Abdual El-Sayed’s ‘genocide’ charge revives the oldest antisemitic libel - opinion

On the Raging Moderates podcast, Scott Galloway laid out the case for Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee. 

The Holocaust murdered two-thirds of European Jewry, including more than 90% of Poland’s Jewish population. Rwanda’s genocide killed about 70% of the Tutsis; the Khmer Rouge slaughtered about a quarter of Cambodia’s population.

Galloway then listed what Israel did in Gaza that no genocidal regime ever has done: distributed polio vaccinations, food aid, evacuation corridors, leaflets, and phone calls warning civilians out of buildings Hamas had made military targets.

El-Sayed’s response amounted to a confession: the point of the word “genocide” is not to wait “until the crime is that big again.” Its “power is in naming a thing before it gets that big.”

Translation: the charge need not be accurate, only useful. El-Sayed conflates when genocide must be stopped with what must be proven before it is alleged. That is a theory of libel, not genocide.

Clips spread on the far-left and anti-Israel woke right with a familiar argument since October 2023: Why quibble over the word? More than 70,000 are dead. Call it whatever you want. Just stop the killing.

This poses as rising above semantics. It is the opposite. First, that death toll comes from Hamas’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t separate combatants from civilians, and whose own statistics chief admitted that natural deaths were being counted as war deaths.

Second, most of those who recite it never demanded what would have ended the war on October 8: Hamas’s surrender and the hostages’ return. Third, if the word “genocide” didn’t matter, nobody would fight so hard to keep it.

History of antisemetic libels

The word matters because antisemitic libels always have. In Norwich in 1144, a dead boy spawned the first recorded ritual-murder charge. In Blois, France, in 1171, the charge – without a body – resulted in over 30 Jews being burned alive at the stake.

During the 1348 Black Death, claims that Jews poisoned wells caused the annihilation of hundreds of Jewish communities. In 1648, Cossacks branded Jews as Poland’s instruments of oppression and killed over half of Ukraine’s Jewish population.

In 1903, newspapers in Kishinev blamed Jews for a murdered boy in Dubossary; weeks later, a Kishinev Easter mob slaughtered 49 Jews.

The Land of Israel got its own version. In 1929, Haj Amin al-Husseini’s circle spread the lie that Jews planned to seize or destroy al-Aqsa Mosque. The ensuing pogroms killed more than 130 Jews – 67 in Hebron alone – with hundreds wounded, and mobs committing mass rapes of Jewish women. Ninety-four years later, Hamas named its October 7 mega-massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

How Many knew they were inciting murder is unknowable. Surely, some believed they were naming a crime “so we could do something about it,” as in El-Sayed’s framing. But antisemitic libels are never about vocabulary. They’re a license. They tell ordinary people that the Jews among them are doing or abetting something so monstrous that anything done to stop them is justified.

“Genocide” is the modern ritual-murder charge, the one crime so absolute it suspends every moral limit. Galloway warned El-Sayed the word implies the accused has earned a genocide in return. El-Sayed waved it off.

That license to kill has already been redeemed. On May 21, 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot dead Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. His manifesto declared the “perpetrators and abettors” of genocide had “forfeited their humanity.”

Eleven days later, in Boulder, Mohamed Soliman firebombed people marching for the hostages. Karen Diamond, 82, died of her burns.

As a lawyer, I can supply what El-Sayed, a physician, admits he lacks. “Neither you nor I are scholars on genocide,” he told Galloway, after years of leveling the charge.

In fact, the Genocide Convention requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Where intent is inferred from conduct, the International Court of Justice held in Bosnia vs Serbia, and Croatia vs Serbia, that it must be the only reasonable inference. Galloway’s list points the other way.

El-Sayed’s standard doesn’t fail that test. It abolishes it, turning the word “genocide” – coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin from the ashes of the Holocaust – into a weapon against the Jewish state.

Michigan has seen where this leads. On March 12, Ayman Ghazali rammed a pickup loaded with gasoline and fireworks into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, with 140 children in its preschool, and opened fire with an AR-style rifle. Only armed guards stood between him and those children.

El-Sayed condemned the attack, then gutted the condemnation by saying: “Hurt people hurt people.”

On August 5, newly nominated, El-Sayed claimed his commitment to Jewish safety was “the same as the commitment I have to the safety of my own daughters.”

Asked that day if he regretted his “hurt people” comment, he stood by it. Only on August 29, before the state party’s Jewish caucus, did he manage to say: “If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry,” while insisting the “context” could still come “in the fullness of time.”

No decent father rationalizes the man who tried to murder his daughters. The rationalization came free. The half-apology came when politically necessary.

The “daughters line” also has a geography problem. Nearly half the world’s Jews live in Israel. El-Sayed opposes US arms sales to it, even Iron Dome interceptors, after years of Iranian ballistic missiles and Hezbollah rockets. He calls Israel’s war against Hamas – whose official Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat October 7 “again and again” until Israel is destroyed – a “genocide.” 

El-Sayed’s concern may extend to the Jews whose votes he needs. It stops at the Jews defended by a Jewish army. A man willing to disarm half of world Jewry has told you what their safety is worth.

Galloway and co-host, Jessica Tarlov, pushed harder than most, yet still treated this as an electability problem. Tarlov asked only for “bare minimum acknowledgment” of Jewish concerns.

Galloway even allowed that Israel may have committed war crimes, as if that were genocide-lite. It isn’t. The two are legally distinct, and war crimes do not establish genocidal intent. Few modern wars have lacked them, and Hamas built its entire war on them: fighting out of uniform; using child soldiers; hiding next to, behind, and beneath human shields.

This is how moderation launders a libel: it treats the charge as a messaging problem and haggles over tone. You don’t negotiate with a libel. You demand its retraction. El-Sayed is not a friend with a different view on foreign policy. He is the latest purveyor of the world’s oldest hatred.

El-Sayed argues “genocide” needn’t wait for all the facts. On that, he is right. Antisemitic libels never have. In Norwich, in Kishinev, in Hebron, and in Washington, the libel came first, and the killers followed. Name it, without equivocation, for the dangerous lie it is, before it buries more Jews.

The writer is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.