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Exposed: Anti-Israel Group Under Fire for Using Name of Raphael Lemkin, Zionist Who Coined the Term Genocide
Raphael Lemkin being interviewed on Feb. 13, 1949. Photo: Screenshot
Members of the family of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and pushed for the passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, say they are outraged that a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization is using the Lemkin name to pursue an agenda of extreme anti-Israel activism.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention was initially registered as a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation on Aug. 19, 2021, and won US federal tax-exempt recognition in September 2023. In recent months, it has veered into strident anti-Israel political advocacy, supporting anti-Israel campus protests and reaching millions of viewers with social media posts that falsely accuse Israel of genocide.
Less than one week after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, the institute released a “genocide alert” calling the onslaught an “unprecedented military operation against Israel” while decrying the Jewish state’s actions against Hamas as “genocide.” The Oct. 13 message came before Israeli launched its ground offensive in Gaza.
Then on Oct. 18, 2023, the Lemkin Institute called on the International Criminal Court “to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of #genocide in light of the siege and bombardment of #Gaza and the many expressions of genocidal intent.” The social media post accumulated 1.3 million views, according to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The institute’s vocal anti-Israel advocacy has continued unabated for the past year. In September, for example, it described Israel’s war against Lebanese Hezbollah as “terrorism” and “the slaughter of Arab peoples” leading to “the wanton slaughter of all mankind.” The post did not mention that Hezbollah is an internationally designated terrorist organization that began firing rockets at Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks.
‘Totally Outraged’: Lemkin Family Disavows Institute
Joseph Lemkin, a New Jersey lawyer who is related to Raphael Lemkin, said he was unfamiliar with the institute until being informed of it by The Algemeiner.
Lemkin, who represented the family at a UN event marking the 65th anniversary of the genocide convention, described himself as “totally outraged” to see his late relative’s name used to push an anti-Israel agenda. His father was Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin.
“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 said in a statement to The Algemeiner that was copied to eight of his family members. “Our family fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and are fully in favor of US policies to support Israel. Indeed, we have many family members in Israel; family members who have served in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and others that have been impacted by the terror of Hamas.”
The family is discussing possible steps ranging from a joint public statement to a cease-and-desist letter aimed at getting the Philadelphia organization to drop the name.
The co-founder and executive director of the institute, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, was previously an assistant professor and director of the masters program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.
Joeden-Forgey did not respond to two emails and two cellphone voicemail messages from The Algemeiner left both last and this week seeking comment. Her co-founder, Irene Victoria Massimino, told The Algemeiner that Massimino is no longer with the Lemkin Institute and “cannot speak on its behalf.”
A Pathbreaking International Lawyer Dedicated to Zionism
Lemkin was born in Poland in 1900 and eventually escaped the Nazis to America, where he joined the War Department, documenting Nazi atrocities and preparing for the prosecution of Nazi crimes at the Nuremberg trials. He dedicated much of his life to making the world recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and designating mass murder as a crime which could be prosecuted through international law. Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were killed in the Holocaust. He died in 1959 in relative obscurity.
Raphael Lemkin’s grave, Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York. Photo: Oberezny, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A 2017 article by James Loeffler, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, described what he called “the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin.” Loeffler noted that while “dead international lawyers rarely become celebrities,” Lemkin “has emerged as a potent symbol for activists and politicians across the world.”
Scholarly and popular attention to Lemkin has blossomed in recent years, with his story featured everywhere from the alumni magazine at Duke University, where he taught, to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” A search of one database of academic articles, JSTOR, turned up 1,515 references to Lemkin, of which 1,133 were from 2005 or later. Samantha Power, a Harvard professor who served as UN ambassador during the Obama administration and administrator of the US Agency for International Development during the Biden administration, highlighted Lemkin’s story in a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book; she is said to have kept a framed portrait of Lemkin on her office wall while serving as a White House staffer.
Loeffler traced Lemkin’s work as an editor and columnist of a Jewish publication, Zionist World. “The task of the Jewish people is … [to become] a permanent national majority in its own national home,” Lemkin wrote in one such column.
“It is not enough to know Zionism,” Lemkin wrote in another column quoted by Loeffler. “One must imbibe its spirit, one must make Zionism a part of one’s very own ‘self,’ and be prepared to make sacrifices on its behalf.”
‘A Genocidal State That Is Completely Out of Control’: The Institute’s Relentless Critique of Israel
The Lemkin Institute’s social media account has been persistent in defending anti-Israel activists that the US government defines as antisemitic. For example, the American ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, posted on Oct. 29, “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role. The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”
The Algemeiner has reported extensively on how Francesca Albanese has used her position as the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’s attacks on the Jewish state.
Nonetheless, the Lemkin Institute’s account jumped into the replies of Thomas-Greenfield’s post with a defense of Albanese and an attack on the American diplomat.
“Your attack on UN special Rapporteur Albanese is so clearly intended to hide your criminal complicity in an ongoing genocide that you truly should be embarrassed,” the institute wrote in a post which, according to X, garnered 294,000 impressions. “Is there any trick from the genocidaire’s playbook that you will refuse to carry out?”
The post continued, “Francesca Albanese is an upstander. She will be remembered as a hero. You will be remembered as a perpetrator and an apologist. As experts on the crime of genocide, we can say this with certainty.”
The institute’s 2023 annual report listed only $10,300 in revenue. Yet in addition to the outsized social media footprint, the institute has also generated press mentions, with coverage and placements in media outlets including Newsweek and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Its website lists a seven-person leadership team that includes personnel devoted to outreach, education, research, communications, and operations.
A Facebook post from September by the Lemkin Institute accused Israel of “sexualized violence,” asserting, “This sexualization alone is indicative of genocidal violence, as it indicates a desire to destroy Palestinians as such by desecrating symbols of generation and undermining the ability of Palestinians to reproduce biologically and culturally.”
An August post from the organization criticized the elimination of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh. “The Lemkin Institute strongly condemns this attack … We condemn Israel’s decision to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh, which sends a clear message that Israel is not interested in any peace, much less the ongoing peace process,” the institute said.
In April, the group issued a statement expressing solidarity with anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University and criticizing the Columbia administration for calling in police to clear a pro-Hamas “encampment.”
“Expressions of opposition to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s apartheid policies are not the same as expressions of antisemitism or hatred of Jews and the Jewish faith,” the statement said. “What is being labeled as ‘antisemitism’ is, in large measure, the visceral outrage that many young people feel toward the State of Israel and its military for the deadly occupation of Palestinian land and the mass-murder genocide they see every day in the news.”
When Israel in September targeted Hezbollah terrorists by exploding their pagers and other communications devices, the Lemkin Institute issued a post with more than 700,000 views condemning what it called “Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanese people.”
“Hezbollah, the ostensible ‘target’’of the attacks, is not a simple ‘terrorist organization’ engaged in criminal activity. It is also a political party and a service provider for southern Lebanon, so it includes civilian doctors, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Are they terrorists?” the post asked. “What we see is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is, in large measure, too racist and Islamophobic to care.”
“Shame on you for appropriating the Lemkin name to spread propaganda,” replied the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, Robert Silverman.
Silverman’s reply, seen by only a few hundred users, raised a cutting-edge legal question: Who has the right to use the Lemkin name?
“In the USA, in most states, people have rights of privacy and/or publicity based on common law or statute to the use of their own name or likeness or identity,” said Anita Allen, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on postmortem privacy rights.
“In some instances such rights descend to heirs or assignees after death. The details of a particular case would determine whether the organization in question is subject to civil liability,” she said. “They could be.”
A Burgeoning Field of Anti-Israel Critique
The Lemkin Institute’s use of the Holocaust as a weapon with which to critique Israel is not an outlier. Rather, it reflects how the rapidly expanding genocide and Holocaust studies fields, much of it funded by gifts and endowments from well-intentioned Jewish donors, have veered away from the facts and the law and toward, instead, anti-Israel activism.
In one case from earlier this year, a doctoral student at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies reportedly confronted a visiting Israeli reservist and publicly accused Israel of genocide. Months later, in August, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University wrote in an article for The Guardian that it was “no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions.”
That same professor, Omer Bartov, joined other Holocaust and genocide studies scholars in declaring in the New York Review of Books that “Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians.”
The post Exposed: Anti-Israel Group Under Fire for Using Name of Raphael Lemkin, Zionist Who Coined the Term Genocide first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Signs Major Deals With Qatar as New Report Reveals Doha’s $40 Billion Influence Network Across US
US President Donald Trump and Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attend a signing ceremony in Doha, Qatar, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
As US President Donald Trump visited Qatar on Wednesday as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East, a new report exposed the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts describe as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor.
According to the report, which was published by the Middle East Forum (MEF), a US-based think tank, Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
“Qatar, a tiny Gulf emirate with just 300,000 citizens, has deployed nearly $40 billion across our nation’s institutions since 2012. This is not mere investment. It is calculated influence,” MEF executive director Gregg Roman wrote in the report’s foreword. “The pattern is clear: Qatar targets critical infrastructure, including our energy grid. It bankrolls academic departments that foment campus unrest, buys Manhattan skyscrapers, and infiltrates Silicon Valley. Its capital flows to Washington insiders who shape Middle East policy.”
The report, written by the MEF’s Benjamin Baird, came amid mounting scrutiny over Trump’s announcement that he plans to accept a $400 million luxury private jet from Qatar as a gift. It was also published as Trump was in the Middle East this week visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to speak with regional leaders and strike several economic deals.
On Wednesday, when Trump was in Qatar, he signed what the White House touted as a sweeping “economic exchange” worth at least $1.2 trillion with the Qatari government.
The agreement will likely fuel criticism from experts and lawmakers who have warned about Qatar’s long-standing support for Islamist terrorist organizations such as Hamas and extensive investments in the US.
In 2015, for example, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, announced plans to invest $45 billion in the US over five years. According to MEF’s analysis, that target has likely been met — or exceeded — amid the continued growth of QIA’s global asset base.
Of the $39.8 billion in Qatari money traced by MEF, an estimated $33.43 billion went into commercial ventures like real estate, private equity, and hedge funds. The QIA acquired stakes in the Empire State Building and the Plaza Hotel, with QIA’s Manhattan real estate investments alone totaling at least $6.2 billion.
Qatar has also invested deeply in US critical infrastructure, including the power grid, liquified natural gas production, oil pipelines, and plastics manufacturing, raising concerns among national security experts.
The report also revealed that Qatar has emerged as the largest foreign donor to American higher education, giving US universities a staggering $6.25 billion since 2012. Between January 2023 and October 2024, Qatari contributions totaled roughly $980 million.
Qatar’s financial ties to American universities have come under intensifying scrutiny following the surge in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel Israel campus protests in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Observers argue that foreign actors, including Qatar, have used generous donations to encourage universities to hire radical academics and startup anti-Israel academic programs.
A 2023 from the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy found that concealed donations from foreign governments, especially Qatar, to US educational institutions have been associated with an increase in antisemitic incidents on campus and the erosion of liberal norms.
Despite the prevalence of what MEF described as Qatar’s “influence network” in the US, Trump on Sunday announced that the Department of Defense would receive a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a “gift, free of charge” from Qatar. According to Trump, the jet will serve as a replacement to “the 40-year-old Air Force One.” It will be considered property of the US federal government until the end of Trump’s term in office, after which ownership of the aircraft will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation.
On Monday, Trump defended his controversial decision to accept the $400 million luxury jet.
“I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much,” he said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’ But it was — I thought it was a great gesture.”
The US president argued that the Qatari government gifted him the jet because he has “helped them a lot over the years in terms of security and safety.”
Trump’s plan to accept the splashy airliner set off a firestorm of criticism among foreign policy experts and some lawmakers, especially Democrats, with skeptics accusing the president of violating the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign countries without the consent of Congress. Others expressed concern that Doha could use the gift as leverage to influence US policy in the Middle East.
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (NY) suggested that the gift from Qatar is an attempt to bribe Trump and gain “influence” in the US government.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) also lambasted Trump’s announcement and called for a probe into Qatar’s gift. In a letter addressed to the Government Accountability Office comptroller general, the Defense Department acting inspector general, and the Office of Government Ethics acting director, Torres suggested that the gift likely runs afoul of the Emoluments Clause.
“With an estimated value of $400 million, the aerial palace would constitute the most valuable gift ever conferred on a [resident by a foreign government,” Torres posted on X/Twitter. “Just as troubling as the gift itself is the identity of the benefactor. Qatar is not a neutral party on the world stage. It has a deeply troubling history of financing a barbaric terrorist organization that has the blood of Americans on its hands.”
Meanwhile, Trump on Wednesday signed a series of agreements totaling at least $1.2 trillion with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha.
The deal includes a $96 billion order of Boeing jets and GE Aerospace engines. Beyond aircrafts, the deals encompass over $243.5 billion in trade and infrastructure agreements with companies such as McDermott and Parsons, and a $1 billion joint venture in quantum technologies.
Alongside commercial investments, the US signed major defense deals with Qatar, including nearly $3 billion for advanced drone systems and counter-drone technology from Raytheon and General Atomics. A broader $38 billion framework agreement for military cooperation, including potential expansion at Al Udeid Air Base, further cements Qatar’s strategic influence in US defense planning.
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Canadian Man Sentenced to Jail for Antisemitic Assault on Jewish Couple After Synagogue Visit
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
A Canadian man has been sentenced to one year in jail and two years of probation after being convicted of assault in an antisemitic attack on a Jewish couple walking home from synagogue last year.
On Monday, the Ontario Court of Justice sentenced 36-year-old Kenneth Jeewan Gobin after his March conviction on two counts of assault and one count of breaching probation.
According to court evidence, Gobin — who has an extensive criminal record and was on probation for a previous crime at the time of the attack — deliberately planned the assault against the Jewish couple, driven by antisemitic hatred.
The incident took place on Jan. 6, 2024, when Gobin, riding an electric bicycle, approached four Jewish adults returning home from synagogue and deliberately mounted the curb to target them. He then began assaulting the two couples, hurling antisemitic slurs during the attack.
As he continued hitting the victims, he performed a Nazi salute and shouted antisemitic insults, including “Hitler should have killed you all” and “You should have died in the Holocaust,” striking one of the women in the process.
The sentencing came after a months-long trial, during which the court heard multiple victim and community impact statements.
Among several testimonies submitted to the court, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC) — a nonprofit human rights organization dedicated to Holocaust education and antisemitism programs — described Gobin’s attack as an “unprovoked, hate-motivated assault.”
“When expressions of hate are paired with physical acts of aggression, they pose a grave threat to public safety and social cohesion,” Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, FSWC’s senior director of policy and advocacy, said in a statement. “History has repeatedly shown that when this kind of hatred is ignored or minimized, it paves the way to more widespread and dangerous violence.”
“These acts are not isolated incidents — they’re part of a deeply troubling historical pattern whose gravity must be taken seriously,” Kirzner-Roberts continued. “Today’s sentence sends a strong and necessary message: hate-fueled violence cannot and will not go unpunished.”
As several other countries around the world, Canada has witnessed a surge in antisemitic incidents following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In 2024, the country recorded a record-breaking 6,219 anti-Jewish incidents, according to B’nai Brith Canada, up from 5,791 the previous year. Although members of the Jewish community make up less than 1 percent of the country’s population, they were targeted in one-fifth of all hate crimes.
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Yale University Leaves Pro-Hamas Hunger Strikers Hanging After Refusing Meeting
A Palestinian flag hangs over the doors of the Schwartzman Center with stickers covering Woolsey Hall during a demonstration at Yale University. Photo: Derek French/Sopa Images via Reuters Connect.
A pro-Hamas student group at Yale University has launched another disruptive protest to cap off the final weeks of the academic year, choosing this time to starve themselves inside an administrative building in lieu of establishing an illegal encampment.
“Hunger strikers have consumed nothing but water since Saturday,” Yalies4Palestine said in a press release explaining the action. “They have become hypoglycemic, are experiencing dizziness, faintness, extreme fatigue, inability to regulate their temperatures and concerningly low blood pressure, in addition to immense psychological pressure and stress.”
Yale administrators are refusing to meet with the students for a discussion of their demands that the university’s endowment be divested of any ties to Israel, as well as companies that do business with it, according to the Yale Daily News. On Tuesday, the fourth day of the demonstration, Yale student affairs dean Melanie Boyd briefly approached the students at the site of their demonstration, Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, advising them to leave the space because “the administration does not intend to hold any additional meetings.”
A member of the Yale Corporation, the university’s board of trustees, previously met with a group of anti-Zionist students last September, to discuss their demands for the school to disclose and divest from any Israel-linked entities and military weapons manufacturers.
Now, however, Yale has no intention of holding another such meeting. School officials said that the latest hunger strike is being held in “violation of university policy,” noting that Yalie4Palestine was stripped of its recognized-organization-status due to similar, past transgressions — including an aborted attempt to camp out on the grounds of Beinecke Plaza in April.
In that case, the students eventually abandoned the demonstration after Yale’s assistant vice president for university life, Pilar Montalvo, walked through the area distributing cards containing a message which implored students to “Please stop your current action immediately. If you do not, you may risk university disciplinary action and/or arrest” and a QR code for a webpage which explains Yale’s policies on expression and free assembly.
The cards triggered a paranoiac fit, the News reported. Upon receiving them, the students became suspicious that the QR code could be used to track and identify those who participated in the unauthorized protest. “Do not scan the QR code!” they chanted in response. They decamped moments later, the paper added, clearing the way for public safety officers to photograph and remove the tents they had attempted to pitch.
This time, the students say they will not budge and are imploring their supporters to flood the phone lines of high-level Yale officials with calls demanding that they meet with the students.
Yalie4Palestine have provided the would-be callers a script. It says: “It is unconscionable that Yale administrators are more concerned about nonsensical university policies than the basic welfare of their own students and their complicity in the ongoing famine in Gaza. Yale must divest from military weapons companies aiding Israel’s genocide, end partnerships that normalize apartheid and occupation, and protect student protest rights.”
Yale University’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) has before ruled against divesting from armaments manufacturers, saying in April 2024 that “it does not believe that such activity meets the criteria for divestment” because “this manufacturing supports socially necessary uses, such as law enforcement and national security.” The decision set off a raging protest which resulted in the assault of a Jewish student and the arrest of some 47 students who had trespassed Beinecke Plaza, where they vowed to abstain from food, as they are now, unless the university acceded to their demands.
The campus has seen a heightening of anti-Zionist and antisemitic behavior since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Less than a month after the onslaught, the Yale Daily News came under fire for removing what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas raping and beheading Israelis on Oct. 7 from an article written by Sahar Tartak. Published on Oct. 12, the column — which lambasted Yalies4Palestine for defending and seemingly applauding Hamas’s atrocities — was at some point afterward censored to no longer include a portion describing reports and eyewitness accounts of Hamas raping and beheading Israeli civilians. The paper later apologized.
Additionally, on the day of the massacre, Zareena Grewal — an associate professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race & Migration, and Religious Studies at Yale who describes herself as a “radical Muslim” — defended Hamas, saying it had “every right to resist through armed struggle” while denouncing Israel as a “murderous, genocidal settler state.”
In another incident, a pro-Hamas activist spat in the direction of Jewish students, a group which included Jewish civil rights activist and Yale student Sahar Tartak.
In December, Yale University students voted in favor of a referendum calling for the school’s divestment from Israel — a core tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
“The referendum, proposed and written by the pro-Palestine Sumud Coalition, asked three questions. The first two ask whether Yale should disclose and divest from its holdings in military weapons manufacturers, ‘including those arming Israel,’ and the third asks whether Yale should ‘act on its commitment to education by investing in Palestinian scholars and students,’” the Yale Daily News reported at the time, noting that while each item received overwhelming “yes votes,” they equaled just over one-third of the student body.
The low threshold is, however, sufficient for the referendum questions being codified and passed as a resolution by the Yale College Council (YCC), which facilitated the referendum and spoke positively of it before students cast their votes. It also rings loudly to the school’s Jewish community, senior Netanel Crispe told The Algemeiner during an interview at the time, explaining that some 2,500 students voted for a policy aimed at compromising Israel’s national security to precipitate its destruction.
Yale University told The Algemeiner it will continue to foster intellectual diversity and a robust Jewish student life without discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of the referendum.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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