This May 24, 2026 “CAMERA Eye on the Media” Op-Ed by CAMERA U.S.’s Darcie Grunblatt appeared in JNS.
The International Court of Justice, The Hague, The Netherlands, January 26, 2006. (credit: UN Photo/Andrea Brizzi., Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Since genocide is considered humanity’s most abhorrent crime, courts have developed the most stringent legal definition to prosecute it. Now, aided by a compliant news media, anti-Israel activists are stripping the crime of its legal gravity to weaponize it against the Jewish state.
The United Nations created the Genocide Convention in 1948 to codify this mass atrocity as an international crime in the wake of the Holocaust, a systematic annihilation targeting Jews that claimed 6 million lives.
Due to the supreme gravity of the charge, Article II of the Genocide Convention establishes a firewall: a special characteristic known as dolus specialis, which distinguishes genocide from all other serious war crimes. This Latin legal term translates to “special intent” and rises far above general criminal intent (mens rea). Proving genocide requires showing not just that people were tragically killed in war, but that there was a proven, specific intent to physically destroy—in whole or in part—a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s Op-Ed at JNS.