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'Genocide' is the cool, new antisemitic slur.

JL;DR SUMMARY Joanne Strasser explores the troubling misuse of the term "genocide" in discourse surrounding Israel, comparing it to historical antisemitic tropes such as blood libels and Holocaust inversion. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish StateHuman RightsUnited NationsGenocideRaphael LemkinPolitical DiscourseHolocaust InversionRhetoric

Places mentioned

London, United Kingdom
"This is a guest essay by Joanne Strasser, a postgrad fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism."
Gaza, Palestinian Territories
"You can condemn civilian deaths in Gaza under the laws of war, or a single act of torture, without reaching for the gravest charge in international law."
Donbas, Donechchyna, Ukraine
"Russia, for example, invoked the Genocide Convention to describe how Ukraine was treating Russian-speaking populations in the Donbas region."
Myanmar
"Between 2016 and 2020, Myanmars military conducted operations against the Rohingya that the UN Fact-Finding Mission formally characterized as bearing the hallmarks of genocide."
Tigray, Ethiopia
"The Tigray conflict from 2020 to 2022 generated even stronger evidentiary claims: Casualty estimates ranged from 162,000 to over 500,000."
South Africa
"In South Africa, it displaces unresolved guilt about the Holocaust onto Israel."
Ireland
"Irelands submission to the International Court of Justice, urging the court to broaden its interpretation of the Genocide Convention to include collective punishment, is one example."
Israel
"When a legal scholar argues that the available evidence does not meet the Genocide Conventions threshold for genocide, the response is often a label: apologist, Zionist (deployed as a slur), defender of ethnic cleansing."
Xinjiang, China
"There has been no similar campaign around Chinas repression of Uyghur cultural and religious life or Russias treatment of Ukrainian identity in occupied territories."
Russian Federation
"There has been no similar campaign around Chinas repression of Uyghur cultural and religious life or Russias treatment of Ukrainian identity in occupied territories."

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Cairo Item ID 80740
Cairo Source ID 36
Retrieved 2026-04-24 05:30:46 UTC
Curated 2026-04-24 08:31:13 UTC