look into the camera and say “Free Palestine.”

Wiener mostly says nothing. His face is the face of a man who has just understood something he didn’t fully understand before. The ultra-progressive movement he helped build has come for him.

Three days later, Wiener showed up at San Francisco’s Trans March — an event he had attended for 22 consecutive years, an event that exists in part because of laws he wrote. A crowd confronted him, shouted obscenities, and made it, in his own words, “impossible for me to safely remain in the park.” He left. A video of the expulsion racked up roughly six million views by the following afternoon.

The activist who filmed it captured the moment’s terrible irony in a single sentence, shouted at Wiener’s back as he retreated through Dolores Park: “It sucks because you’ve been wonderful… for trans people, and you’ve been terrible… on Gaza.”

There it is. That sentence is not just about Scott Wiener. It is the clearest possible statement of what has happened to a significant faction of the American left.

The Most Progressive Jew in California

To understand why these two videos are so remarkable, you need to understand who Scott Wiener actually is.

He is not a centrist Democrat who got tagged with a progressive label. He is the real thing — a Harvard-educated attorney and 55-year-old gay man who has spent a decade in the California State Senate methodically dismantling the legal architecture around LGBTQ rights, one bill at a time.

Start with SB 107, his 2022 law that made California the first state in the nation to establish itself as a formal refuge for transgender youth and their families. When Texas, Alabama, and Idaho began criminalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, Wiener’s law made California a legal sanctuary for those families fleeing extradition orders, subpoenas, and custody battles. Last year he strengthened it further with SB 497, which added warrant requirements for healthcare data and expanded shield protections for trans patients, their families, and their doctors.

Before that there was SB 239, which removed California’s HIV-specific felony statute. Before that, it was a felony to intentionally expose someone to HIV infection. Wiener’s bill reduced those offenses to misdemeanors and allowed prior convictions to be vacated.

SB 145 ended mandatory registration as a sex offender for cases of same sex “consensual” sex in which the victim was between 14-and 17 years of age and the adult was no more than 10 years the minor’s age.

Wiener also wrote the nation’s first LGBTQ Seniors Bill of Rights, protecting residents of long-term care facilities from discrimination based on sexual orientation or HIV status. He made PrEP available from a pharmacist without a prescription — also a first in the nation. He secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender-affirming healthcare that the Trump administration was cutting from Medicaid.

This is not simply a legislative record but rather an ultra-progressive architecture. No California politician has built more of the legal infrastructure protecting trans people.

He is also running for Congress in a heavily watched race — the frontrunner, having taken roughly 42 percent of the primary vote for the seat Nancy Pelosi held for nearly four decades. His November general election opponent is SF Supervisor Connie Chan, backed by Pelosi herself.

And in the last week, he has been cornered in a bar and expelled from a parade he helped make possible.

The Capitulation That Was Never Enough

What makes the Wiener story a genuine morality tale — and not just a local San Francisco drama — is the sequence of what he gave up before any of this happened.

At a candidate forum on January 7, Wiener sat alongside two progressive opponents — Supervisor Connie Chan and former congressional staffer Saikat Chakrabarti — and was asked to hold up a sign: Does Israel commit genocide in Gaza? Chan held up “yes.” Chakrabarti held up “yes.” Wiener declined to answer. It was a moment of genuine moral seriousness: a Jewish politician who knew what the word genocide meant to his community, refusing to deploy it as a campaign prop.

The backlash from the activist left was swift and furious.

Four days later, Wiener released a 90-second video and reversed himself. “I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide,” he said, “but I can’t anymore. To me the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out. And that qualifies as genocide.” He had read the polls and felt the pressure.

Two weeks after that, he resigned as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus — a position he had held since 2023. Wiener never took AIPAC money. He has called for a halt to U.S. arms sales to Israel. He now calls out Israel’s military response to the October 7 terror attack as “indefensible.” That was still not enough to satisfy the Gaza wing of the party.

The man who confronted Wiener at the Napper Tandy bar on June 24 was not some random stranger. Jesus Coba had targeted Wiener before — in 2024, he filmed himself confronting the senator on a flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, posting an image with a Hamas targeting symbol superimposed over Wiener’s head, then following him through the airport calling him a “weak-ass Zionist” and telling him his “whole bloodline’s cowards.” This is a man who makes a practice of hunting elected officials. And Wiener — who had already publicly declared Israel guilty of genocide and resigned his Jewish institutional leadership as a consequence — was still his target.

That is not a policy dispute. It has become a loyalty ritual.

Gaza Has Replaced Everything

Let me be direct about what these two incidents, taken together, reveal.

There is a faction of the Democratic Party — centered in the DSA, energized by the anti-Zionist left, and now demonstrably capable of winning elections, as the recent New York City primaries showed — for which Gaza has become the single organizing principle of political identity. Not climate. Not abortion rights. Not trans rights. Not Black Lives Matter. Not economic inequality. Gaza. Specifically: Gaza framed exclusively as genocide, with no acknowledgment of October 7, no acknowledgment of Hamas, no complexity, no history.

These activists have erected genocide as a non-negotiable litmus test — a single phrase that every Democrat must publicly affirm or be treated as an enemy. And critically: even affirmation doesn’t buy you immunity, as Wiener discovered. What they want is not agreement. What they want is the ongoing spectacle of submission.

The message of the Trans March video — “you’ve been wonderful for trans people, and terrible on Gaza” — could not be more explicit. A decade of legislative work protecting trans lives counts for nothing. The only currency is Gaza. Trans people, one presumes, should be grateful for whatever they’ve received, but that gratitude does not entitle their champion to attend their march.

The Infection in the Party

The Scott Wiener story is a flashing yellow warning light, and Democratic Party leaders who ignore it do so at their peril.

The DSA-aligned left is not a fringe curiosity. It is winning elections — in New York, in progressive enclaves across the country — and it is doing so by organizing around a cause that has, by design, no resolution. A demand for a ceasefire can be satisfied. A demand that every Democratic politician publicly endorse a genocide finding, on pain of expulsion from progressive spaces, is not a policy position — it is an ideological filter that will keep running forever, eliminating candidate after candidate who won’t pass it.

What that means in practice is the systematic destruction of the Democratic coalition’s most reliable progressive actors. Scott Wiener didn’t wander in from the center. But he is being expelled now from the movements he helped build and empower. The movement he helped arm with moral certainty had turned that certainty on him.

If the Democratic Party cannot protect politicians like Scott Wiener from this kind of targeted harassment — if it cannot articulate clearly that chasing a man out of a bar and a trans march because he won’t say the right words on Gaza is not progressive politics but its opposite — then it is surrendering its coalition to a litmus test that will drive a wrecking ball through the Democratic coalition.

Scott Wiener’s face in that bar video — blank, still, as though he is trapped and does not know what to do — is the face of a man who realizes he has been caught in a contagion sweeping the party’s far left.

It is not ultimately a story about Scott Wiener. It is a story about where a piece of the Democratic Party is going — and how it threatens to take down the party along the way.

I don’t often use this newsletter to recommend interviews I’ve done, but this one felt different.

If you’ve ever been curious about how I actually do the work—how stories begin, how sources are cultivated, how archives yield secrets, and how books come together—this is one of the deepest conversations I’ve had about it.

Earlier this week I joined Jack Carr on his podcast, Danger Close: The Fourth Option, for what turned into one of the longest and most in-depth interviews I’ve done in years—nearly one hour and forty minutes.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews over the past four decades, including conversations with some legendary interviewers. Yet I have to admit I was especially excited when Jack invited me onto his new podcast.

If you don’t know Jack, he’s a former Navy SEAL, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and the creator of The Terminal List, the thriller series that became the hit Amazon Prime show starring Chris Pratt. His podcast brings together authors, journalis…

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I registered as a Democrat the week I turned eighteen. My first presidential vote, cast in San Francisco in 1972, went to George McGovern. I didn’t think much of it at the time — in the San Francisco I grew up in, there wasn’t really a Republican Party to speak of, so being a Democrat wasn’t a choice so much as the only option on the table. McGovern’s 49-state loss to Nixon was the first time I understood how badly out of step my hometown was with the rest of America.

I stayed a registered Democrat for nearly thirty more years, until shortly after September 11, when I became an independent. I’ve been there since, watching for whatever remains of the vanishing middle in either party.

I haven’t had to watch very hard on the Republican side. What began as the Tea Party insurgency in the early 2010s became, under Donald Trump, a hostile takeover of the party I grew up around. The Bushes were pushed out. Mit…

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The summary isn’t wrong. It’s just not where the story is.

Read closely, three provisions don’t do what the celebratory coverage assumes — and each one matters more than the headline number attached to it. A nuclear fix that’s designed to be undone. A blockade whose removal may be permanent in a way the text obscures. And a war declared over by two of the three sides actually fighting it.

What’s concrete. The blockade language is specific and front-loaded: removal begins immediately, full termination within 30 days, naval traffic restored in proportion to pre-war volumes. Strait of Hormuz passage for commercial vessels is similarly immediate, though Iran’s …

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This is another in my occasional series on the pediatric trans industry.

Imagine a 14-year-old walks into a therapist’s office and announces she has bipolar disorder. She read about it online, she says. The symptoms match. She wants an antipsychotic prescription medication.

No competent therapist anywhere would write the prescription. The therapist would do what therapists are trained to do, explore family history, the circle of friends, the social media diet, the possibility that what the 14-year-old has concluded is bipolar disorder might be anxiety, depression, trauma, or simply the ordinary adolescent turbulence. That careful, skeptical, exploratory process is not an obstacle to good care. It is the care.

Now imagine the same 14-year-old announces instead that she is a boy.

In that case — and only in that case — the rules of therapy are inverted in the United States. The patient’s self-diagnosis is the diagnosis. The therapist’s job is to affirm it. And if a bill now moving through the California legislature becomes law, a therapist who asks too many questions could be sued for it — and minors can file claims until they turn 40.

Senate Bill 934: Litigation as Ideology Enforcement

This week, Senate Bill 934 cleared the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on a 7–3 party-line vote. The bill is authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. The ultra-progressive lawmaker is responsible for several controversial bills, including measures restricting parental involvement in their children’s ‘gender affirming care’ and a separate effort to narrow sex-offender registration requirements.

Wiener’s latest bill allows former patients to bring malpractice suits against licensed therapists for so-called “conversion therapy.” It has a statute of limitations unlike almost anything else in civil law. Patients who were minors at the time of treatment can sue until they turn 40. Adults get 10 years from their last session, or five years from “discovering harm.” In other words, the moment they decide the therapy harmed them.

Plaintiffs can seek damages for medical expenses, mental health treatment, lost wages, pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. And, of course, attorney’s fees and, in cases of alleged fraud, punitive damages.

Wiener has been candid about why he authored the bill. In April, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Chiles v. Salazar that state bans on talk therapy touching sexual orientation and gender identity must survive strict scrutiny. That is the Constitution’s most demanding test. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, and the case was remanded to lower courts.

Chiles v. Salazar put California’s own 2012 ban, the nation’s first, on shaky legal ground. Wiener acknowledged as much to California Senate committee: there have “already been rumblings” of a legal challenge to the California law, “so here we are.”

What to do if the courts will not allow the state to ban a category of speech between therapists and patients? Wiener noted publicly that Gorsuch’s opinion did not cover malpractice suits and therefore he designed a statute-by-litigation workaround by which the state will make practicing standard talk therapy when it comes to gender, financially ruinous. What the First Amendment forbids by statute, SB 934 accomplishes by litigation exposure.

The Definitional Sleight of Hand

The bill’s defenders and sponsors include prominent LGBT advocacy groups, Equality California, Lambda Legal, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and the Trevor Project. They invoke the genuinely discredited practices that the phrase “conversion therapy” conjures: the aversion treatments, the oppressive religious boot camps, the electroshock horrors of decades past. Wiener slams it all as “psychological torture.”

Historically, that discredited legacy was abusive and is rightly condemned.

If SB 934 targeted only that, it would be unremarkable. Those practices are denounced by every major medical association, already banned for minors in California, and already grounds for professional discipline. Wiener has used that concept as a cudgel, saying the bill gives victims “the right to hold charlatans accountable for this debunked torture.”

But that is not how the bill is written. Its definition of prohibited “change efforts” sweeps in any attempt by a licensed mental health provider to direct a patient toward “a particular sexual orientation or a particular gender identity.”

That language is the critical hinge of the bill. The chilling effect isn’t a side effect but rather its mechanism. A therapist who spends six months helping a gender-distressed 13-year-old examine whether her confusion might be rooted in autism, internalized homophobia, or social contagion — and who watches that distress resolve without a single medical intervention — has, in the eyes of a plaintiff’s lawyer, “directed” the patient “toward” her birth-sex identity. That is not conversion therapy.

That is therapy. For every other condition in the diagnostic manual, it is called the standard of care.

The Chilling Effect Is the Point

Clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo said it plainly at last Tuesday’s committee hearing: “In supervising therapists today, I constantly hear their anxiety over their legal exposures or risks to their license if they do just that — practice traditional exploratory psychotherapy. These are not conversion therapists. These are honest clinicians who want to practice traditional psychotherapy with gender-distressed young people, but they’re afraid to do so.”

SB 934 bakes that fear into statute. Few therapists in private practice can absorb the cost of defending a malpractice suit, even a winning defense — and no malpractice insurer will look kindly on a clinician whose patient population carries a two-decade liability tail. The rational response for a therapist is to choose not to explore or question, not to have “watchful waiting,” what used to be considered the gold standard for treating minors with questions about their gender.

The safest path will be to affirm the child’s self-diagnosis, write a referral letter, and move the child along to the endocrinologist. The medical pipeline of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery becomes not just the path of least resistance, but the path of least litigation.

Among those who testified against the bill was Jonni Skinner, a 23-year-old detransitioner. Skinner grew up in a devoutly religious family in small-town Michigan. He described being a feminine boy who constantly was bullied and later diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Skinner told lawmakers he encountered trans influencers online as a teen: “They said, ‘Change your body and your life gets better. Don’t, and it gets worse.’”

Skinner told the committee that doctors told his mother that he would kill himself if he was not allowed to transition. The therapy he needed, the kind that might have asked and challenged whether an autistic, gender-nonconforming, bullied kid was actually a girl, is precisely the therapy SB 934 makes legally radioactive.

A child like Skinner has no comparable remedy. The bill creates a 22-year window to sue any therapist who counsels caution. Meanwhile, it is not intended to create an equivalent window to sue the clinic that prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or irreversible surgical interventions to a confused minor. Under SB 934, it is caution that carries potential liability. The scalpel may not.

How We Got Here

None of this happened overnight. Two years ago, I traced the history in “Who Put the Kids in Charge?” — how gender dysphoria entered the diagnostic manual only in 2013, the first time the disorder was applied to minors; how a Dutch protocol built on a handful of patients, and underwritten in part by a pharmaceutical company holding a puberty-blocker patent, became the global template; and how American gender clinics adopted the most permissive interpretation of it, multiplying from a single Boston clinic to dozens of dedicated pediatric gender centers over a decade.

The therapist’s predicament was then compounded by the profession’s own gatekeepers. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association published Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, the first textbook of its kind — and, as I wrote in the New York Post, it is less a clinical reference than a handbook for affirmation-only practice. Its 26 chapters, each featuring at least one author who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or “gender-expansive,” instruct the next generation of psychiatrists that their role is to affirm, facilitate, and refer — not to explore. A young clinician trained on that textbook, practicing under SB 934, will not need to worry about the law’s liability because that clinician will only wave patients as fast as possible from the therapy couch into the pediatric gender pipeline.

The Rest of the World Is Walking This Back

What makes California’s timing so remarkable is that it comes as the countries that pioneered pediatric gender medicine are retreating from it. England’s National Health Service, following the landmark Cass Review’s conclusion that the evidence base for youth gender medicine is “remarkably weak,” ended the routine prescription of puberty blockers for minors and closed its Tavistock clinic for pediatric patients. Sweden and Finland — early adopters of the Dutch protocol — have restricted hormonal interventions for adolescents and restored psychotherapy as the first-line response to gender distress.

In other words, the careful, exploratory approach that SB 934 would expose to two decades of litigation risk is the approach now recommended by the health authorities of the very nations that invented this field. California is not protecting children from a discredited fringe practice. It is threatening therapists for practicing what is becoming, everywhere but here, the international clinical consensus.

What Is Next

I have no quarrel with protecting genuine victims. Anyone subjected to the coercive, shame-based practices that deserve the name conversion therapy should have their day in court, and the bill’s authors could have written a statute narrowly targeting exactly that. They chose not to. The breadth of the definition is not sloppy drafting; it is the mechanism by design.

A legislature that wanted to protect gender-distressed children would want more therapy for them, not less — more time, more questions, more of the in-depth analysis and skepticism that we demand from clinicians treating every other condition a child might claim to have. SB 934 delivers the opposite: a legal regime in which the only safe thing a California therapist can say to a confused 13-year-old is yes.

The bill now moves toward a floor vote in a legislature where its passage is assured and a governor’s signature is likely. What Sen. Wiener may not expect is a future wave of lawsuits from a constituency he seems not to be watching: detransitioners now reaching adulthood. Under the bill’s own language, after all, a clinic that fast-tracked a child toward a particular “gender identity” — complete with new pronouns, blockers, and a medical roadmap — has arguably committed the very offense the statute creates.

I expect some creative plaintiffs’ lawyers to notice. And they might use the statute to seek damages from the clinicians and institutions that moved children at warp speed into a medical system that left them with lifelong consequences.

California will then discover it has built a weapon that points both ways.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood at the White House podium this past Thursday and held up a mock design: a $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s portrait. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward about it,” he said. The bill, he added, would honor the president serving during America’s 250th anniversary. Congress just needs to pass the legislation, and Treasury will print it.

Before going any further, let me be direct about something: this argument is not about Donald Trump. Supporters who admire him may find it entirely fitting that the president in office during America's 250th anniversary should appear on a new bill. Critics who oppose him may find the idea an affront. Both reactions are beside the point. My objection would be identical if the president were Biden, Obama, or any future Democrat or Republican. The problem is not whose face is on the bill. The problem is opening the door at all — because once it is open, every future pres…

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The two teenagers who opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego mosque left a 75-page manifesto that is the clearest and most chilling portrait yet of what online radicalization is doing to kids.

Eighteen-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez of Chula Vista and 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark of San Diego livestreamed the attack to Discord. Their 75-page document contained both of their separate manifestos, with a title built like a flag: The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant — a tribute to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in two New Zealand mosques in 2019.

These two boys did not invent a worldview. They inherited one — assembled, piece by piece, from the open sewer of the modern internet.

That is the part of this story that should keep parents awake. The *Sons of Tarrant* manifesto is not the work of a single ideology with a single grievance. It is, in every meaningful sense, the kitchen sink — every poisonous current of the last f…

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