Serbia, Libya, Gaza, and the "Genocide" Petard

Dems Used to Throw the Petards. Now They Are the Ones Being Hoisted.

Democrat candidates find themselves suspended in air. For years, they and their media acolytes created a genocide whenever it suited their purposes. Now, the genocide machinery is blowing up in their faces.

As MS NOW concedes, “The word ‘genocide’ has become a litmus test for Democratic candidates, both in the 2026 election and looking ahead to 2028.” As testament, “somewhere between 72% and 77% of Democrats believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.”

Woke indifference to Israeli lives rivals their indifference to the unborn, well, almost. So unhinged is the Democrat Party on this issue that—OMG!—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have emerged as the party’s more responsible spokespeople.

Recently, when asked to designate the war in Gaza a “genocide,” Obama literally stuttered through a non-answer that disgusted the editors of the Polis Project, an international leftist journal. Said the Polis spokeswoman in a video response., “This is like asking a war criminal to condemn genocide.”

Unlike Obama, Hillary Clinton held her ground. At a December 2025 summit in Israel, Clinton attributed the currency of the genocide idea to bad Israeli PR and youthful enthusiasms. In response, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention called Clinton’s remarks “outright genocide denial,” and they were hardly alone in their denunciation.

The one minority group whose lives don’t matter

This turn of events has to shock Obama and the Clintons. In the past, they were the ones who played the genocide card when creating a “war of choice.” Now the card is being played on them. As a case in point, recall the response of NATO (a.k.a. US) to the fracturing of Yugoslavia. To hold the country together in 1999, the mostly Serbian authorities were attempting to suppress an insurrection by Muslim Albanians in the Kosovo province.

In that the Serbs had no WMDs, no terror arm, no ambitions on its neighbors, no grudge against the United States, no sheltered terrorists, not even any oil, Clinton and his people began a drumbeat about mass graves, ethnic cleansing and even genocide to bolster support.

Serbia burning

The State Department’s David Scheffer was the first to claim a six-figure death count, specifically “upwards of about 100,000 [Islamic] men that we cannot account for.” A month later, the State Department upped the total to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians missing and feared dead. On CBS Face the Nation Secretary of Defense William Cohen repeated the 100,000 figure and claimed that the war “was a fight for justice over genocide.”

President Clinton compared the work of the Serbs in Kosovo to the German “genocide” of the Jews during the Holocaust. The New York Times helped Clinton amplify his message. No fewer than 375 articles would contain the combination “Kosovo” and “genocide,” most of those making a direct equation. This propaganda barrage softened the PR ground for 78 days of bombing civilian targets in a Christian country.

In the war’s wake, however, international teams could find no signs of genocide. The ethnic Albanian dead numbered in the hundreds, not in the hundreds of thousands. Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol would tell the British Sunday Times that the talk of genocide was “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one—not one—mass grave.”

On March 19, 2011, President Obama authorized a “limited military action” in Libya whose stated goal was “to protect Libyan civilians.” The “why” of this attack is still uncertain. For all his flaws, Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi had recently abandoned his WMD program and his terrorist arm.

In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama admitted as much. “It’s fair to say that I found the idea of waging a new war in a distant country with no strategic importance to the United States to be less than prudent.” You think?

In the Obama calculus, an atrocity prevented was the military equivalent of “a job saved,” each worthy of a boast but neither capable of being verified. In the case of Libya, however, evidence strongly suggests that Obama was working off a false premise: the “bloodbath” he repeatedly promised was never in the cards.

In his March 28, 2011, address to the nation Obama claimed that if America had delayed just one more day, “Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” Obama was either lying or just being stupid. That massacre would come six months later, and four Americans would be the victims.

Two weeks after Obama’s promised massacre, Democratic analyst Alan Kuperman did the math. Kuperman made the simple point, “The best evidence that Gaddafi did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured.”

We came. We saw. He died. (laughter)

As Kuperman explained, rebel forces did what rebel forces have been doing since the dawn of the age of mass media: they faked a humanitarian crisis to save their futile cause. Just as they did in Serbia and Libya, the international leftist media enabled insurgent Muslims in Gaza. The New York Times and other outlets amplified the death and destruction in Gaza and manufactured evidence to sell their narrative.

Next thing you know, the Times will be telling you that Israel has trained dogs to rape its prisoners. Oh wait, we’ve already crossed that bridge. By November, belief in “rape dogs” could be a litmus test.