Finding truth in the white smoke of consensus

On the IAGS claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

On Monday, a conclave of experts convened, cast their ballots on the question of genocide in Gaza, and the sky filled with the billowing white smoke of consensus. Yes, they announced, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The headlines were predictably damning. An association of academic experts on genocide, using the exact language of international legal doctrine as their guide, had passed a formal resolution with overwhelming approval. Case closed, right? Well, if I’m writing about it, clearly not, for as it happens, every major news outlet ran the story uncritically and, as we say in the newsroom, every subsequent headline wrote its own lede, meaning every headline was the story, self-contained, no need to read further or click. Consider, if you will, the headlines below. In media theory, it’s considered good practice for hard-news headers to answer the core question, or what people are reading the article to find out. You want all the important facts up top, ranked by significance, so the reader dives deeper into the details the deeper into the article they read. Simple.

Outlets like BuzzFeed and HuffPost exploit the curiosity gap by giving readers just a taste to hook their interest, then dropping breadcrumbs of information throughout the story, as opposed to data-dumping at the outset. Done well, this drives real engagement and enhances longform narrative. Done poorly, it results in gimmicky clickbait and the rapid loss of readership. My point is, if you’re going to answer the core question in a headline, it has to first be a question that can be answered in a headline. This should be self-evident, but you’d be surprised how often outlets ignore the principle. Or maybe you wouldn’t. But not a single outlet I found bothered to dig beneath the topsoil of this story. Walk with me a minute, and let me show you the bedrock. I’m going to use Reuters as our case study because, along with the Associated Press, it’s commonly regarded as the most unbiased news source. And, given that readers barely look beyond the headlines these days, we’re not going to review the entire article, but just the first two paragraphs.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, scholars’ association says

by Stephanie van den Berg
September 1, 2025

THE HAGUE, Sept 1 (Reuters) - The world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars has passed a resolution saying the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday.

Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution declaring Israel’s “policies and actions in Gaza” had met the legal definition set out in Article II of the 1948 UN convention on genocide.

One sentence in, and already my mind pauses over the syntactic redundancy of the construction, “Group A said X, says Group A.” This may seem like a stylistic gripe, but it suggests a lack of clarity in thinking that’s immediately confirmed by the next sentence, one that instantly hits us with a powerful and dangerously misleading statistic, because without further explanation, which the article never provides, most readers will take that second sentence to mean 86% of a 500-member panel, which pencils out to 430 experts in approval. But the real number is closer to 43. That’s because “86%” only refers to “those who voted,” and only 28% of IAGS members actually did, which The Guardian and a few other outlets were careful to note. But look at how Al-Jazeera reports the story:

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), a 500-member body of academics founded in 1994, passed a resolution on Monday, stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza fulfil the definition of genocide set out in the 1948 United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

“This is a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide,” said Melanie O’Brien, IAGS president and professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, speaking to the Reuters news agency on Monday.

The resolution won overwhelming support, with 86 percent of members voting in favour.

Anyone reading that is reasonably going to conclude that 86% of IAGS members voted in favor. But if only 28% of members voted, that means — 0.86 x 0.28 = 0.24 — only 24% of IAGS members approved the resolution. Major outlets weren’t the only ones who got this wrong either. So did supposed human-rights experts such as Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, who claimed the resolution was passed by “an overwhelming majority of members.” But it gets even worse, because the widely reported figure of 500 total members isn’t true either.

I looked at the IAGS “public directory” this week, which isn’t public anymore since IAGS pulled it down yesterday, one day after releasing their resolution on Gaza, meaning the directory now returns a 404 error unless you sign in as a member, so factor that into your analysis of their transparency as a scholarly group. Thankfully, I had already reviewed the list of names,¹ and first of all, the directory only lists 405 members. This alone bring the number of approvals from 120 members, or 24% of 500, down to 97 members, or 24% of 405. But we’re still not done, because if you click through the names in the directory, you’ll find many are inactive members who could not have voted. I randomly selected 78 members, and found half are inactive. My selection process was not truly randomized, but taking this as a rough gauge, 78 out of 405 yields a margin of error of plus/minus 10% at 95% confidence, which extrapolates to 162-243 total active members, and 24% of that gives us 39-58 votes in approval of the resolution. So like I said above, 43 is closer to the real number than 430.

But we are still not done tearing this figure apart, because now let’s try to add a little granularity to each vote by looking through specific member profiles in order to see if we can identify any indicators of potential bias. And yes, we can. Doing this, two things jumped out at me. First, plenty of members seem have no real expertise. Take Benson Ojur, whose only apparent background is a 25-hour course on preventing atrocities, but no specific focus in genocide, not to mention Israel, Palestinians, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic terrorism, the current war, or the relevant legal doctrine being cited in the resolution itself. Second, I noticed an alarming number of members who, well, extremely woke. I can’t confirm this without their direct commentary but, based on certain biographical details, I’m willing to go out on a limb:

• Anna Aleksanya explores “gendered aspects of the Armenian genocide.”

• Helen Al-Hawezi’s areas of research focus include colonialism and gender.

• Ana Velasco gave a 2022 speech at Pontifical Catholic University titled “Critical Genocide Studies,” critical meaning with a Marxist lens.

• Maha Abdallah’s research examines “settler colonialism, Zionism, and the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

• Jess Gifkins co-wrote the 2023 article “Queering the Responsibility to Protect,” saying we must remove our “cishetronormative blindfold” to combat atrocity.

This is not to say there are no respectable scholars on the IAGS roster, which includes none other than Gregory Stanton himself, the founder and president of Genocide Watch, widely cited for his “Ten Stages of Genocide” framework. But by my own admittedly rough estimate, half the profiles or more belong to leftist academics, some of whom are outrageously woke, decolonial, Marxist, or some combination thereof. If only 28% of members bother to take part in such a resolution, it doesn’t surprise me that this self-selected group would over-index members who care a lot about the issue, and might bring in a disproportionate number of voters who view Israel as a settler-colonial, white supremacist state. So yes, I can definitely believe that 39-58 overwhelmingly woke academics voted yes to the resolution. It’s just not very newsworthy. Or it is, but not in the way IAGS would like for it to be. And, not for nothing, keep in mind that IAGS president, Melanie O’Brien, who is quoted in every report I found, is herself the kind of pink-hair-in-Bluesky-bio intellectual who feels the need to point out that the cast for the new film about Nuremberg is mostly men, and whose reaction to the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, in which trans terrorist Robin Westman murdered two children, was to say that she fears “trans people will be targeted further from this.”

Finally, since the IAGS resolution says Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal criteria set out in Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, let’s take a quick look at Article II:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Readers might make the mistake of focusing on the fact that Israel has attacked Palestinians “with intent to destroy,” and that Israel has, in fact, killed Palestinians “in part.” I have seen this talking point on social media already. But it’s not enough to kill off a group in part, otherwise every act of homicide would be genocide — or even multiple genocides, with one for each intersectional identity that the victim claims, or potentially claims. Rather, genocide is when you attack a whole group, or part of a group, with the intent to destroy that group. If you attack 1,200 Israelis because you don’t think the nation of Israel should exist, that’s genocidal. But even if Israel kills 500,000 Gazans, it’s only genocide if Israel does so “with intent to destroy” Palestinians as “a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” and I would argue the fact that, not including Gaza or the West Bank, Israel is 20% Palestinian, or that its parliamentary body, the Knesset, contains Palestinians, or that the same social services covering Jewish citizens also cover Palestinians, means that when it comes to arguing Israel is committing a genocide, the IAGS has all their work still entirely ahead of them.

1. Navras Aafreedi, Daban Abdalla Mahmood, Maha Abdallah, Nshen Abddulrahman, Kochar Abdulla, Dastan Abdulla, Reband Abdulrahman Kanaby, Fahim Abrar, Rouben Adalian, Ademola Adesola, Jwan Afraseau Shaways, Rezan Afraseau Shaways, Robert Agaba, Karan Aggarwala, Kamaluddin Ahmed, Fatih Ahmed, Habil Ahmed, Kawser Ahmed, Bayes Ahmed, Gregory Aimaro, Taner Akcam, Ali Zainulabdeen, Naïm Al Chami, Helen Al-Hawezi, Anna Aleksanyan, Amanda Savita Alexander, Sandra Alfers, Akar Ali, Mohamad Ali, Dylan Ali, Zhirkar Ali, Lawand Ali, Laween Ali, Sarwar Ali, Aisa Ali Aref-Shaways, Rosa Ana Alija Fernández, Hymn Haseeb Qader Aljabbari, Christiane Alsop, Shadi Amin, Eileen Angelini, Iuliia Anosova, Lilia Arakelyan, Hikmat Arif, Maayan Armelin, Jobb Arnold, Maral Attallah, Alison Avery, Emraan Azad, Sirwan Aziz, Mounia Azriyaa, Jeff Bachman, Dianto Bachriadi, Hawkar Bahir Saleh, Peter Balakian, Kevin Bales, Alejandra Ballón, Alek Barovic, Sivan Bashdar Musa, San Beauchemin, Janja Bec-Neumann, Artak Beglaryan, Jean-Philippe Belleau, Natalie Belsky, Caroline Bennett, Bhaswati Bhattacharjee, I-GMAP Binghamton University, Martin Bitschnau, Victor Bivell, Tetiana Boriak, Willemijn Born, Nelida Boulgourdjian, Lauren Ashley Bradford, Mike Brand, Yvonne Breitwieser-Faria, Niyonzima Brian, Esther Brito Ruiz, Sara Brown, Daniel Bultmann, Linda Burghardt, Vera Burrows, Rosa Cantoral, Rishab Chatty, Ivelina Cherevko, Sara Cohan, David Cotter, John Cox, George Dalbo, Asya Darbinyan, Sirwan Darwesh, Roland Sylvestre Dawa, Theresa de Langis, Joe Delap, Alex Demirdjian, Alex Dev Test, Mamadou Boussouriou Diallo, Mark Drumbl, Keo Duong, Hilary Earl, Julia Ebner, Michelle Edgar, Daniel Moses Ekwaru, Maria Elander, Julia Englander, Kate English, Nicholas Idris Erameh, Craig Etcheson, Amy Fagin, Daniel Feierstein, Jacob Flaws, Marina Frangos, Karen Frostig, Shannon Fyfe, Hannah Garry, Mirjana Gavrilović Nilsson, Lucy Gaynor, Rekan Ghazi Hama Salih, Jess Gifkins, Markus Gloe, Max Goetz, Daniel Gonzalez Stier, Ashley Greene, Sandra Grudic, Amanda Grzyb, Raúl Gualtruzzi, Christian Gudehus, Narine Hakobyan, George Hale, Nerma Halilović-Kibrić, Roman Hama Amin, Hawkar Hama Faraj Hassan, Sarkhel Hama Khan, Tawfiq Rahman Hamad Hamad, Kabunda Hambomba, Brvan Hamdi Hussein, Rebecca Hamilton, Kwanghoon Han, Rochelle Harris, Christopher Harrison, Harry Regensburger, Peshraw Hassan, Farhad Hassan, Marta Havryshko, Alex Hinton, Angelique Hoffman, Tessa Hofmann, Raymond Hoogendoorn, Kristina Hook, Josie Hornung, Mohammad Pizuar Hossain, Mari Hovhannisyan, Amy Hudnall, Shiraz Hussein, Dlsooz Hussein, Dalsooz Hussein, Azeem Ibrahim, Shireen Ibrahim Abdulrahman, Mohammed Ihsan, Sandrine Irankunda, Shirin Jabari, Josephine Jackson, Tanya Jalal, Salah Jangir Salah, Elizabeth Jansen, Nina Janz, Helen Jarvis, Nidal Jboor, Otoro Juma Zapherio, Shahriar Kabir, Rael Kakai, Vicky Kapogianni, Yaseen Kareem Amin, Abdulrahman Abdulrahman Karim Darwesh, Jetnor Kasmi, Zachary Kaufman, Nazanin Kawa Kareem, Selen Kazan, Anna Kazaryan, Aline Keledjian, Shawn Kelley, Michael Kelly, Shushan Khachatryan, Fazel Khalifa, Kamaran KhidtIr, Naupess Kibiswa, Rachel Killean, Heesun Kim, Lorrie Lynn King, Emilia Klebanowski, Antonie Klopper, Nancy Kobrin, Gnamienwa Gerald-Rene Kouassi, Dimitrios Kourtis, Yuliia Kovalchuk, Barbara Krasner, Fabian Krautwald, Thomas Kuehne, Paul Kutner, Jerzy Kwaśniewski, Bashir Kyana, Jiří Lach, Eivor Lægreid, Brett LaFemina, Bahr Lak, Samantha Lakin, Alexander Landry, Mark LaRubio, Adeeb Lateef M. Saeed, Jonathan Leader Maynard, Yanikka Lemons, Adam Levin, Merio Jimmy Likudu, Jutta Lindert, Alyssa Logie, Flavia Lucenti, Shilan M Salih Darweesh, David MacDonald, Paul Macharia, Laura Mahan, Darw Mahmood, Taban Mahmood, Tazhan Mahmood, Omeed Mahmood Ismael, Abdullah Mahmood Mohammed, Zeravan Majid Piroo, Muzaffar Syah Mallow, Kerri Malloy, Goran Mammend Ibrahim, Anjali Manivannan, Suren Manukyan, Ihsan Mardan Haidar, Narine Margaryan, Armen Marsoobian, Luis Enrique Martinez Chavez, Samira Marty, Anwar Masifi, Raziya Masumi, Jack Mayerhofer, Eyal Mayroz, Jermaine McCalpin, Madeline McClenney, Macy McCormack, Melissa McKay, Shannon McMahon, Richard Mead, David Mednicoff, Pamela Meijer, Lukas Meissel, Ehlimana Memisevic, Suham Merkhan, Antonio Míguez Macho, Shukur Mikaeel Mikaeel, Luciana Minassian, Stacey Mitchell, Andreas Moeller, Fanos Mohamad, Luqman Mohammed, Dana Mohammed Ameen Mansor, Àli Mohammed MirHamad, Adil Mohammed Salih Abdalla, Sulaiman Mohsen Tahir, Lucrecia Molinari, Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen, Raya Morag, Jesse Mugero, Shilaan Muhammed, Adam Muller, Samson Munn, Celestin Musekura, Kamaran Mustafa Abdalla, Jiyana Mustafa Taha, Sascha Nanlohy, Tali Nates, Omar Ndizeye, Rhiannon Neilsen, Sworo Nelson, Leonard Newman, YBhim Nie, Khasifa Ninsiima, Patrick Njawaala, George Njung, Valens Nkurikiyinka, Tawheed Noor, Rukumbuzi Delphin Ntanyoma, Jeanine Ntihirageza, Shamsad Nurani, Laetitia Nyirazinyoye, Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Melanie O’Brien, Edward O’Donnell, Richard O’Brien, Tabassum Niger Oishi, Benson Ojur, Jabar Omar Salih, Handren Omer Abdullah, Dana Omer Hussein, Hazhar Hazhar Omer Mohammed, George Oputo, Priscila Ortega Portella, Emma Palmer, Rafal Pankowski, Rachel Paul, Maxwin Paul Rayen, Murali Penmetsa, Gheysa Daniele Pereira Moura, Kristofer Petersen-Overton, Victor Piercey, Narek Poghosyan, Antony Polonsky, Jack Porter, Christopher Powell, Beverley Pratt, William Pruitt, Zahida Qader Sulaiman, Judith Rafferty, Hiwa Raheem, Rzgar Rahim, Shahla Rahman, Mohammad Rahman, Rebwar Ramazan, Mohammed Raoof, Annie Rappeport, Foysal Shahriar Ratul, Howie Rechavia-Taylor, Sahra Rezaie, Luís Ribeiro, Marc Sherman, Wes Rist, Charles Rix, Emily Roche, Simone Rodrigues Pinto, Thomas Roeper, Sylvia Ronnau, Eric Ross, John Roth, Karwan Afraseau Shaways, Ibrahim Sadiq, Kim Sadique, Shadi Sadr, Darko Saeed Hama, Vera Sahakyan, Brenda Salazar, Goran Salihi, Raymond Salomonn, Stefano Saluzzo, Emily Sample, Zoé Samudzi, Simarjit Sandhu, Shirley Sapire, Sara Sara Hallo Zandy, Mohammed Sarwar Mohammed, Joachim Savelsberg, Anneliese Schenk, Magnus Schillis, Timothy Schorn, Elyse Semerdjian, Ashti Shagani, Lana Shaik, Nashmil Shakir Qader Shakir Qader, Nawsherwan Sharif Saeed, Ahang Shaways, Agrin Shaways, Nawroz Shaways, Rastgo Shaways, Dastan Shaways, Kamaran Shaways, Tara Sheppard-Luangkhot, Kirril Shields, Hisashi Shigematsu, Shakhawan Shorash, Alex Developer, Leo Silowa, Malena Silveyra, Yael Siman, David Simon, Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska, Jaspreet Singh, Laura Slinkman, Linda Slinkman, Alette Smeulers, Jim Snow, Bunly Soeung, Claudia Andrea Videla Sotomayor, Snežana Stanković, Gregory Stanton, Peter Stavrianidis, Marcus Steiner, Ellen Stensrud, Moni Tabitha Emmanuel Gabu, Margarita Tadevosyan, Hazhar Taha Ahmed, Hedi Taher Mestafa, Sirwan Abdalkarim Tahir Tahir, Mina Talaat Kareem, Kate E. Temoney, Tun Theara, Henry Theriault, Kevin Toro Sanchez, Kara Torres-Kilgannon, Gregory Townsend, Barry Trachtenberg, Alliou Traore, Onur Uraz, Karen Uslin, Madeline Vadkerty, Iris van den Berg, Virginia Vecchioli, Ana Velasco, Ernesto Verdeja, Vera Verschoor, Tawnya Vogelsong, Mariolanda Vrolijk, Lorna Waddington, Bawar Wahab Ahmed, Emmanuel Waliuba, Umme Wara, Kerry Whigham, Tim Williams, Frances Williams, Ben Willis, Roger Willoughby, Stephanie Wolfe, Andrew Woolford, Ivan Wrobel, Cheng Xu, Nihan Yaseen Othman, Gor Yedigaryan, Nhial Moses Yien, Krmanj Younis, Evrim Caprice Yurtsever, Hallo Zandy, Larysa Zasiekina.