The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
James Zogby: Calling Hummus "Israeli Food" = "Cultural Genocide"
Zogby is a Democratic National Committee member, Chair of The [Bernie] Sanders Institute, and founder and president of the Arab American Institute.
Tyler O'Neil (PJ Media) reports, with copies of the tweets (which began with a Rachael Ray tweet); it apparently wasn't a joke on Zogby's part.
I should say that there's nothing wrong with pointing out that something which we label as coming from place X actually comes from place Y instead. Many ethnic groups are proud about what they see as their inventions, and want to get credit for them. (Sometimes such corrections as to origin are themselves mistaken, and often the true origin of a food or some other discovery is actually hard to track down, though that's a separate matter.)
But let's keep a sense of perspective here: There's nothing remotely connected to "genocide" here -- if anything, it's demeaning to actual genocide (or even to lesser crimes) to use such a label here. I don't like the term "cultural genocide" at all, precisely because mass murder is very different from other things; but at least that term has some plausible claim to analogy when a government tries to coercively extirpate (often with threat of prison or physical abuse) some cultural practice, for instance if it bans the use of some language or cultural practices by a minority group. There's no plausible claim to analogy here.
