NEW 2025 Interview: Genocidology (CRIMES OF ATROCITY) Part 2 with Dirk Moses

Note: if you haven’t already heard it, please start with our original, May 2024 episode with Dr. Moses: A lot has happened since then, and author, scholar and genocide expert Dr. Dirk Moses was kind enough to return for a 2025 episode. We cover how public and legal sentiment has changed since our first episode, and discuss his recent paper, “Introduction: Gaza and the Problems of Genocide Studies,” which includes a roundtable discussion with dozens of experts. Also: some behind-the-scenes influences regarding the war in Gaza, humanitarian law precedents, munitions and the Geneva Conventions, myths, the problems surrounding the language of transgression, new research, up-to-date statistics, and how protests have been criminalized. Like that first Genocide episode, this one would not be possible without the input, research, producing, and additional writing of Mercedes Maitland, who joined me on this interview once again with her questions for our expert. So, huge thanks to her for that passion, hard work, and tireless advocacy for human rights.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F O R H E R S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 1:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Just a content warning up top for this second episode on genocide. Like our 2024 episode on genocide, this one also contains information about crimes and atrocity, the murder of civilians and children,

• 1:50Alie Ward?

  the Holocaust, racism, religious prejudice, and of course, genocide. It's also, at times, a general bummer, and it does not reflect the usual lighthearted and comedic tone of ologies. But it's very important. Also, if you've not invested the time to listen to our first episode, released in May 2024 on genocide, it's linked in the show notes. It will make this episode much easier to understand with that history and context. Also, if you haven't listened to that one, Please don't write with any criticisms of what this episode may have left out. This one is really an addendum to the first one. And the thing you're looking for is probably in that first episode we released in 2024. So listen to that first.

• 2:33Alie Ward?

  Okay, it's your cousin hitting his vape on the porch, Ally Ward. And here we are on the cusp of some holidays. We wanted to keep you up to speed on one of the most pressing matters of our time. It's not climate change. Sorry, it's less fun. It's humans doing terrible things to other alive humans. This is a brand new interview we're releasing, serving as a 2025 update. We were able to bring back our lauded and trusted academic source on the topic of what is genocide? And why does it even matter? This guest has been a distinguished professor of global human rights history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taught at the University of Sydney and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

• 3:14Alie Ward?

  He's currently a professor of political science and a researcher of genocide at City College of New York, and has been the senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011. In 2021, he published the 600-page book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. And he recently published the September 2025 Roundtable article featuring work from 30 genocide scholars, titled Introduction: Gaza and the Problems of Genocide Studies in the Journal of Genocide Research, alongside co-editor and expert Dr. Roz Segal. Now, in our first episode, which again, I suggest you listen to first, we cover what is genocide? How long has it been happening? Is it a war crime? Is it a crime of atrocity? Who makes up humanitarian law?

• 3:59Alie Ward?

  What's self-defense? What's offense? How is it litigated? Whose business is it? Whose responsibility is it? Why do we do this to each other? And in this one, we look at genocide through the lens of the ongoing war in Gaza, and how international human rights experts and litigators are approaching what is widely and increasingly deemed a genocide. So like that first genocide episode, this one would not be possible without the input, the research, the producing, the encouragement, and the additional writing by Mercedes Maitland, who joined me in this interview once again with her question. For our expert. So huge thanks to her. So get ready for an overview of current academic sentiment, some behind the scenes influences regarding the war in Gaza, some busting of flim flam, legal precedents,

• 4:43Alie Ward?

  the problems surrounding the language of transgression, why it even matters what you call it. New research as up to date statistics as possible in context with professor of international relations, crimes of atrocity researcher, author, and the world's foremost expert genocideologist, once again, Dr. Dirk Moses.

• 5:21Alie Ward?

  So, Dr. Moses, we spoke to you in the early spring of 2024. It was roughly six months into the conflict in Gaza, between Gaza and Israel, this recent one. And by December of 2024, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both proclaimed that Israel's military action against Palestine constituted genocide. And you held some roundtable discussions with human rights scholars in May and June of 2025. And then in September 19th, you published the paper Introduction Gaza and the Problems of Genocide Studies in the Journal of Genocide Research. And three days before that, the UN published a legal analysis of the conduct of Israel and Gaza about the crime of genocide.

• 6:04Alie Ward?

  I have been so curious looking at how public opinion has changed over the last year and a half since we spoke to you last. And I'm wondering if, in your opinion, if that's the cumulative action of people weighing in and scholars looking at the conflict as this has progressed? Has it escalated? Or was it the weight of the UN putting that proclamation out? Or was it your roundtable paper?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's definitely not the thing I wrote. My observation is that a number of scholars have identified a transition from what was a campaign driven by military objectives, in this case, neutralizing Hamas as a military force, from that to a genocidal objective, which is the destruction of Palestinian society as such. So different scholars and, you know, legal scholars, observers, dated it differently. Some said May last year, I think it was, when Israeli forces invaded Rafa. Others pitched it earlier this year, when Israel broke those ceasefires early in 2025.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  So, you know, these aren't factual determinations. These are interpretations based on judgment when they think that the campaign changed. Now, against those kind of, if you like, belated recognitions of genocide, you have some genocide scholars and certainly many Palestinians who thought it was genocidal from the outset, from sort of the 8th of October 2023, so a little over two years ago. And for those of us who study these things, this presents a sort of conundrum, like, what is genocide? When do you see it? When do you don't? And I, as an historian of concepts and ideas like genocide,

• 7:59Speaker 01

  which is a fairly new concept in human history. It's only been around since the early, mid 1940s, you know, when we've had thousands of years of human civilisation and hundreds of years of international debate about the morality of state violence against peoples and so forth. We had other words for, you know, extermination, extirpation, repression of rebellions, you know, which have all amounted to the same thing. So what does this word do? And how does it in fact lead to this confusion about what is a legitimate and what is an illegitimate form of state violence against an opponent? Of course, genocide is always a criminal intention. And it's the intention to destroy a group simply for being a group.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  That's what that term "as such" means in the Genocide Convention. The intent to destroy an ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part as such. That's the legal definition. So whereas a military intention to defeat a group is not a criminal intention, it's allowed in international law if in self-defense. Yeah, that's why people constantly said who support Israel that it's acting in self-defense. Now, that can be disputed in international legal terms for various reasons.

• 9:11Alie Ward?

  And in the Genocidology episode we released in May of 2024, we covered so much history, including the establishment of the term genocide by Polish Jewish scholar, Dr. Raphael Lemkin, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. And as we mentioned in our first Genocidology episode, which I highly, highly recommend you start with. It's the foundations, it's the history, it's a lot of what you need to understand this episode. When World War II war criminals were charged at Nuremberg, they weren't on trial for genocide. The charge was a crime against peace. And as I've said before, it's like stealing a tank and using it to intentionally kill people and then just being charged for grand theft auto.

• 9:56Alie Ward?

  I did not know that before and it's horrifying. So the charge of genocide is easy to evade, is what history has shown us. So what's the point of even arguing if something is genocide, if literally the people behind the Holocaust weren't even charged with it? But first, let's back up and let's give you a refresher on war crimes, et cetera, from the last episode that we did with Dr. Dirk Moses, in case you are cloudy on it. So again, genocide, which was not a legal concept during World War II, involves actions specifically targeting certain protected groups, national, ethnic, racial, or religious. Now, war crimes are just that.

• 10:38Alie Ward?

  They're acts committed or ordered by individuals during a war, and they involve inhumanities like taking hostages and torture and this wanton destruction of civilian property, sexual assault in wartime, the murder of prisoners of war, stealing from civilians, or drafting children into the military. Worse mass killings. Now, crimes against humanity as a legal concept is a little bit different. It involves actions targeting civilians in general, regardless of their national identity group, whether they are foreign or a part of the same state as the aggressor. And crimes against humanity can happen both in wartime and in peace. War crimes only happen during war.

• 11:23Alie Ward?

  Okay, so 2025, me again. So what about this logic that a country or state is just acting in self-defense? So according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." But in the case of Israel and Palestine, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory campaign in the 2004 report titled, "Judgments, Advisory Opinions, and Orders: Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory."

• 12:04Alie Ward?

  It essentially said that since Palestine doesn't have separate statehood in the eyes of the Israeli government, Israel can't count a Palestinian strike against it as an attack by an outside entity. But more salient is the issue that what occurred on October 7, 2023, was not the inciting incident in this long history of death and displacement. So during the 1948 Nakba, which means catastrophe, Israel drove out about half of Palestine's population, 750,000 people, through seizing of lands, through violence, and what many scholars and historians say was intent to wipe out their way of life and culture as such. So less than two decades after that Nakba,

• 12:46Alie Ward?

  there was 1967's Six-Day War, during which the state of Israel further drove out Palestinians. So clearly, there has been a long history of settler colonialism, displacement, attacks, counterattacks, et cetera. This did not begin in 2023. So what is self-defense? And what is resuming a longstanding objective? And what is legal, according to humanitarian law, established after the Holocaust?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  But in any event, the key thing for your listeners is that, you know, a military campaign acting in self-defense is not criminal. A priori, not as such, although war crimes may occur in the course of that campaign. Many Israel supporters have admitted that now, that, well, we do see some excesses here and there. I mean, it's just undeniable. All the videos made by soldiers, you know, taunting victims, dressing up in lingerie, Palestinian women in their homes that have been displaced, the excessive bombing. People have just seen the footage, the drone footage of Gaza, which is just a wasteland. Ninety percent of the infrastructure destroyed, the agricultural land destroyed, the compaction or corralling of the 2 million people, you know, in ever smaller spaces.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  It's hard to see that this is driven solely by a military logic.

• 14:01Alie Ward?

  And if you haven't seen much of this, well, news came out a few weeks ago that YouTube quietly erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations and that, quote, "The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups, a capitulation to Trump sanctions," according to a headline from the nonprofit news association, The Intercept. And another recent article on the matter noted that YouTube removed content, including harrowing testimonies, the murder of journalists, visual evidence of the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes under occupation, and other key investigations into war crimes committed by Israel. And it continues that this removal was a direct consequence of US State Department policy.

• 14:44Alie Ward?

  So there is evidence of Israel committing war crimes, but now what?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So this is the conundrum. Now, by going back in my own work and looking at what Raphael Lemkin, the person who invented this concept in 1942, 43, what he intended, we can see how conceptually things went wrong and led to this confusion. Originally, he said, "With the term genocide, I want to capture wars of extermination," you know, which he identified in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, by which he meant that the military target of a campaign is not just the soldiers on the other side.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  But the entire society, so the women and the children who are not combatants. So you wage war against the entire society. That's what a war of extermination is. And that's what I want genocide to capture and to criminalize. He wrote in this book, Access, Rule and Occupied, where he introduces the term for the first time. However, rather than making genocide a modality or form of warfare, we know warfare against an entire society, is that genocide and warfare were split. So people would say, that's a war, not a genocide.

• 15:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And that's what people have been saying until the present day. Also in conflicts like in Vietnam or the Nigeria, Biafra, civil war in the late 60s, in which many millions died and not just several hundred thousand or 65,000. I mean, the numbers are staggering and are forgotten today, except by people who are directly affected by it. But there were intense genocide debates about these various, mainly secessionist conflicts in the late 60s and then the war in Vietnam in the 70s. And at the time, people said, you know, this is a genocide. All these people are dying, I mean civilians. And in reply, people would say, well, it doesn't look like the Holocaust, which was an attack on a civilian population above all Jewish people, simply because they're Jewish people.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Whereas in these civil wars, people are being attacked because they're part of the other side, the enemy, right? But they are being attacked not simply because of their identity, but because there are armed groups in their population, which are, you know, waging conflict against us. So one is a war, and that's legitimate, even if it can be carried out excessively at times, and that might be war crimes. Whereas for it to be genocide, it needs to look like the Holocaust. That was a kind of reasoning. And we need the victims to resemble, you know, Anne Frank, a non-combatant, a little girl hiding in an attic in Amsterdam, who was not a threat to anyone.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  So that's the kind of reasoning people engage in, and that continues until to the present day.

• 17:31Alie Ward?

  And in our 2024 Genocidology episode, we talked a lot about how the Holocaust was a Critical turning point for humanitarian legislation and conventions, introducing, of course, the word and the concept of genocide, which has shaped what people think of when they hear that word.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And has leads to this, in my view, catastrophic and bizarre and untenable conclusion, which is that it is argued that Hamas committed genocide or attempted to commit genocide on the 7th of October and killing about 1,200 people, most of whom are Israelis, or there are, I mean, many of whom are actually also soldiers, but, you know, most of whom were civilians and some agricultural workers from Asia.

• 18:14Alie Ward?

  And Mercedes wants to note that she appreciates that Dirk does mention the many deaths of enlisted soldiers as the death tolls were 68% civilian. Also, she notes the official number of October 7th deaths is 1,139, but the number tends to be rounded up to 1,200. And according to a Brown University paper titled, "The Human Toll of the Gaza War: Direct and Indirect Death From October 7, 2023 To October 3, 2025", as of the 3rd of October, 2025, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 67,075 people have been killed and 169,430 people have been injured

• 18:57Alie Ward?

  out of the approximately 2.2 million people living in the Gaza Strip. And it continues that those deaths are estimated to be over 80% civilian. 48% of the deaths have been children, according to Doctors Without Borders. And October 7th Israeli deaths, which are a tragedy, of course, in their own right, tend to be rounded up. Palestinian deaths, also tragic, are said to be vastly underestimated as many bodies have yet to be recovered from the rubble.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  So say 1,200 people, whereas Israel in self-defense can kill 60 times more people than then devastate an entire place, area, but not commit genocide. You know, it's only war crimes, quote unquote, because there's this implicit hierarchy with genocide at the top as the crime of crimes.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  So that's the conclusion we come to, you know, you can kill sixty times more people in self-defense and it not be as bad as the initial attack which killed, you know, ten percent of your number. And yet genocide is considered worse because of this demonic or diabolic intention ascribed to it, which is to kill a group, destroy a group, simply because it's, you know, you don't like that group. So that's, I know there's a long-winded answer.

• 20:14Alie Ward?

  No, it's great.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  We need to sort of understand what's implicit in these distinctions of war and genocide and how they're misleading because the bottom line is that the nature of the campaign by the Israelis was a war against the entire Palestinian society. You just have to look at the scale of the bombing in the first month or so, which was actually the high point of the bombing, it tapered off after that, in which two thousand pound dumb bombs were deployed to target, you know, fairly low-level Hamas operatives. I mean, we know Israelis can target people with pinpoint precision because they did that in Qatar and Iran recently, right? But they're very expensive bombs and they didn't want to use those.

• 20:52Alie Ward?

  And according to a September 2024 BBC article titled Gaza War, Where Does Israel Get Its Weapons? The US is, quote, "by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel." And according to the Quincy Institute's paper, US military aid and arms transfers to Israel, October 2023 to September 2025, of the 21.7 billion already provided in military aid, the US provided 17.9 billion in the first year of the war and 3.8 billion in the second year. And according to one paper by an academic in international law and public law at Leipzig University, a system called Lavender flagged up to 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants, marking them and their homes for possible airstrikes.

• 21:36Alie Ward?

  And there's a second AI system that was built specifically to look for them in their family homes rather than during military activity because it was easier to locate the targets when they were in their private houses, sometimes targeting the wrong people, but accepting collateral damage of a hundred civilians for a single target. And that system of identifying the home and killing the family of a target, that AI system is named chillingly, Where's Daddy? But back to those prohibited bunker buster bombs.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  So if you're going to target, you know, Hamas police officer or somebody like that. Whether in a marketplace or in his home, which was preferred for various reasons, you know, in which you have these multifamily, sort of multi-generational family apartments, right? You have one generation at one level, the grandparents another level, the great-grandparents up above, right? So they would drop an entire apartment block and around it, the size of several football fields. But that's how powerful these bombs are, right?

• 22:35Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  So the nature of that kind of bombing is clearly disproportionate to the target because you're going to kill hundreds of people. But you do that once, it might be a war crime. And you do it tens of thousands of times, knowing that there'll be this collateral damage, so-called collateral damage, which means incidental, you know, non-intended in a way. But how can you say that's not intentional? It obviously is intended, right? But the way the genocide law is defined in law, in the convention, it makes it a challenge for the judges to say it was intended in the sense that it's necessary for the law.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And that's the kind of conundrum we're up against as well. We don't know what the International Court of Justice is going to rule on this question in the several years it takes to get there.

• 23:27Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm. That was exactly my question about that pinpoint accuracy. And, you know, genocide being a crime of intent and targeting a population as such, it seems like if one is just maybe dishonest or disingenuous about the intent, then it negates the charge entirely. But, you know, as we know from your book and from our first talk, the language of transgression is maybe not the important thing. And yeah, Mercedes had a great question as well.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm curious, over the course of the last, however, years it's been since the genocide convention.

• 24:07Alie Ward?

  Seventy seven years.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Is the Gaza case unusual in the way that the international political community is reacting to it, specifically in this resistance to prevent and punish in the way that there's a continuation of providing funding, of providing weaponry and arms, having trade relationships, having diplomatic relationships continue with a state that's credibly and widely believed to be actively committing genocide? Is that unusual?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, no.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  You'd say that, okay. It all depends on where you, you know, what you identify as international society. International public opinion is a kind of necessary fixture because it's highly divided. I mean, it's divided between, you know, east and west in the Cold War. So the Soviet side would excuse, you know, virtually any crime committed by its allies. And the same would go on the West. We're seeing that today. For example, as well, in a post-Cold War context, Myanmar, which is credibly accused of genocide or genocidal expulsion of Rohingya in 2017, is protected diplomatically by China.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  So nothing will happen in the Security Council regarding Myanmar in the same way that the US and Germany and leading Western allies protect Israel. So there's a real symmetry there. And they will continue to sell weapons and provide military support and diplomatic support for its client because for them, there's a geopolitical interest in doing so. But you also asked Mercedes an important question about prevention. The R2P doctrine, you know, responsibility protector doctrine, which gained traction in the 2000s in the wake of the genocides of the 1990s.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And the failure of, if you want to talk about international institutions and the UN institutions to do something about it. Now, that doctrine has been put to the test in various moments and has been accused of instrumentalization as a cover to intervene against states that were not in your favor.

• 26:23Alie Ward?

  And this R2P doctrine is the shorthand for the United Nations Responsibility to Protect. And it was first posed in 2005. And the UN notes that, following the atrocities committed in the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda, which the international community failed to prevent, it says, and the NATO military intervention in Kosovo, which was criticized by many as a violation of the prohibition of the use of force. The international community engaged in a serious debate on how to react to gross and systematic violations of human rights, it says. And the R2P in part lays out that the international community through the United Nations also

• 27:05Alie Ward?

  has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means in accordance with the Charter to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It's great in theory.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  So people have noticed, critics have noticed, that the UN official in charge of R2P really had very little to say about Gaza in the last two years, whereas she had plenty to say about other cases. So it's really about balance. And, you know, we can only speculate why, but the UN is a pretty weak organization at the end. I mean, it's not an independent state. There's no global government, as people often think. There's global governance, you know, it provides framework for nation-states to talk to each other and come to multilateral solutions. And the UN can't tell states what to do. Only the Security Council could authorize interventions in other states.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And that was never going to happen because America would provide a veto and this, until the very last minute, vetoed all ceasefire resolutions, even if the French and the British supported them, as you know. And people were, you know, tearing their hair out about that.

• 28:21Alie Ward?

  And since our first genocide episode aired in May 2024, the UN veto has been used three times by the US, from November 2024 to most recently September 2025. Three times, all regarding Gaza. And for more on that, you can see the UN articles titled, "United States Veto's Gaza Ceasefire Resolution at Security Council," "US Veto's Security Council Resolution Demanding Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza," and "Security Council: US Votes Against Resolution on Gaza Ceasefire." So while Israel and complicit nations like mine commit war crimes...

• 29:00Alie Ward?

  Live in full color in front of the world. My country has, under Article 3 E of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ostensibly committed complicity in genocide by providing financial support, military goods and technology, training, intelligence sharing, while also using veto power to prevent a ceasefire in Gaza. So since that first genocide episode aired, the US has used this veto power more often than I've gotten a haircut.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  But that is not a unique situation in global affairs, unfortunately. So although conceptually and legally, there's symmetry and parity among states in the United Nations, like everyone just gets one vote regardless of size, right? Everyone understands that there's actually massive hierarchy and asymmetry in international affairs and that the notion of prevention and the interdiction of a genocide depends very much on power. And that's why everyone looks to the United States to apply pressure on the Israelis. And that's what seems to have happened in the last couple of weeks. But it wasn't to prevent genocide.

• 30:11Alie Ward?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting too, since we spoke the first time, learning that certain powers who have committed what would be a textbook genocide in the past, not wanting to admit what is a current genocide for then having to acknowledge what they've done in the past. And, you know, this is coming out around the Thanksgiving holiday in America. And it's impossible not to look through that lens and see the admissions that the United States would have to make. You know, if people knew exactly what the definition of genocide was. I'd like to note here that we mentioned in that first genocide episode and in several ologies related to Indigenous justice, that, for example, the Canadian residential school

• 30:56Alie Ward?

  system continued to operate through the 1990s, the 1990s, which was finally acknowledged in 2015 by the Canadian House of Commons as a, quote, "cultural genocide," which helped them over. Avoid some little pesky legal implications. And in 2022, then Pope Francis, after a visit to Canada, went on record responding to a journalist's question, would you say via the colonization of North America that members of the church participated in genocide? Again, Pope Francis responded, it's true. I didn't use the word genocide because it didn't come to mind, but I described the genocide and asked for forgiveness. Pardon for this activity that is genocidal. For example, he says, I condemned this too.

• 31:41Alie Ward?

  Taking away children, changing culture, changing mentality, changing traditions, changing a race. Let's put it this way, an entire culture. He continued, yes, genocide is a technical word. I didn't use it because it didn't come to my mind, but I described it. It's true. Yes. Yes, it's genocide. You can all stay calm about this. You can report that I said it was genocide. So in 2022, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously voted in favor of this motion, calling on the federal government to recognize Canada's residential schools as genocide. Also, by my mention of the past, just now, I meant the immediate genocide following the colonization of North America.

• 32:24Alie Ward?

  But there is no past tense in actuality. Indigenous people continue to suffer daily injustices in stolen land use, abuse, astonishing and heartbreaking rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and a deliberate and a systemic lack of funding and resources from governments. Canada made at least this flaccid and belated attempt to recognize this after the fucking Pope had to call them out. But the US won't even go there. They're far from it. But even through the 2010s. There was not social media. There wasn't a lot of documentation. And I'm curious about the role of social media and watching a genocide unfold.

• 33:06Alie Ward?

  We have seen reporters being targeted. You know, algorithms and media can be incredibly biased, depending on which billionaire owns it. But in February of 2025, Trump released an AI video about Trump Gaza, about turning that rubble into a glittering golden Riviera with statues of himself. And I believe the ending shot of it was he and Netanyahu in AI cheersing a cocktail on a lounge chair on the Gaza Riviera.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Yikes.

• 33:37Alie Ward?

  A little background on this AI video. It was created by Israeli-born American film producer Solo Avital, who says it was satire in response to Trump's proposal to, quote, "clean out Gaza's population of 2 million people and build the, quote, "Riviera of the Middle East, where the rubble of Gaza now stands." And Avital's business partner shared his video on social media. It took off, and the president seemed to proudly share it via his social channels with no context, which left Avital in hot water. Also, apparently, bafflingly, Mel Gibson may have been the one that got it to President Trump's attention as he's in his sphere of influence.

• 34:19Alie Ward?

  Anyway, this video that Trump shared of Netanyahu and himself transforming Gazans' homes into their golden playground, seeing that, what's been the role? Has it hastened criticism?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  So I myself am on social media, but I'm not on TikTok.

• 34:35Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I'm Gen X, and I don't think, I think that's a step too far for us. But my understanding, my observation, is that TikTok has been hugely influential for Gen Z and even slightly younger, you know, high school children if they're all kids, if that is also Gen Z. And the allegation is that it's been biased against Israel content or pro-Israel content. And there are now speculations that the change of ownership in TikTok is meant to redress this balance. I've seen people talk about that openly, you know, who matter. And certainly, there's a lively debate about whether these dramatic changes of ownership in major platforms is designed to redress a perceived imbalance.

• 35:21Alie Ward?

  Again, Google has been on record as confirming it's taken down YouTube videos by Palestinian human rights groups showing proof of war crimes. But

• 35:29Speaker 01

  My own observation of, say, my own students and students I've encountered in Germany, where I spent quite a bit of time, is that, you know, when they talk about a live stream genocide, they mean it literally because they're following not just random accounts, but particular people who are in Gaza and have access to a phone, journalists or so-called, you know, influencers or just people who are witnesses. And they're seeing it live. I mean, it's unprecedented. So I think you're absolutely right to draw attention to it. So they're direct witnesses to the suffering and particularly that of children. And obviously, this is going to have an effect. And the point of the genocide language is to shock people. You know, it is meant to be

• 36:12Speaker 01

  an emergency, to sound an alarm, like we must do something. And I sense immense frustration with younger people because, you know, they've been taught that genocide is the crime of crimes and that never again. And they say, well, we're witnessing it. And yet no one's listening to us. And in fact, we're being gaslit and being told that we're the anti Semites here because we're raising this about the state of Israel. And ergo, you know, we must be anti Semites or badly intentioned or at the very least dupes, dupes of Hamas or something. So obviously, they find that very wounding because the videos are not AI videos. I think they're smart enough to see the distinction between them. And it's accumulated over two years.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  So there's a real gulf in perception among Americans and others as well, mainly in Europe. I mean, I think outside Europe, people are pretty certain what's going on and there's not much debate, like this is genocidal and should stop and the West are hypocritical and so. But within the West, there's a real disjunction between, if you like, the political class, which sees, you know, the hands of Hamas somehow in all those protests.

• 37:20Alie Ward?

  And as reported in 2025, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN experts have urged the UK not to ban the direct action group Palestine. In action as a terrorist organization stating that we are concerned at the unjustified labeling of a political protest movement as terrorists, the experts at the UN said. Now, according to international standards, they continued acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people should not be treated as terrorism. Now, in late September 2025, just a few months ago, days after this wave of international condemnation for acts of genocide by Israel and Gaza, the United States introduced an executive order

• 38:02Alie Ward?

  titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which threatened charges of terrorism for, quote, "all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies involving even anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions." So protesting, say ICE raids or donating to protest networks now can carry the threat of legal retaliation. So this prompted, of course, a wave of RIP First Amendment. It was fun while it lasted.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And the perception of the protesters, or even those that are just commenting on it, even if they don't go to a demonstration, who see, you know, the gravest human rights outrage of their lifetime playing out before them, and it's being funded by their parents' taxpayer money or their own taxpayer money. And that, I mean, witnessing immense suffering like that cumulatively does affect the brain and literally can drive people crazy. And, you know, some people do crazy things and like the shooting of the two Israeli embassy staff members in DC a couple of months ago, you know, clearly a criminal behavior, can't be excused and so forth. But what wonders about the mental state of the person who did that. And I'm not making any excuses for anyone, but we're trying to explain like,

• 39:20Speaker 01

  why do people resort to such extreme measures? And what is the effect of daily exposure to massive suffering? I mean, I personally avoid those videos. I mean, they come up on my Instagram feed or whatever social media platform it is. But, you know, if you look at decapitated babies every day, that is going to affect your perception of the world and, you know, you'll end up with vicarious PTSD symptoms. I'm sure that is the case for many of the protesters in the encampments. And that explains a lot of their passion and their determination to continue.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  You know, they see the witnessing, the crime of crimes unfolding. And yet, you know, the people running the universities, running institutions are thwarting them. So they see enormous moral hypocrisy and more than that, evil. But I think that's how they would see it. And the greatest evil, it's like a capital E evil. And if you're confronted with that as a very sensitive young people, young people are very morally sensitive and acutely conscious of hypocrisy, especially of their elders, right? To whom their customs are looking for moral guidance and they're seeing the opposite. But as a scholar, you know, as in constant contact with young people, I'm trying to ask myself, go, why do they feel like that? What's causing these emotions?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And, you know, is it their fault that, you know, the genocide or the violence is taking place in Palestine? No, it's not, but there are witnesses to it. If you witness immense violence continuously, it will affect you. It's normal and human. If it didn't, there would be something wrong.

• 40:56Alie Ward?

  Right. I always think of that if you're not angry, you're not paying attention, types of thing. And Mercedes, right before we got on this call, you know, we, we talk about that a lot on theology's team. It's like, if you are feeling good right now, then I would be concerned about you, you know, like we take extra mental health breaks and we need to. It's a really, really unprecedented time to be witness in vivid color and literally live streamed day by day updates.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:21Alie Ward?

  Which I think is helpful for anyone who wants to avoid knowing what's going on is actually, if you're not vocal, all it takes is watching a few of those videos, but.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Could I add a little historical footnote on that? On the way, there are just different perceptions. So Deborah Lipstadt, the historian at Emory University, who was under Biden, the anti-Semitism commissioner, whatever they call it. Her first book decades ago, if I recall, was on the US press during the Holocaust. So she studied in New York Times and other local, regional and national newspapers. How did they report what we now call the Holocaust? They didn't use that language in those days. But, you know, people understood that the Nazis were persecuting Jews and then later in the war, you know, massacring them. And no one knew the exact details as we do now, but there was enough information trickling out. And what she found was that the newspapers did report it, but it was like a small column on page eight.

• 42:17Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  You know, it wasn't front page news. And yet, of course, Jewish groups in America were well aware of it and made, you know, public demonstrations, tried to get the president to bomb Auschwitz. But then there was a sense of panic and urgency because it was their family members in Europe who were being subject to this. So the perception within the victim group was very different to the public reporting of it.

• 42:40Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And this is why it's useful to go back and look at the historical record because our retrospective sense of, you know, the significance of the Holocaust was not how it was registered and appreciated at the time.

• 42:53Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  In fact, if you look at the speeches of Roosevelt, he seemed to understand, you know, when he was condemning the Nazis and during the war and all their massacres, he seemed to understand the Nazi policy more generally as an attack on European Christian civilization. Because, you know, most Europeans were Christians. And so when the Nazis occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia and so forth, these were all, in the American understanding, Christian nations. Yes, they had a small Jewish minorities, but they were Christian nations and they were being occupied by this anti-Christian pagan power known as the Nazis.

• 43:27Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Nazi Germany had gone off the rails. And yeah, Jews were also persecuted and murdered, according to this understanding. But the central drama was an anti-Christian drama. Now, that's not how we see it today.

• 43:41Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  But of course, in those speeches, he was trying to convince Americans to join the war because Americans only joined the war later, right? So there's a reason for that kind of pitch, right? So I think it's always useful to go back and look at the historical records to see how it was portrayed generally and then how victim, the directly affected victim groups experienced it and, you know, their own newspapers and advocacy and so forth.

• 44:04Alie Ward?

  Long aside here, so bear with me. From his recent paper, Dirk notes that the Holocaust historian Omer Bartov advanced the same argument in 2003. So the open-ended definition of genocide can also be used to blur the distinction between the perpetrators and the victims. Thus, for instance, it is not uncommon to hear the argument that there is no essential difference between the American genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement and cultural genocide of Africans, the mass killing of the Vietnamese in the war with the United States, the expulsion and maltreatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

• 44:47Alie Ward?

  And that, again, was from Omer Bartov, who is a Holocaust historian. Now Dirk points out that the October 7th attacks saw the highest number of Jewish people killed at once since the Holocaust. While Palestinians feel that the military strikes driving people to the south of Gaza, where more military strikes are carried out, is a new Nakba, a new catastrophe or disaster. And it's been noted many, many times, even in our last genocideology episode, that there is a strong but inaccurate tendency to conflate Judaism, which is a religion and/or ethnic identity, with Zionism, which is the name of the political movement to seize Palestinian lands for an Israeli state. And the UN's General Assembly's Human Rights Council in 2022

• 45:31Alie Ward?

  addressed this disambiguation very blankly, noting that, quote, "anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," continuing that "a tactic Israel has been increasingly exploiting to silence opposition is branding those opposing its apartheid as anti-Semitic." And the latest example they noted in 2022 is the Israeli Foreign Ministry's accusation of Amnesty International's report, saying that Israeli apartheid against Palestinians, a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity, was anti-Semitic. And again, as we discussed in our last genocideology episode, the events of October 7th are also considered war crimes and crimes against humanity by the same human rights organizations advocating for Palestinians.

• 46:16Alie Ward?

  And for me personally, and I think millions of people watching the continued massacre of civilians in Gaza unfold, this conflation has been one of the hardest parts of understanding and speaking up against these crimes perpetrated by Israel that continue. But as a reminder, antisemitism should never be tolerated. And as a guide, it's been helpful for me to reflect on how the United States and other governments invoke religions to justify oppression. For example, our far-right lobbying for like the Ten Commandments in classrooms, or the purchase of Trump Bibles in schools, or litigating against same-sex rights, blocking healthcare

• 46:57Alie Ward?

  for trans people, a lot of it under the name of Christianity. Meanwhile, many Christians oppose these political tactics, and they want to disambiguate their religion with policies that don't actually align with their beliefs. So governments have been hiding behind religions for a long, long time. Now, we'll take a quick break for a minute, but as you know, we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing each week. And this time, once again, Dirk chose student support at the Colin Powell School of the City College of New York because, he says, many of his students are first-generation college students, and that even the low fees at City College are unaffordable for them. But they have a financial aid program, so we will make a donation to that for this episode. And we are once again donating to a fundraiser organized by our own lead editor and producer and a writer on this

• 47:41Alie Ward?

  episode, Mercedes Maitland. It's a very, very grassroots crowdfund on behalf of, she says, a wonderful, big-hearted couple in Gaza, Tasneem Abu Sherek and Nidal Abu Hassan. And this initiative, dubbed "The Hand of Salvation," is run by Nidal for the benefit of their neighbors in camp who are unable to fundraise to access the necessities of life, which have become incredibly scarce, expensive, and dangerous to obtain. And Mercedes has been in contact with Tasneem since the summer of 2024 and is really touched by her and Nidal's dedication to supporting those around them despite their own hardships, which include fleeing and ultimately losing their home, being displaced to various tent camps multiple times, along with their young daughter and newborn

• 48:25Alie Ward?

  While enduring Israel's blockade on food and necessities, surviving nearby airstrikes and more. And Tasneem's birthday was also yesterday, so we'll hope you'll be inspired to help them help their neighbors in the now rainy and cold camps. And Mercedes is fundraising via the platform Chaffed, as GoFundMe has made it difficult to transfer funds recently into Gaza. Also, as a reminder, you don't need to tip those fundraising sites. Better to have your money go to those who need it most. Okay, link to the Hand of Salvation initiative via Chaffed is in the show notes. So, thank you to all who make these donations possible. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode.

• 49:07Alie Ward?

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• 50:33Alie Ward?

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• 51:21Alie Ward?

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• 52:46Alie Ward?

  Now, in addition to doing so much research and writing and producing for this episode, Mercedes also co-hosted it, of course. So let's jump back in. Well, you know, looking from the past to the future, I know Mercedes had another question. It's a great one.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. With everything that we've just talked about with how social media is really playing a role in this, but also, you know, this is kind of dependent on what your answer to my previous question was going to be is how unusual is this? But I'm curious if you're seeing any changes in attitudes about the role of the genocide convention, the Rome Statute, the UN, the Security Council, about the effectiveness of all of that. And if you're seeing any more traction towards these ideas that you've put forward about looking more at a concept of permanent security, has there been a change in kind of how this is perceived?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Well, more generally, no.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, people like me, academics, write these books that they're not bestsellers. It's a lot like The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings and so forth, you know, which sells millions of copies. But I do know that other academics in the field do read it and some of the UN special rapporteurs, you know, have read these things. However, when it comes to the, you know, the UN reports, they stick very much to the law because they have to, because they're trying to convince the judges at the ICJ to, you know, apply the law in a particular way. And the courts just can't throw out, you know, decades of reasoning. I mean, they are free to set precedents, but they don't like doing. The ICJ is actually not bound, as I understand it, by the doctrine of precedent, where you slavishly have to

• 54:23Speaker 01

  follow previous precedents. So what a number of us are observing is that some governments, like Ireland, are making representations to the ICJ, not only in relation to the South Africa versus Israel case, but also the Gambia versus Myanmar case, which will be heard first and really set the tone for what's going to come. So we need to rethink this extremely high threshold, which makes genocide effectively impossible to prove. So we need to rethink the threshold, particularly in relation to, say, the number of children who are killed, to make it easier to prove or more, you know, reasonable to prove genocide.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Now, of course, none of those nations that signed that statement and made this recommendation to the ICJ in relation to Myanmar have been willing to do so in relation to Gaza. So you can see this hypocrisy we were talking about just a few minutes ago, Mercedes. I mean, everyone can see that and is disappointed. So on the one hand, you have this incredible hope that's invested in the international courts, you know, to validate the genocide, to make it sound official or be official.

• 55:34Alie Ward?

  And Dirk's entire position and essentially thesis of his 2021 610-page book, Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, is that, and I'm going to distill this kind of into my own interpretation, that it's nearly impossible to get someone charged or convicted of what is called genocide. And so, fucking what, what you call it, if it continues to happen time and time again, people are still dying, even without this impossible-to-obtain label, pretty much.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  On the other hand, you also have this deep suspicion that the rules of the game are rigged against victims, which I think is the case. The threshold of genocide is having to somehow resemble the Holocaust as one of those. Because if the Holocaust at the same time is unique, unprecedented and so forth, as is constantly said, well, how can you make an analogy with it? It's virtually impossible. So of all the mass killing of civilians you've had since the Second World War, you can count the cases that are broadly defined and regarded as genocide in one hat. You have the Holocaust finishing in 1945, and then there's a 30-year jump to Cambodia in 1975 to 1979, and you had these tribunals until quite recently.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And then there's basically another 20-year jump roughly to the mid-'90s, where you have Shrepanitza, which is the only one massacre among many in those wars of the Bosnians, Serbs against the Bosnians. Many others, I think, could have been classed as genocidal. In fact, the whole campaign was kind of genocidal. And then you've got, of course, Rwanda. But in between, there's been, millions of people have died or been killed deliberately in various kinds of messy civil wars. The victim groups allege it's genocide, for example, Tammals, regarding the destruction of the Tamil Tigers along with tens of thousands of civilians in 2009. You know, they're desperate to have it classified as genocide. But, you know, it's completely

• 57:31Speaker 01

  forgotten in sort of world opinion, right? So only if you're sort of validated by the courts, victim of genocide or a community that's been victimized in a genocidal way, can you, you know, appear in the curricula of university campuses or be recognized in Holocaust and genocide museums. You know, they'll have sort of a list of other genocides. But all these others, in which actually more people have been killed, whether in Nigeria-Biafra War, the East Pakistan Secession in 1971, or the massacre of so-called communists in Indonesia in 1965, or the Russian destruction of Grozny in Chechnya in the mid 90s, when they successfully brought back a separatist country called Chechnya into the Russian

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Federation, laid bare destroyed Grozny, which looked very much like Gaza until recently. Not only is it not included, it's like forgotten. And all those victims are forgotten. They're not accorded the same dignity. You know, I think this disparity is highly probable.

• 58:29Alie Ward?

  Well, I'm curious what you think a couple of possible scenarios for this, as what's been described a very fragile, if that, ceasefire, what you think might be the outcome?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  So, I mean, as an historian and international relations scholar, one's loath to predict the future. But there are a number of things. First, none of this is consistent with international law. I mean, let's remember that the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion in the middle of 2024, determined that Gaza is occupied.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Illegally, that Israel needs to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank as well, because Palestinians have a right of self-determination in the same way as any people. And that's being thwarted by this occupation. Now, this ceasefire, which, I'll hasten to add, is good to the extent that it stopped the mass killing, at least in the high-intensity phase. There's still plenty of killing of Palestinians, but the numbers are low, lower.

• 59:30Alie Ward?

  How low is low? Because if I had a four-year-old child running around a refugee camp, starving, and in dirty clothes, and he killed her, that would be a lot of killing to me. Or a civilian grown man who is a non-combatant. But if we're talking about people as spreadsheet totals, according to updates available 24 hours before the release of this episode, 346 people have been killed and 875 injured by Israel since the October 10 ceasefire 2025. 67 of those killed were children. And those are just the tolls counted by government officials. They don't include any people who haven't sought out medical attention or whose bodies have not been recovered. Israel has been accused of violating the ceasefire about 500 times in the past 45 days.

• 1:00:16Alie Ward?

  Also, as of November 14, according to a report by Al Jazeera, out of the promised 600 aid trucks that were supposed to be allowed entry every day under the ceasefire agreement, Israel has only allowed about 150 per day, only one quarter of what was promised. So survival rates are better than before October 10, but wow. Still extremely shitty and dangerous and still people dying.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  But the hot phases of the war is over, and we're into maybe a cold phase, right? But the plan that has been proposed, which ignored Arab plans by other Arab coalitions, does not mention Palestinian self-determination. It doesn't foresee a unification of Gaza and the West Bank in kind of a unified political entity. That's something that the Israelis are desperate to avoid, which is why they make sure that the Palestinian Authority is not deputized to run Gaza. The authority that is going to be running Gaza has entailed no Palestinian consultation or any Palestinian participation. So it's hard to know how that can find legitimacy with the population on the ground.

• 1:01:25Alie Ward?

  And we'll link to the peace proposal on our website, but some TLDR highlights are that Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee and international experts with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the Board of Peace, which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of state to be announced. And it continues, "A Trump Economic Development Plan to Rebuild and Energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East." It continues, "Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas will

• 1:02:10Alie Ward?

  be considered to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza." So this proposal includes that steps will be taken to ensure Gaza does not pose a threat to its neighbors and that it is critical to prevent munitions from entering Gaza. It says this four times, but not once has it even implied that Israel also poses a threat, just one line that they won't occupy or annex. So can you trust the same governments who are complicit in war crimes to draft a peace deal that's fair to both sides? I don't know.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Now, some people are speculating that although the avowed Israeli attention to deport the population, self-deport the population of Gaza was not realized by the ceasefire, right? To that extent, is a victory. Of endurance for the Palestinian population there, that they're still hoping that a good number of them will choose to leave when they're made an offer. Hmm. Because, you know, their circumstances of their living is just intolerable there and they'll be made an offer, here's a few thousand dollars, go and live somewhere else, right? So they'll sort of thin down as much as possible, the Palestinian population in Gaza, and then ultimately continue with the aim that you alluded to, Ali, with the AI video

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  of the real estate boom, making it into a Singapore or Dubai, what have you. And that actually still is the aim. And because many of the Gulf states which were involved in this deal share the real estate ambitions, monetary and extractive ambitions of, you know, the Western powers that are involved, people are saying, well, nothing good come of this for Palestinians. However, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. No doubt armed groups like Hamas, if they're still lurking around the place, will try to thwart this. But given the military balance, you know, they have no heavy weapons, they've been smashed, and you have no Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, still occupying a lot of Gaza and will continue

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  to, and have the right to confront any perceived resistance, you know, Hamas doesn't disarm. Then one could foresee that this plan could be executed and realized to the detriment of the Palestinian population. And in the sense that their desire for self-determination, which means also self-rule, is not going to be realized, in fact, it'd be violently thwarted. And that is contrary to, you know, international law. But no one seems to care about that, which goes back to your question before, Mercedes. I mean, the ICJ also came up with an advisory opinion last week in which they said that Israel is obliged to let aid in and not interfere in the activities of the United Nations in UNRWA. Hmm. And that's also being just ignored.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  So I think we're at a moment where the international legal institutions and governance institutions established after the Second World War, under American patronage, are being abandoned by key powers in the West because they're no longer

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Convenient, they can't control them, you know, they're coming up with opinions they don't like. So this isn't me criticizing it one way or the other, it's just an observation is that, you know, something is changing and international conventions, norms, practices, and institutions are going to be just ignored, criticized, attacked, and, you know, thrown into the scrap heap of history because the power interests of key stakeholders are different now. You know, they can't rule through them or govern through them.

• 1:05:49Alie Ward?

  In his September 30th gathering of the most powerful generals in the country, the United States Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, noted that troops, quote, "Don't fight with stupid rules of engagement." He said, "We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters." So a restraining order is great in theory until it's violated.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  And in fact, you know, upper east states like South Africa are using them against their intention.

• 1:06:31Alie Ward?

  It seems like this might be something that is addressed not in our lifetime with maybe the justice that a lot of people would hope to see now. It seems like there is a lag time of a generation before these things can be seen clearly with hindsight, or will be admitted to.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we seem to accept them once we're at a point where all that we can do is say, wow, what a sad thing that happened. And that's really difficult to watch happen in real time.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm observing that there are academics who I know personally who talked about genocide from day one who have paid a professional price, you know, they've had jobs taken away from them and have been attacked, you know, their credibility attacked, family members won't speak to them, what have you. And so they paid a price. Those that sat on the fence but have now in a belated way said, oh, Maybe there's genocide there. They're now on the on the circuit.

• 1:07:30Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  They're getting, you know, big honor area to go to universities and be the sort of play the Old Testament prophet. And get a pat on the back.

• 1:07:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  And in fact, they make a virtue of their belated realization by saying, look, you know, I didn't want to jump in prematurely with an extremist, you know, determination or opinion. I really had to look at the facts carefully. And then, you know, after great anguish and pain, I I realized that now, you know, six months later. Now the genocide is taking place. They said this adds to my credibility as someone who's, you know, balanced, even handed and so forth. So I'm observing that with some interest and and keeping the receipts.

• 1:08:14Alie Ward?

  Mercedes notes, we love him for this. Are you pressured? Have you felt pressured? Have you wanted to maintain a here are the facts, make a determination on yourself? Or have you been moved to make that kind of soundbite yourself? I know Dr. Raz Segal was one of the first people, just the thirteenth of October, noted that it was a textbook case of genocide. You know, he'd been cited heavily as kind of an early influencer of that opinion. Do you feel that that pressure personally?

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  I have been spared the kind of vituperation that he has. I should also add, on the same day, on the thirteenth of October, the English social scientist Martin Shaw wrote an article coming to the same conclusions as Raz, but it was in a less illustrious publication, you know, didn't get the same airplay. And the headline wasn't, you know, that catchy textbook case of genocide. It was much more oblique. But Martin has just come out with a new book, actually, on genocide in the world today. So he and Raz have been, you know, deepening their analyses over the last couple of years. Now, I myself, as I was saying, have, you know, been less public in the sense of social media.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Although I've written quite a lot on the subject, but always in an academic way. And there is a difference between the way they and others have. Pitch their case in the international media and so forth to me. I am myself, as you can tell from what I've said before, somewhat sceptical about this concept of genocide. As it is in law.

• 1:09:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Because it no longer signifies a war of destruction against an entire people. You know, which is what's been going on. So I've been trying to use this debate and confusion, if you like, over the last two years to draw attention to the limits of the genocide concept. Rather than say, that's a genocide, that's not a genocide. In fact, I've resisted that, if you like, godlike power that people ascribe to some academics to, you know, validate a particular case. I've resisted. I think it's the Australian in me. We don't like playing god. We don't like taking on the air of authority. And I've often been asked when I give a talk in the past, like well before this current case. You know, somebody stands up and says, I'm from the such and such community.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  I think we're victims of genocide. Do you agree? And I would say to them, well, why do you want me? Why do you care what I think? Well, they care because the professor's up on the stage, right? And it validates their suffering. But I want to turn that into a, a learning moment for everyone or reflective moment. I don't want to teach them anything, but I, you know, academics, we do want to add nuance and make things complex.

• 1:10:56Alie Ward?

  Hey, the siren is on our recording, so don't panic. Okay.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Like, why would it make you feel better if some random academic from Australia agrees with you? That is genocide. What's wrong with crimes against humanity? You know, why do we think genocide is worse than crimes against humanity? When, say, the same number of victims are at stake. Now, what is it about the stigma that genocide implies? You know, how did we get that? I'm not Jewish myself, but I, you know, work on Holocaust and genocide, obviously. So, you know, I'm in these discussions. Now, I've been saying these kind of things actually for thirty, thirty years. So it's like, you know, it's like a bit of told you so.

• 1:11:33Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Because my first book was on genocide in Australia. In two thousand and four, and you know, around clearly a settler colonial case. And identified imperial and colonial logics and dynamics also in the Holocaust.

• 1:11:47Alie Ward?

  And Dirk notes that there are obvious differences between what happened in the US and Australia with colonialism and the Holocaust. But there are also some points of contact or continuities, he said. One of which is the notion of, quote, permanent security and the killing of women and children and other noncombatants to forever eliminate the population and culture of a people as such.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  And I was instantly reminded of the mitzmaik lice argument that you got on the American frontier and in the Australian frontier, which settlers said, we need to kill Native American children because one day they'll grow up to be warriors. Or if they're girls, they'll grow up and bear warriors. There'll be mothers that will produce our future enemies. So it's a bit like the first Terminator movie, right? You have to go back in time and, you know, in this case, it's the opposite. You've got to go forward in time. You've got to kill the children so they can't grow up to be your opponents. It's exactly the same logic. And that is a conceptual link between colonial warfare and the kind of warfare that the Germans engaged in. Not saying it's exactly the same, but there are some points of contact there which people are loathe to acknowledge.

• 1:12:53Alie Ward?

  And, you know, I think that's one of the biggest takeaways from our first episode. And even, yeah, the language of transgression is, why does it matter? What you call it, what the label is, especially since it's rarely ever actually prosecuted or, you know, punishments enacted. So why does it matter when these are the facts in front of us? And I think that's really fascinating to look at and also, you know, trying to let people know what that even entails so that they can look at it with their own eyes. But I'm so grateful that we got a chance to talk to you. I know we asked you a lot of questions. I'm so thankful for your time. Thank you so, so much for

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:13:29Alie Ward?

  all of the work that you do and keep it up.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Okay, it's a pleasure talking to you both, even on this terrible topic.

• 1:13:35Alie Ward?

  Thanks. Yeah, I appreciate it.

• 1:13:39Alie Ward?

  So ask scholarly geniuses genuine questions. Speak up for others and most of all, please be kind to each other. Thank you so much, Dr. Turk Moses, for all the time you spent with us on both episodes and the research that you continue to do and put out. Again, his book, The Problems of Genocide, is linked in the show notes. We'll also link his social media handles. You can follow him in other episodes that you might be interested in. Those are all linked in the show notes. Thank you again so very much to Mercedes Maitland and Maitland Audio for your continued advocacy, your informed conclusions, generosity, research, additional writing, questions during this interview, producing and of course, editing this episode. Again, a few bucks to the Hand of Salvation Initiative goes a long way to families whose homes are destroyed and are being deprived of aid. We will link that in the show notes.

• 1:14:23Alie Ward?

  We're at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward on both. We have shorter, kid-friendly cuts of classic episodes. Those are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. They're available for free at aliward.com/smolologies or wherever you get your podcasts. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Newell Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is managing director. Kelly Ardwire makes our website and can make yours. Additional editing by Jake Chaffee and Jared Sleeper and music by Nick Thorburn. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret. And this one is not much of a secret, but the last genocide episode, I was very hesitant to say outright what my opinion was.

• 1:15:06Alie Ward?

  I wanted people to get the history and make their own informed conclusion. And honestly, since that episode is out and since we released it, I've just been much more confident in the conclusions I've come to that this is a genocide. And a lot of times we think, what can I do to speak up against things? And just empowering people around you to speak up has such a domino effect. I think the work that Ms. Rachel is doing is also incredibly powerful to let other people stand up for what they believe in and to stand up for others. So big kudos to everyone who's using your voice. Also, second secret, in one of the Owls episodes, I mentioned that I got to see the Northern Lights from an airplane and I tapped the guy next to me to show him. The guy ended up emailing me and now we're buddies.

• 1:15:49Alie Ward?

  He sent me some pictures of some fishing he was doing and some sunsets where he lives in the Pacific Northwest. So what's up, Lee? I don't know if you're listening to this one. This is a pretty hefty one. But anyway, yeah, just make friends on an airplane. Okay, everyone. Have a really lovely holidays. And it is not an accident that these episodes on Genocide are coming out the week of Thanksgiving in America. Again, if you have a few bucks to spare and you're not sure where to give it, you can also give it to your local food bank. If you go to givingmultiplier.com/ologies, you can choose a food bank. You can also choose an international charity. Again, we have Tasneem and Nadal's Fund at CHEFT. So if you are feeling grateful for what you have, then those are some great places to donate to.

• 1:16:34Alie Ward?

  And if you are in need, I really hope that others are putting out some resources to make this holiday season a little bit easier. Okay, more fun next week, I promise. All right, bye bye. Pachydermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, amnology, meteorology, geology, geology, geology,

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  seriology, geology.

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