How do you talk someone out of a conspiracy theory?
That was the question Marissa Streit asked Skeptic Magazine founder Michael Shermer on a recent PragerU podcast. Shermer advised asking the person holding the theory, what would change your mind?
That’s a reasonable question for those, including the New York City Mayor and many others, who still claim to believe that Israel committed or is committing genocide in Gaza as the evidence to the contrary piles up.
Earlier this week, 78 retired senior leaders of the U.S. military wrote, “genocide is a grave and exceptional violation of international law, defined and prohibited by the Genocide Convention of 1948 and enumerated as a crime in the Statute of the International Criminal Court and in the U.S. federal criminal code. The allegations that Israel committed this crime do not meet the established definition and standards of genocide, are unsupported by established facts, nor do they stand up to common sense scrutiny.”
They explained, importantly, that “established legal precedent makes clear that civilian deaths occurring during combat, however tragic, are insufficient, by themselves, to support a finding of genocidal intent. That is because of the unfortunate realities of war and the laws that govern it, both of which Israel’s accusers appear woefully ignorant.”
Before these military leaders spoke, the (now former) International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan said, not once but twice, there is no evidence to bring a genocide charge against Israel at the ICC. He said this in May of 2024 when he announced lesser war crimes charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on CNN, and he said it again in April of 2026 in a combative interview with former MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Once she was retired from her role as President of the International Court of Justice, Joan Donoghue publicly corrected the false claim that court had found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in an interview with the BBC. Circumstantial evidence indicates that South Africa’s ruling ANC party may have been paid off by Iran to make the genocide claim at the ICJ.
In 2025 nearly two hundred genocide and Holocaust scholars called on the “International Association of Genocide Scholars” to retract its claim that Israel was committing genocide, calling the resolution a “distortion” that “reduces the Association to farce.” The IAGS refusal was no surprise, as it has been revealed to be a fraudulent organization, that “anyone with a credit card” could join. Notably, the number of scholars who called on the IAGS to retract its statement was almost twice as many as the number of people who voted in favor of the IAGS resolution.
Academics including Steven Pinker, Benny Morris, Sir Niall Ferguson, Deborah Lipstadt, Dina Porat, Jeffrey Herf, Norman Goda and Judea Pearl joined thousands of others in various fields to reject the claim in another open letter.
On the other side of the ledger, the claim itself was always based on misrepresentations. To make its findings against Israel, Amnesty International rejected the established definition of genocide under international law, calling it an “overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence.” Amnesty admitted that, in the absence of direct proof of genocidal intent, using the established legal standards “would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict” such as the war that Hamas had started.
Anyone who continues to promote this lie should be asked, isn’t all of that enough to dissuade you?
And if not, why not?
