Scam Season: The 'Genocide Scholars' Stage A 'Vote,' And We Get Snookered

Jeff Robbins on Sep 9, 2025

When a president recites 30,000 documented falsehoods in one term, is indicted by federal grand juries for violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice, is convicted of 34 felonies, is found liable for fraud and separately liable for sexual abuse and is nevertheless returned to office by American voters, you pretty much know that where con jobs are concerned, America is a seller's market. It's no wonder there are so many people selling BS; BS is selling like hotcakes.

On any given day, there are more examples than you can shake a stick at of hogwash-peddling. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent appearance before a Senate committee illustrated the point. The guy who had claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine was "the deadliest vaccine ever made" and that more people had died from it "than from 72 vaccines over the last 30 years" now calls Donald Trump a "genius" for being president when it was developed, even recommending Trump for a Nobel Prize. His broadsides against vaccines long conclusively established as effective are supported by nobody other than a smattering of kooks. "You're a charlatan," Sen. Maria Cantwell told Kennedy. But that seemed too elegant; Kennedy is a scam artist.

But these are scam-friendly days, and there are a lot of practitioners. Among them are the founders of a group with the impressive-seeming title "International Association of Genocide Scholars," which announced that it had approved a resolution asserting that Israel's response to Hamas' invasion and massacre on Oct. 7, 2023 "(met) the legal definition of genocide." The announcement received the intended media splash. "Leading Genocide Scholars Organization Says Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza," proclaimed PBS. "Israel Is Committing Genocide In Gaza, Scholars' Association Says," pronounced Reuters.

Turns out that the organization is a joke, the vote a crock and the media coverage ridiculous. You might expect that a group that bills itself as "Genocide Scholars" would be comprised of genocide scholars, or at least scholars, maybe students. And since "genocide" is a legal term with a very specific legal definition grounded in complex international law, you'd expect that those claiming that Israel's conduct met "the legal definition of genocide" were lawyers, or if not lawyers then individuals who had taken a law class here or there, or who knew a lawyer, or perhaps had seen one on TV. Or something.

Nope.

It emerges that anybody -- literally anybody -- can join the IAGS, and we have no way of knowing who its members are, because the IAGS disabled its website so as to make it impossible to find out. We do know that anyone can join for as little as $30, with no credentials or qualifications needed to join this "leading genocide scholars organization." No verification of a member's identity, or even their existence as a bona fide human being. The IAGS admits that a "large percentage" of its members come from the Middle East -- no small point.

Despite having "rules" that permit anyone on the planet, or purportedly on the planet, to join and vote on the genocide resolution, the IAGS has only about 500 members, and of those about 75% did not even vote. In other words, a little over 100 individuals, if they actually exist, voted to "resolve" that Israel is guilty of genocide. The IAGS itself concedes that there is no requirement that they be anything close to being genocide scholars, scholars of any sort or even verified human beings. "The more you learn about it," observed Hillel Neuer, founder of the watchdog UN Watch, "the International Association of Genocide Scholars has about the same scholarly authority as the International House of Pancakes."

It gets worse.

IAGS' leadership promised its members the opportunity to debate the resolution but then reneged. It blocked the circulation of opposing views on its members' listserv. "The quieting of dissent is an alarming tactic used on such a controversial matter," wrote 420 actual, identified scholars and lawyers pointing out egregious errors in the resolution and urging that it be retracted.

Fat chance of that, or even of their petition receiving any media coverage. It's scam season, and there's a lot of scamming going on.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.