Christine Flowers: Plenty of disdain for misuse of emotionally charged words

As an old Catholic school girl who may or may not have started too late, words mean a lot to me.

To be more specific, the proper use and interpretation of words is pretty much sacramental.

For example, I spent a lot of time diagramming sentences, and I know the difference between a noun, an adjective, an adverb, a gerund, and a dangling participle.

When I hear someone use a word in a way that God and Miss Manners never intended, I get very annoyed.

That is why when someone uses the term “illegal” to describe a human being, I get very preachy.

“Human being” and “illegal” are not fungible things. If you want to call someone an “illegal alien,” I will not object from a grammatical standpoint because that is correct English. “Illegal” as an adjective works, even if it’s not entirely polite.

Then there is the whole issue about “genocide.”

A lot of folks use that word with the same liberality that the late Tammy Faye Bakker used eye makeup, which is to say, everywhere, and in a frightening manner.

The actual legal definition of “genocide” can be found in the Genocide Convention ratified in 1948, and which states that “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group.

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As you can see, the convention looks at people as a “group” united by race, ethnicity, religion or nationality,” which also closely tracks the basis for asylum.

Interestingly, it does not say that acts that tend to cause corollary harm to members of these groups are genocidal. For example, if a group of Christians happen to be killed because they were working in tall buildings in New York in 2001, that would not be genocide.

That would be terrorism, but the fact that a group of Christians were killed in that terror attack does not mean that the attackers were guilty of genocide under the Convention.

To qualify as “genocide,” there has to be a specific attempt to essentially erase a group from existence, and motive matters.

“Specific acts” means someone did something on purpose, not that a terrible result arose from acts that were designed to cause another type of harm, or to protect another group from harm.

This might be too esoteric for the sort of childish person who puts a tablecloth around his neck, a mask on his face, goes to his Crayola Box and scribbles “Free Palestine” on a billboard and marches through the streets of Rittenhouse Square dodging the raised eyebrows of the adults.

But it is nonetheless true. Under the Convention, what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide, not even close.

Then you have the folks who are worried about Trump and his announced “war crimes.” In the first place, one gets the sense that they actually wanted him to do something that would allow them to pull out their, ahem, trump card: the 25th Amendment.

Alas, he didn’t do what they thought he was going to do: Make their lives meaningful and their X feeds relevant.

More importantly, even if he did what he clumsily said he was going to do, it still would not be a war crime. Trump threatened to bomb infrastructure and erase a “civilization.”

Let’s look at this a bit more closely, shall we?

According to the Geneva Convention, a “war crime” is one that causes severe bodily harm or death to individuals, or to property that houses individuals such as schools, hospitals and places of worship.

Bombing a bridge or other infrastructure is not, per se, a war crime unless the bomber knows that there are people who are likely to be traveling on it at the time that it is being attacked.

Rape, deliberate famine, and other acts are also considered war crimes.

The important thing to note is that people must be the target, not property. The only time that property can be considered the target of a war crime is if, as I stated above, the attacker is only going against the property to harm the people in it or on it.

People who read Trump’s tweet said that his threat to the Persian “civilization” was a threat. It absolutely was.

It was a threat against an inhumane civilization of more than four decades standing, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that has murdered, raped, censored, silenced and tortured its people since I was in high school.

Destroying that sort of a civilization is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a war crime.

But the people who hate Trump jumped on it, some of whom might have even gone to Catholic school — including, ahem, Pope Leo — but none of whom ever got gold stars in English class, except maybe Pope Leo.

I’m so tired of the misuse of language. Maybe it’s because I speak five of them, but I hate the dishonesty in people who manipulate words to manipulate minds.

I see through them. So should you.

This article was originally published in the Delco Times.

Christine Flowers can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.