Red Flag Alert - Trump’s Genocidal Threats Against Iran

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security joins many other voices in the world in raising the alarm about U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats against the state and the people of Iran. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,“ he posted on Truth Social at 8 AM this morning, threatening nothing less than collective annihilation. This threat comes on the heels of other, similar ones, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim on 3 March that Iran was another Amalek needing to be destroyed and U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s implicit warning today that President Trump could resort to using nuclear weapons if Iran did not agree to U.S. ceasefire terms. It is imperative that the U.S. President be stopped from committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide against Iran’s ancient civilization this evening. The burden to act rests with powerholders in the U.S., who must decide immediately whether to prevent these crimes or choose to be complicit in them. If they choose the latter, they can be sure that history will not look kindly on them.

The U.S. President’s language is genocidal. Threatening to destroy a “whole civilization” for eternity signals in no uncertain terms the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such”, as required by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereafter the Genocide Convention). The President’s language goes well beyond martial rhetoric about an enemy state or armed force. In a statement about total civilizational destruction, the target is not a country’s leadership, nor its military infrastructure, but rather an identity and a culture. President Trump’s words are some of the clearest indications of genocidal intent made publicly since the adoption of the Genocide Convention. Any world leader who claims otherwise or fails to speak out is enabling genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The President’s language demonstrates how radicalized the U.S. government has become under his second administration. In just one year of this administration’s virtually unchallenged brutality against immigrants and trans people at home and support for one of the world’s most brutal genocides abroad, the U.S. government seems to have begun to embrace genocidal thinking in all of its conduct at home and abroad. The United States is on its way to becoming a genocidal state, like Israel, Azerbaijan, and Sudan. Genocidal states are driven by genocidal worldviews, that is, worldviews that require genocide of one or many groups. They incorporate genocidal thinking, genocidal strategies, and genocidal tactics into all levels of state authority and public and foreign policy. In these regimes, genocide becomes the coordinated modus operandi of the state, often with strong popular support.

The U.S. President may have attempted to inoculate himself from the charge of genocide by adding to this morning’s post some language about regime change and “the Great People of Iran.” After threatening complete civilizational destruction, he wrote: “Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

His statements in support of the “Great People of Iran” ring hollow, however, given the degree of violence he appears poised to carry out by his threat to annihilate the very civilization of which they are a part.

In his fanatical rants, President Trump uses the same slippage between a leadership and a people that Israeli leaders have used when making threats against Hamas and Palestinians. In both cases, the conflation of civilians and the military apparatus appears intentional. On April 6, at the White House Easter egg roll, President Trump told the press, “[w]e are obliterating that country.” When asked by a reporter how obliteration would not be a war crime, President Trump responded, “[b]ecause they killed 45,000 people in the last month," referring to the Iranian government and quoting a figure much higher than the documented death toll of Iran’s crackdown against protesters. (Regardless, there is no legal justification for war crimes under the Rome Statute.) The President then added, “They're animals, and we have to stop them." In his word choice, the President moves from the general “that country” to a more precise reference to the Iranian regime and then returns to the collective “they.” Similarly, in an Easter post on Truth Social, the President announced, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Such a post can be read to be referring to the Iranian government, which is controlling which ships can pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but the last sentence, “Praise be to Allah,” brings the statement back into genocidal territory by mocking Islamic beliefs. Mocking God is common in genocide.

In analyzing President Trump’s rhetoric, we are reminded of the debate around the meaning of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s famous Amalek statement, which has become one of several statements made by senior members of the Israeli government that are now being used as evidence of specific genocidal intent in Israel’s war in Gaza. On 13 October 2023 Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “But today, against the enemy, with the ancient command 'Remember what Amalek did to you' ringing in our ears, today we are uniting forces in order to ensure the eternity of Israel.” He made a similar statement again on 28 October 2023. Other senior Israeli officials also spoke in genocidal terms. We recall then Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant's statement on 9 October 2023 that “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.” He then added, “[w]e are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” On 12 October 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed that ‘[i]t’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” The failure of Israeli officials to make clear distinctions between civilians and armed groups, like Hamas, is being mirrored in President Trump’s rhetoric.

This slippery use of language can now be considered part of a well-developed US-Israeli propaganda strategy to commit genocide with plausible deniability. Israel has a history of failing to distinguish between civilians and military targets, but since 7 October 2023 the dividing line seems to have completely disappeared, which is a classic linguistic and logical shift during genocidal processes. Genocidal language has become so widespread across the Israeli state and society that Israel has occasionally attempted to tamp down on it. Once Netanyahu’s Amalek statement and other similar threats made by senior Israeli officials became part of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, for example, Prime Minister Netanyahu asked government officials to tone down their rhetoric. But the genocidal language continued, despite possible legal ramifications. In January 2024, one member of the Israeli Parliament said Israel must “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth.” He added that “There are no innocents there” and called for the “elimination” of Palestinians in northern Gaza. This is now common rhetoric in Israel among political leaders and ordinary people alike. Genocidal language quickly spreads and normalizes across a power structure once it is expressed by leadership. The people of the United States must do everything in their power to avoid this erosion of civilization at home.

Of course, the Israeli government and the Israeli Prime Minister himself have repeatedly denied that he was referring to all Palestinians in Gaza when using the term Amalek. They argue that he meant to refer only to Hamas members and that the term “Amalek” has often been invoked historically to identify those who wish to harm Jews. They point out that the Torah passage about Amalek is quoted outside of the Hague in the Netherlands, at a memorial to Dutch Jews murdered by the Nazis. But, no matter where the passage appears, the biblical commandment the Prime Minister refers to calls for King Saul to destroy all of the Amaleks – men, women, and children, as well as their property and animals. In and of itself, it is a call for total genocide.

Two and a half years since the start of Israel’s mass murder form of genocide in Gaza, we can clearly see a straight line from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s words after 7 October 2023 to the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the ground. What we have learned from the Prime Minister’s reference to Amalek on 13 October 2023 is that he was identifying a military project that allowed for up to 300 civilians to be killed as “collateral damage” per military target, leading to the direct killing of tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of civilians. According to Israel’s own data, 83 percent of the people killed in Gaza have been civilians. Not only has Israel killed civilians with abandon, it has also blockaded the Strip, occupied much of its territory, and deprived civilians of food, clean water, and necessary medicines. Whatever Prime Minister Netanyahu claims about who he was identifying when he told Israelis to “remember Amalek” on 13 October, the proof of his genocidal intent is now laid bare across Gaza.

The world therefore should be very alarmed that Prime Minister Netanyahu recently redirected his Amalek accusation towards Iranians. On 3 March 2026, while visiting an Israeli site struck by an Iranian missile, he stated, "We read in this week's Torah portion, 'Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember—and we act." This reference, combined with the U.S. President’s threats that a “whole civilization will die tonight,” offers enough evidence of a planned total genocide against Iranians for world leaders and powerholders in the U.S. to act decisively to prevent this crime.

We warn the international community of the spiraling environment of genocidal escalation and radicalization in which these statements are being made. Although the White House today dismissed speculations about the possible use of nuclear weapons, the apocalyptic nature of President Trump’s statement raises profound concerns, especially when understood in light of Mohamad Safa’s recent resignation from the UN over claims of a planned nuclear attack on Iran. It is particularly alarming that Vice President Vance seemed to threaten the use of nuclear weapons only shortly after White House denials. He stated: “They’ve got to know we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use. The President of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.”

Just shy of four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention. With this document, the nations of the world purported to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. They proclaimed that they would not stand by during another genocide. However, we have seen genocide after genocide in the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first. Despite great strides in our understanding of this crime over the past thirty years, genocide only seems to be becoming more common. After rightly calling out Russia for genocidal intent in Ukraine in 2022, the world stood by silently during the reescalation of genocidal violence in Sudan in April 2023 and the depopulation and occupation of Artsakh by Azerbaijan in September of 2023. Then, for the past two-and-a-half years, the West has provided cover for Israel to brazenly violate the genocide convention. Amidst this, the ongoing genocide against Amharas in Ethiopia is completely overlooked. All the while, heads of state and multinational companies have been benefiting economically from the ongoing destruction of land and the annihilation of peoples.

With U.S. President Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization, the world finds itself at a crossroads. President Trump has announced, in no uncertain terms, his intention to commit the most heinous crime imaginable against the people of Iran, in retaliation for the Iranian government’s efforts to defend itself against an illegal war of aggression. If world leaders allow the U.S. to “obliterate” Iran, to use another one of President Trump’s own words, there will not be peace in the world for a very long time. Obliteration will become the norm, and no country, no region, no peoples will be safe from it. Not only will international law become meaningless – more so than it is even now – but also the most extreme form of attack will be the starting point for all future military engagements.

People in the Trump Administration, the U.S. military, and the U.S. Congress have the power and the responsibility to stop him. The leaders of other nations have a duty to call out his declaration of genocidal intent. They are empowered, by Article VIII of the Genocide Convention, to call upon the UN to take action to prevent this crime. We remind all those in positions of power: Prevention is not just an option, it is a legal and moral obligation. Those who fail to prevent this genocide will be brought to justice in the future if they do not act today. It will soon become clear whether the lessons from the appeasement of Hitler just before the outbreak of World War II, which killed an estimated 60 million people worldwide, have been entirely forgotten.

The Lemkin Institute calls on actors in the U.S. to do everything in their power to rein in President Trump and stop this crime before it is too late. We call on all world leaders to grow some backbones and work together to put the Genocide Convention into practice as it was designed. Failure to do so would once again prove that genocide can be committed with impunity by the wealthy and powerful, and genocide will grow like a fungus, greedily consuming our planet.