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.
Historically, this special intent has been incredibly difficult to prove in international courts without explicit, direct orders from state leadership. That is entirely by design. The Law of Armed Conflict recognizes that the conditions of urban warfare will always result in horrific destruction and civilian casualties. Outcome, however tragic, does not automatically equal intent to destroy.
Today, however, we are witnessing a coordinated effort to collapse this distinction entirely. Anti-Israel activists and states are attempting to lower the threshold of dolus specialis, effectively reverse-engineering the Genocide Convention into a political weapon to vilify and delegitimize Israel.
To achieve this end, part of the strategy is to bypass the courtroom entirely and manufacture a conviction in the court of public opinion. The news media has been entirely complicit in this effort.
Between mid-April and mid-May 2026, CNN and MS NOW have aired more than 10 unique interviews in which reporters allowed their guests to refer to the war in Gaza as a genocide without asking a single follow-up question regarding that label.
Most recently, Brown University professor Omer Bartov has jumped from The New Yorker to NPR to CNN to promote his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?
As a scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, Bartov is intimately aware of the legal threshold for genocide, which makes his deliberate distortion of this crucial legal requirement all the more damning. In a July 2025 New York Times op-ed, he attempted to manufacture intent by taking harsh, standard military rhetoric directed explicitly at Hamas terrorists and falsely repackaging it as proof of intent to destroy the Palestinian people. In doing so, Bartov actively watered down dolus specialis.
Given this op-ed, reporter after reporter allowed Bartov to repeat his claim, demanding zero evidence of the strict legal threshold of special intent.
He is far from the only one benefiting from journalistic malpractice.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour allowed former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in early May and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in late April to propagate the genocide claim unchallenged. Over the last month, Kaitlan Collins gave Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) a platform to do so. Victor Blackwell didn’t challenge Nasser Baydoun, a board member of the Arab-American Civil Rights League, when he accused the “Zionist regime” of genocide charges. Erin Burnett platformed New Jersey Representative-elect Analilia Mejia, noting that she was the only Democrat in her primary to “raise her hand and say she believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
Panelists Ayman Mohyeldin, Catherine Rampell, Antonia Hylton and Elise Jordan displayed the exact same silent complicity on MS NOW’s “The Weekend: Primetime.” They allowed former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) to propagate the claim unchallenged and offered zero pushback when Jodie Ginsberg, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, repeated the charge. Furthermore, they sat quietly as Ginsberg accused Israel of purposefully targeting journalists in Gaza without providing a shred of evidence.
CAMERA has previously documented several earlier instances in which New York Times and NPR reporters also allowed their interviewed guests to state as fact that Israel committed genocide, with no pushback.
This is not merely lazy journalism, nor are these reports trivial; they contribute to the historical record. Furthermore, these reporters know exactly whom they are interviewing. These are all individuals who have previously gone on record calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
When the media normalizes this legal conclusion without requiring legal evidence, news outlets launder unsubstantiated activist allegations into international consensus.
The disconnect between the media’s narrative and legal reality is clear. When International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan sought high-profile arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, he levied charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide.
During a late April interview with British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hassan, Khan implied that there has not been sufficient evidence to advance genocide charges targeting Palestinians in Gaza. That should have given the media pause.
The groundwork for the endeavor to erode the threshold for genocide was laid already in 2019, when The Gambia, acting effectively as a legal proxy for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, filed a genocide charge against Myanmar. This precedent created a major new legal loophole allowing a country to file genocide charges, even if it wasn’t directly involved in the conflict.
Emboldened, Ireland formally filed an intervention at the ICJ in January 2025 in the South Africa vs. Israel case to broaden the interpretation of the Genocide Convention, aiming explicitly to lower the high bar for proving intent.
By tempering the strict requirement of dolus specialis, activists strip “genocide” of its specific meaning, and the news media have become their primary accomplice in driving this erasure.
The architects of the post-World War II order envisioned international law as the embodiment of a liberal democratic world, empowering courts to pursue justice against the perpetrators of the ultimate evil. When news outlets aid those seeking to manipulate the definition of genocide, they become complicit in the erosion of this liberal framework, effectively helping autocracies transform international law into a tool of state propaganda.
