Centering the Colonizer

The Lemkin Institute’s Complicity and the Liberal Hijacking of Genocide Discourse

“The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

A meme reposted by the Lemkin Institute glorifying “pro-Palestine Jewish voices” amid Palestinian pleas for centering their own survival. This is not solidarity—it’s narrative violence.

In the middle of a genocide, whose voices get centered is not a neutral question. It is a function of power. On April 29, 2025, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention reposted a meme declaring, “The most amazing pro-Palestine human beings are Jewish.” This followed a clear and direct plea, on the original post, from Palestinian author and activist Susan Abulhawa to stop centering Jewish voices above the voices of those being actively exterminated.

What followed was not an apology. It was a public entrenchment of a genocidal logic: one that repositions the colonizer—even those dissenting—as more valuable, more human, and more worthy of platforming than the colonized themselves.

This review situates the Lemkin Institute’s actions within a broader pattern of liberal co-option, western exceptionalism, and what Genospectra identifies as a Tool of Genocide: Narrative Erasure via Ally-Centering.

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I. Genocide Requires More Than Bullets

Genocide is not simply the act of mass killing. That is only one outcome—a catastrophic and visible endpoint—but not the whole machine. Genocide is a process: deliberate, multilayered, and institutional. It unfolds legally, culturally, socially, and epistemically. It works through laws, textbooks, charitable slogans, donor language, hashtags, memes, and institutional silence. It is not always marked by mass graves at the outset—but by narrative terrain being gradually, strategically seized.

To put it plainly: genocide doesn’t begin with bombs. It begins with story.

And to sustain itself, it must do more than dehumanize the victim—it must humanize the perpetrator, center the ally, and reframe the violence as complexity, misunderstanding, or moral grey zone. This is why propaganda and discourse manipulation are not side effects of genocide; they are central instruments in its architecture.

Some of the tools at play include:

• Propaganda and narrative warfare:
  The normalization of genocide through media frames, language euphemisms, “both sides” journalism, and survivor erasure.
  (e.g., calling genocide a "war," calling abducted civilians "detainees," or framing settler states as “defending themselves”).

• The strategic erasure of Indigenous voices:
  Removing the colonized from the center of their own narrative by replacing their testimonies with sanitized expert analysis, Western NGO statements, or settler dissidents framed as more credible or relatable.

• The insertion of settler identities into the moral center of anti-genocide discourse:
  This is key. It’s not just silencing the oppressed—it’s replacing them with the “good oppressor.” It asks the world to see the genocide not through the eyes of those being exterminated, but through those who dissent from within the group responsible. It recasts moral clarity as something granted only when endorsed by the colonizer’s kin.

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When the Lemkin Institute—an organization named after Raphael Lemkin, the very legal architect of the term “genocide”—elevates a meme celebrating Jewish allyship as the moral pinnacle of pro-Palestine activism, it is not merely engaging in bad optics. It is actively participating in the discursive machinery of genocide.

This is precisely what Genospectra identifies as a Pervasive Catena:

Narrative Violence and Humanitarian Co-optation: the recurring, often unintentional, deployment of language, imagery, and representation that displaces Indigenous resistance, whitewashes colonial power, and re-centers the colonizer in a humanitarian framework.

By praising settler-adjacent dissenters as the “most amazing pro-Palestine human beings,” this meme—and its institutional amplification—recasts solidarity as settler redemption, not decolonial liberation. It signals to the world that Palestinian resistance is only valid when filtered through white, Western, or Jewish voices. This is not solidarity. This is narrative violence. This is a tool of genocide.

And institutions like the Lemkin Institute should know better.

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II. Liberalism: The Aesthetic of Concern Without the Ethics of Solidarity

This is the danger of American liberalism: it performs empathy without disrupting power. It adorns itself with the aesthetics of concern—hashtags, curated outrage, “solidarity” statements—but refuses the ethical demands of decolonial solidarity. Liberalism does not deny that genocide is happening. It simply requires that genocide be narrated through a form that makes the genocider’s world comfortable. It swaps out justice for recognition. Liberation for optics. Resistance for relatability.

It asks: How can we care about this… without being uncomfortable?

To remain legible within the liberal order, genocide must be filtered. Sanitized. Centered around safe vessels: white-passing allies, NGOs with press kits, curated “good” victims, and narratives that do not indict the systems benefiting the liberal subject. It reframes survivor demands for justice as divisive, and centers the feelings of those least at risk.

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Consider this sequence:

• A Palestinian says: Stop centering Jewish voices.

• A white, western-based account replies: These Jews are brave and amazing, not like the others.

• An institute meant to prevent genocide amplifies the harm—not the Palestinian plea.

This is not an accident. It’s the choreography of liberalism in action.

In this framework:

• Palestinian grief is too “angry.”

• Palestinian demands are too “harsh.”

• Palestinian clarity is too “polarizing.”

• And Palestinian voices are too “complicated” to lead the discourse on their own genocide.

So instead, liberalism finds its own reflection—a more digestible figure to speak in its language, with its cadence, invoking universal humanism while sidestepping the sharp edges of structural indictment.

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The Personalization of Genocide

This is liberalism’s poison: it does not confront power—it personalizes genocide. It frames atrocity as a crisis of individual morality rather than a system of dispossession, militarization, extraction, and global complicity.

In this frame:

• “Not all Israelis support this.”

• “There are good Jews who oppose genocide.”

• “Let’s amplify brave voices on both sides.”

But genocide is not about individual virtue. It is about power structures: racialized sovereignty, settler-colonial regimes, imperial complicity, and the weaponization of humanitarian language to perpetuate erasure.

By shifting attention to the “exceptional” ally, liberalism evacuates genocide of its architecture. It makes it a tragedy of misguided humans, not a system of intentional, orchestrated extermination.

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The Emotional Economy of the Liberal Gaze

In the liberal ecosystem, grief must be recognizable. Anger must be tempered. Solidarity must be inclusive of the oppressor's conscience. But justice, when real, is not palatable. It demands disruption. It requires taking a side.

And liberalism cannot do that—not without risking its own position, prestige, or identity as the “rational” moral observer. So it rehearses compassion while refusing accountability.

This is why liberal genocide discourse will:

• Applaud Jewish allies more than it will center Palestinian mothers burying their children.

• Quote Israeli human rights orgs before quoting Palestinian scholars.

• Platform settler critiques of Zionism more than it will broadcast the raw testimony of a refugee in Khan Younis or Deir al-Balah.

Liberalism does not want the truth. It wants a palatable version of injustice that can fit inside a nonprofit slogan or a TED Talk.

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If genocide requires the erasure of the victim’s voice, liberalism ensures that erasure is socially acceptable—even ethical. It offers a morality that centers the self, performs compassion, and never risks positional loss. In doing so, it becomes a co-author of extermination.

As Frantz Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth:

“The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: ‘This land was created by us.’ He is the one who has made the soil bear fruit. The native has only one role: he is to be eliminated.”

When liberal institutions elevate the settler or their dissenter kin as the central subject—even in solidarity—they extend that odyssey. They reinforce the narrative that this world, this language, this moral compass must always orbit the colonizer’s frame. They do not undo genocide—they update it.

To prevent genocide, we must reject this choreography entirely. Survivors must not be curated. They must be centered. And the structures that liberalism refuses to name—settler-colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism—must be the ones dismantled.

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III. Western Exceptionalism + Jewish Exceptionalism = Genocidal Inversion

There is a dangerous and deliberate confluence here—one that’s foundational to how genocide is sanitized, misframed, and prolonged in Western discourse.

In the dominant American and European imagination, Western exceptionalism and Jewish exceptionalism do not function as separate mythologies. They operate in tandem, colluding to redefine genocide through a settler-colonial lens that absolves itself and relegitimizes its own violence.

• Western exceptionalism insists that the West is the moral arbiter of global conduct—enlightened, rational, civilizing.

• Jewish exceptionalism, as politically instrumentalized by Zionism, claims a unique and perpetual victimhood that must be defended—even when enacting violence on others.

Together, these frameworks have been weaponized not to protect Jewish people from violence, but to protect the violent settler project of Zionism. The memory of Jewish suffering is thus instrumentalized—not mourned, but militarized—used to neutralize critique, flatten power dynamics, and frame resistance as extremism.

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Three Violations in a Single Meme

The meme amplified by the Lemkin Institute—claiming “The most amazing Pro Palestine human beings are Jewish”—does not simply “miss the point.” It performs three simultaneous forms of narrative violence:

1. It erases the Palestinian as subject.
   Palestinians are reduced to context, not protagonists. Their resistance is not centered, their grief not foregrounded, their analysis not deemed sufficient. They are the object of liberal concern, not the voice of anti-genocide truth.

2. It frames Jewishness as the moral filter through which Palestinian resistance is made ‘credible.’
   In this formulation, Palestinians cannot be trusted to narrate their own genocide unless it is validated by those from the oppressor class who defect. The “good Jew” becomes a stamp of legitimacy, reinforcing a colonial standard for who is allowed to speak and be heard.

3. It cloaks the violence of Zionism under the “good Jew” binary.
   By praising Jewish dissenters as exceptional, the meme reaffirms that Jewishness writ large is the default center. The deviation becomes celebrated because it is deviation from the norm. In doing so, it implicitly affirms the existence of a “bad Jew” (i.e., the Zionist settler) while still keeping Jewish identity at the heart of the moral narrative. Palestinian identity, again, is peripheral.

This is not just misrepresentation—it is inversion. It reverses the axis of genocide discourse so that the colonizer’s capacity for reflection becomes more important than the colonized people’s fight for survival.

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The Genospectra Lens: The Colonizer’s Conscience as Narrative Weapon

In the Genospectra framework, this is a textbook example of discursive inversion, wherein the genocidal state and its ideological ecosystem remain the center of moral gravity, even when dissent occurs within it.

Genospectra principle: When the colonizer’s conscience becomes the center of discourse, the genocide is already being rewritten.

This is how genocide becomes narratively sustainable. The moral debate shifts away from dismantling structural violence and toward the interior moral journey of the settler or their dissenter kin. It becomes a tale not of Palestinian freedom—but of Zionist reckoning, of white liberal discomfort, of Jewish dissent.

This shift does nothing to end genocide. What it does is create a discursive safe zone in which people can “condemn genocide” without confronting settler power, Western imperial complicity, or the racist logics embedded in their own institutions.

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A Final Note on Historical Weaponization

This is not accidental. The same European powers that enabled and weaponized the Holocaust now launder their guilt through support for Zionism. The genocide of Jews in Europe has been recast not as a call to dismantle fascism and racial supremacism—but as a license to export settler-colonialism onto Palestinians. This is what Genospectra names as historical weaponization: the use of one atrocity to justify another, by flattening power, selectively deploying memory, and reinscribing empire under humanitarian pretense.

When the “good Jew” is centered in Palestinian resistance, it is not a bridge—it is a barrier: one that blocks the world from hearing, trusting, and following those who are bleeding.

Palestinians do not need moral endorsement from Western Jews. They need the West to stop manufacturing genocide in their name.

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IV. Institutional Complicity: The Lemkin Institute’s Structural Failure

Case Study in Erasure: The Lemkin Institute and Narrative Complicity

The Lemkin Institute’s repost of a meme glorifying white Jewish voices as “the most amazing pro-Palestine human beings” is not a minor lapse—it is a structural failure. More than a social media error, this act exposes the deep void of decolonial ethics within an institution ostensibly dedicated to genocide prevention.

The meme itself centers six white Jewish individuals and declares them the moral gold standard of Palestinian solidarity. There is no mention of Palestinians. No mention of Gaza. No grief, no resistance—just a flattening celebration of settler-aligned identity as the credible face of anti-genocide discourse.

This is not incidental. It is emblematic.

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A Failure in Every Dimension

The Lemkin Institute’s inaction when challenged publicly by Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa—who directly replied to the original post—speaks volumes. They did not engage. They did not delete. They did not apologize. That silence is not careful neutrality. It is narrative positioning.

This decision entrenches several patterns common in liberal genocide scholarship:

• Prioritizing performative concern over political clarity

• Reinforcing settler-adjacent moral authority

• Avoiding confrontation with Western-backed genocide

Even more troubling is the Institute’s broader silence on the genocide in Gaza—despite daily pleas from survivors and a growing body of legal evidence. An organization bearing Lemkin’s name, one that claims to exist for the explicit purpose of identifying and preventing genocide, has opted not to name the ongoing extermination of Palestinians for what it is.

This is not absence. It is abstention from accountability.

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Not Caution—Control

What we’re witnessing is not just institutional hesitation. It is narrative management. The kind that ensures continued access to academic legitimacy, donor networks, and elite discourse—spaces where genocidal violence must be denounced in abstract, but never located in the present, never attributed to allies, and never challenged at its settler root.

As we've mapped throughout the Genospectra framework, this fits within the Pervasive Catena of Narrative Violence, particularly the mechanism of Institutional Narrative Laundering:

The strategic use of selective amplification, curated dissent, and “safe” solidarity to dilute or redirect attention from Indigenous-centered genocide discourse, while preserving institutional credibility within colonial systems.

In failing to engage survivor critique, refusing to retract the harmful post, and declining to name the genocide in Gaza, the Lemkin Institute has reinforced the very colonial epistemes it claims to oppose.

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Decolonial Prevention Requires More Than Optics

To be clear:
This is not about tone. It is about power.

If institutions dedicated to genocide prevention cannot name ongoing genocide, cannot center survivor voices, and cannot correct themselves when doing harm—then they are not neutral observers. They are part of the system that enables erasure.

Genocide prevention without decolonial grounding is not prevention.
It is brand management for empire.

Until institutions like the Lemkin Institute confront their complicity, divest from settler-centered frameworks, and act in material solidarity with those facing extermination, they cannot claim the legacy of Raphael Lemkin. They are not carrying forward his vision. They are distorting it.

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V. The Tool of Genocide: Narrative Erasure via Ally-Centering

Within the Genospectra framework, genocide is not only enacted through visible violence—it is maintained through the discursive subordination of the oppressed. One of the most insidious tools in this process is what we identify as:

Narrative Erasure via Ally-Centering:
The strategic elevation of colonizer-aligned “allies” above Indigenous or colonized voices, used to sanitize, redirect, or flatten the political reality of genocidal violence.

This tool operates not through explicit denial, but through displacement. It removes the oppressed from the center of their own struggle and replaces them with figures more “legible” to the colonial or Western gaze. These allies—often white, Western, or settlers dissenting from within—are elevated as the “credible narrators” of the genocide, displacing those whose lives are on the line.

This is not solidarity. It is substitution masquerading as support.

Pervasive Catena – Narrative Violence

Pervasive Catena: Narrative Violence
The structural deployment of language, representation, and cultural framing to erase, replace, or distort the voices of colonized peoples. This catena manifests across all phases of genocide and is reinforced by institutions, media, and so-called allies who prioritize credibility, safety, or neutrality over Indigenous self-determination.

Key mechanisms include:

• Ally-centered storytelling

• Euphemistic genocide framing (“conflict,” “war”)

• Editorial silencing and selective platforming

• Substitution of survivor voices with curated dissenter narratives

This catena does not merely accompany genocide.
It prepares the ground for it—and ensures it is forgotten.

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How the Tool Functions

This mechanism is particularly potent because it appeals to liberal sensibilities. It doesn’t look like erasure; it looks like “bridge-building.” It frames the ally as morally brave, politically transformative, and safer to platform. But beneath the affective performance is a clear structural result: colonial primacy is upheld, and Indigenous epistemologies are sidelined.

Concrete manifestations include:

• Awarding more press coverage to Jewish dissenters than to Palestinian survivors.
  Time and again, settler-aligned voices who break ranks are treated as revelatory—even as Palestinian writers, activists, and scholars risk everything to speak truth from the epicenter of violence.

• Quoting Israeli human rights NGOs in international law discussions, while sidelining Palestinian legal scholars.
  This signals to audiences that Palestinians require settler validation to be taken seriously—reinforcing a colonial hierarchy of legitimacy.

• Publishing and promoting books about Palestine authored primarily by non-Palestinians.
  Publishing industries and academic presses frequently prefer “interpreters” over the interpreted. Palestinians become subjects to be studied, not authors of their own frameworks of liberation and survival.

• Memes like the one reposted by the Lemkin Institute.
  The meme lauds six white Jewish individuals as “the most amazing Pro-Palestine human beings,” making Palestinian existence secondary to settler deviation. No names of Palestinians. No image of Gaza. No reference to the genocide—just a validation loop within white political comfort.

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The Politics of Palatability

This tool is deployed because colonial systems crave narratives they can digest without being indicted. Indigenous grief is too raw. Indigenous rage is too “radical.” So the system elevates a curated figure—an ally from within its own ranks—whose critique can be heard without unsettling the core of empire.

Ally-centering becomes the emotional laundering mechanism of genocide discourse. It allows the colonizer to see themselves as evolved, compassionate, and self-critical—without ever surrendering the mic, the analysis, or the power.

And it leaves Palestinians, Indigenous peoples, and other survivors of structural extermination to perform the spectacle of trauma for an audience that already replaced them in the narrative.

“Curating the native as “respectable” is a misplaced priority because it redirects critical scrutiny away from the colonizer, which in turn neglects the innate injustice of the colonial project.”
― Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

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Genospectra Framework: Placement of This Tool

In Genospectra, this tool intersects multiple Pervasive Catenas:

• Narrative Violence: Displacing Indigenous accounts with curated settler “truths.”

• Humanitarian Co-optation: Using the language of care and allyship to mask settler primacy.

• Historical Revisionism: Elevating “brave dissenters” while downplaying ongoing structural complicity.

It also feeds into the Feedback Loop of Legibility, wherein oppressed people are required to be mediated by their oppressors in order to be recognized at all.

This is a form of epistemic domination.
It is not just about who speaks—it is about who gets to define the scope, tone, and terms of what is sayable about genocide.

Feedback Loop of Legibility

“The oppressed are only legible when mediated by the oppressor. The survivor’s truth must pass through the settler’s voice to be heard. This is the Feedback Loop of Legibility—and it is a trap.”
— Genospectra Framework

This loop ensures that the colonized are never perceived as full narrators of their own suffering. Their accounts must first be tempered, verified, or repackaged by those adjacent to power. It sustains colonial authority by dictating not just who gets to speak—but who gets believed.

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The Consequences of Ally-Centering

The outcome of this tool is devastating:

• Survivor voices are sidelined, doubted, or rendered “too biased.”

• Public understanding of genocide becomes filtered through settler emotions.

• Decolonial frameworks are replaced by whitewashed narratives of liberal dissent.

• Prevention efforts stall because the root structures—settler sovereignty, Western militarism, Zionist ideology—are never directly named.

It doesn’t matter how many rallies are attended, how many statements are signed, or how many tears are shed on camera—if the colonized are not centered, the genocide continues unchallenged.

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Decolonial solidarity demands more than admiration of allies. It demands withdrawal from settler centrality altogether. It demands listening without curating, amplifying without overshadowing, and dismantling systems instead of decorating them with moral exceptions.

Palestinians are not a backdrop to someone else’s courage.
They are the center. And any narrative that displaces that is not resistance.
It is a tool of genocide.

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VI. Toward a Decolonial Ethic of Genocide Prevention

What does it mean to prevent genocide if we do not center those surviving it?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a foundational indictment of the current genocide prevention landscape—one dominated by Western institutions, legal frameworks, and elite discourse that continually render the colonized invisible even as their bodies are buried beneath rubble.

Prevention, when stripped of its decolonial foundation, becomes theater: a posturing of “never again” that accommodates empire. A legal shell game that redefines genocide as something that only happens elsewhere, or in retrospect, or when the West says so. And within this spectacle, the ally becomes the protagonist—not the survivor. The dissenter becomes the storyteller—not the colonized.

This is how genocides continue. Not only through weapons, but through who gets to narrate the atrocity and how the world is trained to listen.

“The sniper lurks not only atop our homes but in conference rooms and newsrooms, on university campuses and in hospital corridors.”
― Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

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The Core Tenets of a Decolonial Genocide Prevention Ethic

A decolonial framework rejects performance. It rejects the need for genocidal power to approve of its own critique. It demands that genocide prevention be accountable to the people it is meant to protect—not the institutions that fund it.

What this requires is not abstract theory—it is structural commitments, including:

• Survivor primacy. Always.
  Prevention must begin and end with the voices of those directly impacted. Not curated. Not interpreted. Not filtered through settler NGOs, not framed by academic intermediaries, not softened to maintain “objectivity.” Survivor knowledge is not anecdotal—it is authoritative.

• Refusal to frame solidarity through white or settler lenses.
  Solidarity that centers the feelings, journeys, or moral awakenings of those within the oppressor class is not solidarity—it’s narrative displacement. A decolonial ethic insists that settler dissidence is supportive, not central. The focus must remain on Indigenous liberation—not on making dissenting settlers feel exceptional for doing the bare minimum.

• Recognition of narrative power as a terrain of violence.
  Genocide is upheld not only by weapons and laws but by metaphors, memes, and editorial choices. A refusal to name violence, a platform that replaces survivors with “respectable” voices, a headline that flattens extermination into “conflict”—these are acts of epistemic warfare. Preventing genocide requires disrupting narrative control.

• Accountability when institutions like Lemkin reproduce harm.
  When an organization claims the mantle of genocide prevention, it must be held to the standard it professes to uphold. Silence in the face of survivor correction, amplification of settler-centered tropes, and refusal to name ongoing genocide are not oversights—they are betrayals. Institutions must be prepared to relinquish their legitimacy if maintaining it means perpetuating erasure.

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What Genospectra Teaches Us

As the Genospectra framework emphasizes, prevention is not merely a matter of early warning signs or legal categorization. It is about disrupting the cultural, political, and epistemic scaffolding that makes genocide acceptableto the global North.

That scaffolding includes:

• Media narratives that normalize settler violence

• Academic gatekeeping that marginalizes Indigenous scholarship

• International silence until it is politically convenient to speak

• Human rights institutions that use “neutrality” to avoid naming perpetrators

Decolonial prevention means tearing that scaffolding down.
It means saying the unspeakable before it becomes the inevitable.
It means risking institutional comfort for moral clarity.

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In short:
You cannot prevent what you refuse to name.
You cannot stand with survivors if you erase their voices.
And you cannot claim solidarity if your gaze always returns to the colonizer.

Until genocide prevention is decolonized, it is not prevention at all.
It is the administrative wing of empire.

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This Is Genocide—Everywhere, Always

We are not witnessing a new genocide in Gaza.
We are witnessing the latest escalation of a genocide that has never stopped.

From the first wave of organized Zionist settlement in the 1880s to the forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948, to the starvation siege and bombardment of Gaza in 2023–2025, the intent has never changed: to eliminate the Palestinian people as a people. Not just in Gaza. Not just in the West Bank. But everywhere Palestinians exist.

This genocide is not geographic—it is totalizing.

It targets Palestinians in 1948 Palestine, where they live as second-class citizens under apartheid rule.
It targets Palestinians in the West Bank, where they are subjected to land theft, home demolitions, settler pogroms, and military executions.
It targets Palestinians in Gaza, through blockade, forced starvation, and mass extermination.
It targets Palestinians in exile, whose displacement is framed as permanent.
It targets Palestinians in the diaspora, who face state surveillance, deportation, censorship, and systemic Islamophobic and anti-Arab violence in the West.

No Palestinian is safe. Not the mother in Rafah. Not the child in Chicago. Not the student at Columbia.
Not the grandmother exiled in Lebanon.
Not the poet blacklisted for writing truth.

This is the unified logic of genocide: it does not end at borders. It transcends maps, governments, and media cycles. And the institutions meant to prevent it—like the Lemkin Institute—have failed not only to stop it, but to even name it.

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Discursive Betrayal Is Not Neutral

When an institution like the Lemkin Institute reposts a meme centering white Jewish voices as “the most amazing” pro-Palestine allies, in the middle of a genocide against Palestinians, that is not tone-deaf.
It is not unfortunate.
It is a discursive betrayal of everything genocide prevention is supposed to stand for.

It erases the very people being exterminated.
It re-centers the descendants of the settler class as the moral protagonists.
It affirms that even Palestinian death must be narrated through colonial proximity to be recognized.

This betrayal is not abstract—it is material. It shapes policy. It determines funding. It influences who gets platformed and who gets policed. And it helps legitimize genocide by euphemizing its witnesses.

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Genospectra’s Imperative: Dismantle the Frame

If we are to dismantle genocide, we must dismantle the colonial lenses through which it is narrated.

No more white saviors.
No more curated settler dissent.
No more liberal applause for “brave” voices who only say what Palestinians have been screaming for generations.

Genocide is not prevented by performance. It is prevented by confronting power.
By naming the perpetrators, centering the survivors, and refusing to repackage extermination as controversy.

Decolonial genocide prevention demands clarity:

• Gaza is not separate.

• 1948 Palestine is not “Israel.”

• Palestinian struggle is not a reaction—it is a fight for existence.

• This genocide is not a moment. It is a system.

• And it did not begin in 2023, or 1948. It began with the very first Zionist blueprint for removal.

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The Choice Is Clear

You do not get to “observe” genocide from the sidelines.
You are either reinforcing it—or dismantling it.
There is no neutral ground in the machinery of extermination.

So to every institution, platform, or ally who claims to care:

Center the survivors. Or get out of the way.

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Marginalia (Genospectra Lens)

• Catena Involved:
  Narrative Violence and Humanitarian Co-optation
  This catena describes the structural erasure of colonized voices through sanitized “solidarity” and curated empathy. It operates by substituting settler-adjacent figures or institutional proxies in place of those directly targeted by genocide, masking violence with performative concern and “acceptable” dissent.

• Node Triggered:
  Colonizer-Centered Allyship
  This node emerges when platforms, institutions, or movements center the emotional journey, moral stance, or symbolic value of allies—especially from within the oppressor group—over the lived reality, resistance, and analysis of the colonized. It reinforces settler primacy and conditions legitimacy on colonial proximity.

• Red Flag Indicator:
  When media outlets, academic institutions, NGOs, or public figures amplify allied voices instead of—or over—those being actively exterminated. Especially when those allies are praised for their "bravery" while colonized people are framed as too emotional, too radical, or too complex to lead their own narratives.

• ⚖️ Immediate Response Required:

  • Remove the content that perpetuates erasure.

  • Issue a public acknowledgment and apology that names the harm and refuses both-sides framing.

  • Recenter survivor-authored critique: Amplify original voices without filtration, translation, or co-option.

  • Commit to corrective practices—not just once, but as an embedded institutional shift toward survivor primacy and decolonial ethics.

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We have issued a formal Structural Harm Statement to the Lemkin Institute regarding their participation in narrative erasure, settler-centered framing, and failure to uphold decolonial ethics in genocide prevention. This statement outlines the harm caused, the frameworks violated, and the corrective actions required.