Raphael Lemkin

April 20, 2017

New film on Armenian Genocide strikes the right balance

Go see The Promise, a movie opening nationwide tomorrow. Hollywood has mostly ignored the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, and subsequently pursued by the Turkish Republic. Continue Reading...

March 18, 2016

The FAQs: State Department Says Actions of Islamic State Constitute Genocide

What did Secretary Kerry say about Islamic State and genocide? In a speech on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the U.S. has determined that the actions of Islamic State (aka ISIS) against Christians and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes an act of genocide. Continue Reading...

April 15, 2015

The Armenian Genocide: Lessons from Raphael Lemkin

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide – a systematic, murderous campaign carried out by the Ottoman Empire against its Armenian population, killing 1.5 million and leaving millions more displaced. Continue Reading...

March 17, 2015

Religion & Liberty: A Roundtable on Common Grace in Business

In the fall of 2014, business people, scholars, and theologians converged on the campus of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the Symposium on Common Grace in Business. The event was conceived and co-sponsored by the Calvin business department and the Acton Institute as a way of highlighting Abraham Kuyper’s theological work on common grace – the grace God extends to everyone that enables him or her to do good – to the business world. Continue Reading...

January 16, 2015

‘Watchers of the Sky’: Awakening the World’s Moral Conscience

The mass killings of minority groups, which have occurred time and time again throughout history, are often beyond comprehension. How can humans be capable of such evil? But even more inexplicable and troubling is the fact that many of these atrocities have gone largely unnoticed. Continue Reading...

November 05, 2014

Ukraine’s Holodomor: A Genocide Lost in the Pages of History

Seventy years ago this November, a new word entered the lexicon which would contextualize and put a name to the mass killings of minority groups that had gone on for centuries: genocide. Continue Reading...

August 28, 2013

Raphael Lemkin: The One-Man NGO Against Genocide

Today marks the 54th year since the passing of one of the world’s most influential international human rights lawyers. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, made the crime illegal under international law, and possessed an almost prophetic sense of the atrocities that would occur under Nazi tyranny in World War II, died a largely unnoticed man. Continue Reading...