Who Made the Word GENOCIDE-Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin Was Who Made the Word GENOCIDE

It was not surprising that in the winter of 1948, in Paris, the fledgling United Nations meets to adopt one of its first human rights treaties…That was the scene sixty years ago this month. The U.N. voted unanimously to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was ambitious, serious, far reaching and largely the result of on Jewish Polish man, Raphael Lemkin, who made the world GENOCIDE and whose lifetime effort it became to stop genocide or ethnic cleansing.

The stink of the Holocaust still smelled the air as people were still healing from this horrific killing , murder and mutilation’s of millions and millions of Jews. Lemkin’s quite demeanor spoke volumes as he asked, “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?”

It was, at last, a victory for a tireless crusader who had fought for his entire life against genocide. It was Raphael Lemkin who made the word genocide, that describes the world’s most heinous crime. “GENOCIDE” or ethnic cleansing.

Lemkin wrote…”This new official world made a solemn pledge to preserve the life of the peoples and races of mankind.” I wonder how he would see the world with India’s recent terrorist acts or the people in Sudan, Iraq and Iran? I do not think he would be too pleased with how the world is still treating one another.

Polish and a Jew, Lemkin had watched in horror as Hitler nearly succeeded in his plan to exterminate the Jews. Six million Jews, including 40 members of Lemkin’s family, died at the hands of the Nazis.

This is a time of the year that all Jewish people remember what what happened at Auschwitz and the other death camps. The word “genocide,” is no longer whispered. Yet still, in today’s world even though the Nazi have been stopped, there are still parts of the world where the word “genocide” exists.

CNN News has more information on Raphael Lemkin, who made the word Genocide.