The family of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide,’ is ‘totally outraged’ by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
More than 100 prominent Holocaust and genocide scholars are sounding the alarm on an “extremist” Israel-bashing nonprofit named after a Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide,” according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Exploiting the survivor’s name while accusing the Jewish state of genocide, the letter’s leader said, is “nothing less than Holocaust inversion.”
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit named after Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, was established around 2021 without permission from its namesake’s family. It has since used the late lawyer and activist’s reputation to undermine Israel on the international stage, the scholars wrote ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The institute began accusing Israel of “genocide” just 10 days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, later claiming Hamas did not commit sexual violence against Israeli civilians.
“As scholars who have written about the Holocaust or other genocides, we share your family’s concern about extremists exploiting Raphael Lemkin’s name to attack Israel,” the experts, led by Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wrote in a letter to the Lemkin family. “Israel’s counter-terror campaign in Gaza is not genocidal, either in intentions or actions. The civilian deaths there are the result of Hamas embedding itself in residential areas and using the population as human shields.”
Medoff told the Free Beacon that the institute’s “false accusation of genocide in Gaza” amounts to “nothing less than Holocaust inversion,” adding that “the fact that extremists are exploiting Lemkin’s name to do so adds insult to injury.”
The letter is meant to bolster the Lemkin family’s months-long bid to pressure the institute to drop Lemkin’s name, saying the institute’s “policies, positions, activities, and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin’s belief system.” The family, with legal backing from the European Jewish Association, petitioned Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) and the state’s Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations to intervene on their behalf, though the governor and state have not taken yet any action. As Free Beacon senior writer Ira Stoll reported in late 2024, a Lemkin family member said he was “totally outraged” to see his relative’s name used for anti-Israel activism.
“Members of our family were killed in the Holocaust, and Rafael Lemkin would be outraged by the use of his name and the abuse of the word genocide,” Joseph Lemkin told Stoll in a statement at the time.
The Lemkin Institute has used the Holocaust survivor’s name to lend credibility to its claims that Israel is guilty of genocide and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court.
On Oct. 17, 2023, the institute issued a statement saying it was “absolutely disgusted” by Israel’s response to the Hamas attack and argued that “Western nations have given Israel a greenlight to commit #GenocideinGaza,” even before the Jewish state launched its retaliatory ground operation in the territory.
“That greenlight has led to the horrific scenes of genocide in Gaza since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas,” the institute wrote. “Just today Israel struck the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City as well as a [United Nations] school,” the notice added, accusing Israel of having caused the blast. In reality, the blast came from a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
The institute initially said Hamas’s attack included “genocidal dimensions,” but it eventually altered the language to describe October 7 as an “unprecedented military operation against Israel.”
By September 2024, the institute began casting doubt on reports that Hamas terrorists had raped Israelis. The organization framed these crimes as “stories of sexualized violence against Israelis,” contending that “the truth of the claim of instrumentalization and systematization of sexualized violence by Hamas cannot be determined from the evidence at this point.”
The institute instead wrote that reports of Hamas members’ having raped Israelis are “used by supporters of Israel globally to justify Israel’s actions since 7 October, including [sexual and gender-based violence] against Palestinians” and to distract from the Jewish state’s own supposed crimes.
“Israeli officials have framed Hamas as a specifically sexualized threat, referring to the group as ‘a rapist regime,'” the organization wrote. “Defining an adversary in terms related to sexualized violation is common within genocidal thinking.”
Just last month, the institute’s executive director, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, leveled the bizarre claim that Israel’s ongoing operations to root out Hezbollah forces in Lebanon are part of a “disgusting totalitarian sci-fi high tech weapons experiment being conducted by the U.S., U.K., EU, Israel, Russia & China.”
“Perhaps even moreso [sic] than the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, where anti-Palestinian racism is shaping the violence into a very particular pattern, what’s going on in Lebanon is a harbinger of things to come everywhere,” von Joeden-Forgey wrote on LinkedIn. “The drone activity is particularly distopian [sic].”
The institute did not respond to a request for comment.
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