Say the Word or Get Out

Last week in Alexandria, Virginia, a woman sat down to get her eyebrows shaped. The conversation started warmly enough: Afghan poetry, her new novel, food both customer and brow artist loved. Then she mentioned she was Jewish and half-Israeli. The owner ordered her out. On camera, the brow artist said: “I can’t provide service to an Israeli. It’s against my political beliefs.”

Then came a demand: say it’s a genocide. Afterward, the owner explained that the client would have “slid by” had she agreed a genocide was happening.

Slid by.

Do as you’re told, and maybe we’ll tolerate your existence. Refuse, and pack your purse as the stranger who took your money chants slogans at you.

I’ve written extensively about why the war Hamas started on October 7th is scrutinized as a genocide while other high casualty events around the world barely score headlines at all.

Here is where the matter stands legally now: The International Court of Justice is the body tasked with ruling on genocides, and they have not made any such determination. They are reviewing evidence in the case opened by South Africa. You don’t have to take my word for it. The former International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan, who took the extraordinary step of issuing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, said he didn’t try to charge the Israeli prime minister with genocide because “it would take a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamour.” Khan, it’s important to note, is no fan of Israel. When he was finally fired last month after multiple allegations of sexual abuse it came out that he had allegedly asked his victim not to come forward so it wouldn’t jeopardize the arrest warrants. He’s an alleged predator and staunch critic of Israel; even he stopped short of ruling on genocide before the ICJ.

There’s also a committee affiliated with the United Nations that issued a report alleging genocide. An independent International Commission of Inquire. The UN has not officially accepted this as its stance. The UN is a massive, sprawling organization. The members of this particular committee have been mired in repeated controversies about antisemitic or anti-Israel statements. I’ve written about how the UN weaponizes its bureaucracy to lend its credibility to the highest bidder, as you can read here.

All of this is complex and contested, which is exactly why on Sunday, a Miami news anchor named Glenna Milberg interrupted DSA-backed Florida congressional candidate Oliver Larkin when he simply called the war Hamas started a genocide with no caveat. “Factually incorrect,” she told him, reminding him that the UN’s own definition does not conflate a “disproportionate wartime action” with genocide.

She’s right. The statute defining genocide isn’t about casualty counts; it’s about intent: a deliberate aim to destroy a people as such, not a war fought brutally against an enemy hiding among them. The world court has held that where intent is inferred from conduct, it must be the only reasonable inference the facts allow. A genocide determination requires a court to decide that the perpetrators met this horrifying standard.

“My reporting is not supporting anything or anyone,” Milberg said in an email to someone who wrote to criticize her. Her goal, Milberg said, is “to stay true to objective facts no matter how many people are repeating something that is not.” In short, she was doing exactly what reporters should do, which is to tease out the precise meaning of the slogans politicians love to spout.

Then came the fallout. It’s the mob freely calling the war a genocide that would have you believe they are being censored and bullied. But it was Milberg who was forced to lock her social media accounts to non-followers in the public pile-on that followed what should have been a standard interview in a country with freedom of the press. Every producer and pundit in America got the lesson by Monday: affirm that a genocide has been determined when it hasn’t, or face the mob. That’s the tactic the bullies use in every industry. It’s why so many stay quiet.

“Genocide” is no longer being treated as an accusation that needs to be proven. It’s functioning instead as something closer to a loyalty oath. It’s become a badge that you wear, not because it helps anyone or because you’ve truly proven it, but because it makes you acceptable. It’s become the kind of slogan that does to truth what oxygen does to steel.

A culture that cares about truth cares about meeting a standard of proof. It cares about due process. Until that standard is met, the only defensible answer is: not yet proven. Innocent until proven guilty is the foundation of a free society. But when slogans become litmus tests, they end up outlawing that answer. Agnosticism becomes denial. “Show me” becomes complicity. The conclusion comes first and cannot be revised, so it isn’t a conclusion. It’s a creed. A movement that makes people recite what they cannot verify is generating believers who fear the consequences of asking questions at all.

Most American Jews I know are liberals. We’re Zionists because we’re liberals, not despite it. We believe that evidence matters. We believe that you can hold two griefs at once. The insistence that we rule on genocide while the international court is still out hasn’t made most of us into vocal adherents of the Free Palestine cause. But its effects are still visible. They are the grad student silent in seminar, the editor softening her own sentence, and the teenager reciting the pre-approved talking points so her friends will stay. Each time we trade truth for acceptance, it costs a sliver of self.

Back in the brow salon, the Israeli-American customer refused. She walked out minus the service she paid for, with something more valuable intact. The owner offered her the deal this moment offers every Jew in America: say the word, and maybe you slide by. The answer that keeps us whole is the one that got her thrown out, and publicly humiliated for it.

One ray of hope: A few days after that interview, Larkin lost his primary. Jewish, pro-Israel representative Jared Moskowitz won by a landslide. Larkin’s performance raked in likes and views on X, but it didn’t translate to support among Democratic voters in Florida. The mob substituting slogans for due process is still better at manipulating algorithms than at winning elections. It’s going to take a lot of people with integrity to ensure it stays that way.