Shame on the "Genocide Scholars"

By Andrew Fox

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

I recently described genocide on X as a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group simply for belonging to that group. The self-appointed genocide class pounced. Alonso Gurmendi announced that the Convention says “destroy”. Martin Shaw declared that I had plainly never read it. Kevin Jon Heller called the exchange an “idiotic gotcha”. They behaved as though one corrected verb had settled the Gaza case.

 

There is nothing improper about paraphrasing a legal instrument on social media. A paraphrase translates substance into ordinary language; it does not reproduce treaty text. Although I’ll grant them, “exterminate” is narrower than “destroy”, so the correction is textually fair. However, my post captured the central accusation against Israel: that it set out to bring about the physical disappearance of Gaza’s Palestinians. Demanding the precision of treaty drafting from an X post while treating an unfinished court case as settled is semantic nitpicking performed in bad faith.

 

The Genocide Convention requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such, through one or more of five specified acts. The special intent is indispensable. Gurmendi replied that subjecting a group to destructive conditions suffices. He is wrong: it is only when those conditions are deliberately calculated to destroy the group. Heller protested that Gurmendi has written extensively about intent. I accept that he has. Neither supplied evidence that Israel possessed it.

 

This is the manoeuvre. Isolate a piece of shorthand, inflate it into proof of ignorance, then use the supposed ignorance to evade the evidence. Once Article II is quoted back, academic status replaces argument. We are told that these men have studied genocide for years, as though a bibliography can deliver a judgment from The Hague.

 

Omer Bartov is a distinguished historian of the Holocaust and German military history. His scholarship does not make him an international criminal lawyer. His New York Times headline, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, captured the conceit perfectly. “I know it when I see it” is the language of intuition masquerading as adjudication. Genocide is a defined crime with a demanding mental element. Bartov’s historical expertise in a completely different conflict and era gives him no personal warrant or primary evidentiary base to pronounce that element proved in a live case of an ongoing modern conflict.

 

Lee Mordechai is even further out of his lane. He is a historian of the Byzantine Empire, working on ancient Greek history and the Justinianic plague. He produced a Gaza dossier declaring that Israel is committing genocide, as if Byzantium confers mastery of modern targeting or international criminal law. It is activist propaganda from a man operating grossly beyond his professional competence.

 

Martin Shaw is a sociologist. He uses a sociological definition of genocide far broader than Article II, then slides between that concept and the legal crime whenever useful. He has also misstated the ICJ’s provisional order as recognising a plausible risk of genocide. Joan Donoghue, who presided over the order, corrected that claim. The court recognised plausible rights under the Convention and made no finding that the allegation of genocide itself was plausible. Shaw answered scrutiny with an insult.

 

None of these academics sits on the ICJ, although it must be noted that some of their fellow Israel-haters do. Their public biographies reveal no qualification to adjudicate international criminal law or the law of armed conflict, no understanding of targeting, and no expertise in Hamas and its tactics. They may, of course, offer historical parallels or sociological theories within the very narrow bounds of their expertise. However, they have instead issued verdicts, wrapped those verdicts in academic prestige and watched journalists cite the prestige as proof. Shaw’s latest book is called The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges after Gaza. The accusation produces headlines and speaking invitations. It also sells books. The blood libel has acquired peer review and a publicity department.

 

That description is earned. The modern version of the mediaeval libel says that the Jewish state deliberately kills Palestinians as a people, with dead children serving as its most potent imagery. Once repeated as settled fact by decorated academics, the charge escapes Gaza and attaches itself to Jews everywhere. The consequences have names. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum. The accused gunman allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza”. Weeks earlier, an attacker shouting “Free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at a Jewish hostage walk in Boulder. Karen Diamond died from her injuries. Bondi, Manchester, the list of Jews murdered over the Gaza blood libel goes on.

 

These academics did not commit those attacks. They have positioned themselves, however, as part of the international anti-Israel machine. Along with activists posing as journalists, maniacal Israel-haters posing as UN officials, and a whole industry of fellow travellers, they helped dignify the mythology in which Jews anywhere can be treated as accessories to an imaginary extermination campaign. Professors who lend their authority to that mythology cannot retreat into innocent scholarship when its slogans arrive outside Jewish museums with guns, or at Jewish gatherings with petrol bombs. Bartov, Mordechai, Shaw, Mehdi Hassan, Owen Jones, DropSite, Max Blumenthal, and all the rest: they all have blood on their hands as much as any of the IDF soldiers they accuse so viciously.

 

The evidential problem remains untouched. Under Croatia v Serbia, group destruction must be the only reasonable inference when intent is deduced from conduct. My earlier pieces have covered Gaza’s wartime births and Israel’s facilitation of mass polio vaccination, facts the genocide campaign simply wishes away. A brutal war against Hamas remains an obvious alternative explanation.

 

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

 

These academics have strayed wildly beyond their lanes and converted moral vanity into counterfeit legal authority. They profit in attention and publication from a blood libel whose human cost is paid by Jews they will never meet. Shame on them. They are shameless.