Sep 4, 2025
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IAGS leadership accused of a variety of practices designed to stifle opposition to a highly controversial motion claiming Israel is committi
Yesterday there was the news that the IAGS did a majority vote that claimed Israel does conduct a genocide in the war against Hamas in Gaza but this here is the real story behind it. Apparently the voting was chaotic and the actual majority of the scholars didn't even vote!
Here's an excerpt from the article:
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has been condemned for a controversial declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, with a member of the body describing how “the process was a disaster from start to finish”.
In a step widely reported on by international media yesterday, the IAGS, widely described as “the world’s leading association of genocide scholars”, voted to recognise Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide – though almost three quarters of its 500 person membership did not vote. The Association’s President, Melanie O’Brien, described the resolution as “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide”.
However, Dr Sarah Brown, a member of the IAGS, said: “I have been a member… for over a decade and can confirm the process was a disaster from start to finish. Those of us against the resolution tried to submit our concerns for discussion but were blocked by the leadership. “We were promised a town hall, which is a common practice for controversial resolutions, but the president of the association reversed that. The association has also refused to disclose who were the authors of the resolution.” Dr Brown went on to describe how “this resolution is incorrect in its assessment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It includes many unsubstantiated claims, is poorly cited (using deeply biased, questionable sources), and perpetuates an intentionally distorted analyses of the Israel Hamas War.” She said: “This resolution does real harm by recklessly bandying the term ‘genocide’ to describe this war and gives fodder to the people who will read this resolution and leverage it to justify hurting Jews. “Anyone who considers themself a genocide scholar should feel embarrassed by this vote.”
Now that looks indeed a bit different from what was published yesterday, right!?
Someone posted this article on Bluesky and tagged Melanie O'Brien to which she reportedly reacted with a block and nothing else. 🤷
More than 170 professionals demand International Genocide Scholars Association walk back skewed, inflammatory charge, accusing group of play
By Luke Tress
On Friday, a separate group, calling itself Scholars for Truth About Genocide, released a statement highlighting all of those critiques. The statement has so far been signed by 178 individuals and institutions, more than the number of signatories on the IAGS resolution. The IAGS has around 500 members, 129 of whom voted, and 86% of those supported the resolution.
“Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence. It dishonors the memory of past victims, misleads the public about present atrocities, and obstructs efforts to avert future ones,” the Friday statement said.
The statement included the signees’ names and positions, unlike the IAGS resolution, which did not include specifics about the vote, such as the signatories, or the names of those who drafted the resolution. The IAGS confirmed on Thursday that it welcomed non-experts into its ranks.
The Friday response to the IAGS criticized the group for a “quieting of dissent” ahead of the vote. Before passing the resolution, the IAGS leadership had said there would be a town hall for members to discuss the measure, but later backtracked, according to emails shared with The Times of Israel. There were no internal discussions about the resolution before the vote, despite requests from some members.
Friday’s statement said that Hamas was the only party in the conflict to legally meet the definition of genocide for its October 2023 invasion of Israel. The IAGS had blamed Israel for all deaths in Gaza, despite Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure, effectively acting “as a means to excuse Hamas from having agency for its own actions,” the statement said.
https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf
The International Association of Genocide Scholars calls itself a body of experts, but joining requires only a form and a fee. Members inclu
lolol
hmmmmm so legit right?
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, meanwhile, stood its ground amid sharp criticism.
Nearly 200 genocide, Holocaust and legal scholars are calling on the International Association of Genocide Scholars to retract its resolution finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“It is critical that we not water down the legal elements of genocide for the purpose of advancing ideological positions and bias,” the letter says. “Holocaust and genocide scholars can have legitimate concerns about Israeli conduct in Gaza without working to disparage the very legal standards that exist to protect people from these crimes.” The letter’s signatories include former U.S. Department of Justice war crime prosecutor Eli M. Rosenbaum, former Hague legal fellow Isaac Amon; the Holocaust Museum of South Florida; and the pro-Israel attorney Alan Dershowitz, as well as several Holocaust educators and survivors’ children.
The letter represents an escalation of criticism of IAGS since its widely publicized resolution announced on Monday. In a volley of op-eds and elsewhere, the critics lambasted the group’s membership and low voter turnout as suggesting a scholarly consensus that did not exist. On Thursday, IAGS responded to the criticism, writing in a lengthy statement that its membership inbox had been spammed with messages employing fake names including “Adolf Hitler” and email addresses such as “f—kiags@retards.” “The IAGS general email and members of the Executive Board have received a great deal of abusive hate mail and social media posts this week,” the statement read. “Such responses are clearly unacceptable, and create an environment of harassment, bullying, and abuse.”
The group defended itself against criticism that the resolution had only been passed by a voter turnout of 28% of its membership, writing that members had been given 30 days to vote, and that the figure was within its typical range of votes for a resolution.
“If we err, it’s on the side of inclusivity,” the statement read. “No system is perfect, but ours reflects our value of inclusion. The fact that this very democratic, inclusive policy is being exploited and criticised by trolls demonstrates their ignorance at the structures of scholarly organizations, and flies in the face of IAGS’ values (which attempts to include and champion minority voices/global majority voices that may not “look like” what we expect “expertise” to be).” The letter calling on IAGS to retract its resolution said the association had fundamentally distorted a definition firmly established in international law in order to reach an ideological conclusion “To persist in such distortion is to forsake the most elementary standards of law and scholarship,” the letter says. “It reduces the Association to farce, erodes the integrity of genocide studies, and undermines the very meaning of the crime itself.”
YEREVAN – Melanie O'Brien, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has asserted that Azerbaijan committed war crime
By Robert Aydabirian Special to the Mirror-Spectator PARIS — Organized and hosted by the Sorbonne for the United Nations (SONU), Humanitas P
Just leaving this here.
Feel free to reblog.
Azerbaijan has committed crimes against humanity toward the civilian population of Artsakh, which constitute genocide, the president of the
YEREVAN – The international community has been unable to prevent atrocities and crimes of genocide against humanity, often only addressing t
Yerevan hosts the 5th Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide dedicated to the issues of “Strengt
Reblog the shit out of this.
Since your post on whether Israel commits a genocide is from June, I wondered what you make of the statement of the International Association of Genocide Scholars from 1st of September?
I wrote a response to this, but how about you watch this first and let know if you have questions?
IAGS is a sham.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars calls itself a body of experts, but joining requires only a form and a fee. Members inclu
Let’s start with the organization itself. According to O’Brien, the members of her organization “mainly consist of people who are academics, so scholarly experts, but our membership is also made up of people who come from different communities within the field of genocide prevention, education, and punishment.”
On Tuesday evening, Salo Aizenberg, a board member of Honest Reporting and contributor to NGO Monitor, tested that proposition. After exploring the IAGS website, he found that he could become a member of the organization with just a $30 contribution. “This organization that purports to be a leading organization of scholars is open to anyone who is interested,” he told The Free Press.
After Aizenberg posted about his new membership to X, others joined in on the fun. Newly minted genocide scholars now include Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the Star Wars franchise; Adolf Hitler of Gaza City; and our favorite, “Mo Cookie,” who turns out to be the Cookie Monster wearing a green scarf with the Hamas logo.
IAGS’s open membership is important because as Aizenberg learned in his research on the website, 80 of the 500 members of IAGS all claim to be based in Iraq—a country not known for universities with robust genocide scholarship. But it’s even worse than that. Only 108 out of the organization’s 500 members actually voted for the resolution. So contra O’Brien, only 21.6 percent of the IAGS supported it, not nearly 90 percent. That figure represents 108 out of the 129 people who bothered voting for the resolution at all.
What’s more: The process appears rigged from the start.
One IAGS member, Sara Brown, the author of Gender and Genocide in Rwanda, posted on X that the leadership of the organization prevented members from filing comments criticizing the resolution before the vote. “We were promised a town hall, which is a common practice for controversial resolutions,” she wrote, “but the president of the association reversed that. The association has also refused to disclose who were the authors of the resolution.”