“Gorillion” and “Genocide”: Laundering the Holocaust from the right and the Left ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, August 21, 2026

“Gorillion” and “Genocide”: Laundering the Holocaust from the right and the Left

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue recently published an interesting article about what it calls “lexical laundering”: extremist language that escapes from fringe communities into mainstream discourse while retaining a second meaning understood by the people who originated it. One of its examples is “gorillion,” as in “six gorillion,” a far-right joke about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Sometimes it mocks the number itself; sometimes it suggests that Jews exaggerated or fabricated the Holocaust. The deliberate absurdity provides plausible deniability. Someone called on it can always pretend it is merely an edgy internet joke.

What caught my attention was ISD's chart showing when the term took off on X. Usage had been comparatively low and stable, and then in October 2023 it suddenly exploded.

That immediately reminded me of another word whose usage changed dramatically after October 7: genocide.

The analogy is not that “genocide” is itself an antisemitic word. “Gorillion” attacks the Holocaust from one direction by saying that Jews lied about, exaggerated or exploited their genocide. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide attacks Jewish Holocaust memory from the opposite direction by accepting the Holocaust and then turning its moral meaning against the Jews.

The Jews were victims of the Nazis. Now the Jews are the Nazis. The Palestinians become the Jews, Gaza becomes Auschwitz or the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Holocaust becomes less a crime committed against Jews than a lesson Jews supposedly failed to learn.

This rhetoric existed long before October 7. Holocaust inversion is hardly new, and anti-Israel protesters were comparing Israel to Nazi Germany decades ago. What changed after October 7 was its legitimacy and scale. The genocide accusation moved with extraordinary speed from activist circles into universities, NGOs, mainstream journalism, political speeches and international institutions. Within months, describing Israel as genocidal - recognized as obvious Holocaust inversion by most people before October 7 - had become ordinary language in environments where saying “the Jews are Nazis” would still sound grotesque.

That is where ISD's idea becomes useful. Lexical laundering allows an extremist meaning to travel inside language that sounds innocuous to outsiders, and the person who repeats the term later may have no idea where it came from or what its earlier users meant by it. Something similar can happen with a legitimate word.

For decades, explicit antisemites have delighted in Holocaust inversion precisely because of its cruelty. Calling Israelis Nazis does more than accuse Israel of wrongdoing. It takes the central Jewish historical trauma and converts it into an accusation against Jews themselves. The power of “genocide” as political rhetoric is that the Nazi comparison no longer has to be spoken aloud. When protesters describe Gaza as a concentration camp, invoke Auschwitz, wear striped uniforms, draw swastikas inside Stars of David and call Israel genocidal, the cultural associations do the rest. The respectable speaker can use the same word without any of those images and insist that he is making a purely legal or humanitarian argument. Both meanings coexist.

That may be better described as semantic laundering than lexical laundering. Nobody invented the word “genocide” as an antisemitic code. A legitimate and morally powerful word acquired an additional ideological function, and its ordinary meaning provides cover for a much older message.

The symmetry with “gorillion” is striking. The far-right version says that the genocide of the Jews was a lie or exaggeration. The anti-Zionist inversion says that the genocide of the Jews was real, but its great lesson is that the Jews became the genocidaires. One denies Jewish victimhood; the other appropriates it. In both cases, the Holocaust stops being primarily something that happened to Jews and becomes a weapon against them.

Both forms became far more visible after October 7, when Jews had just experienced the largest mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. October 7 should have made the nature of antisemitism harder to deny. Instead, two different ideological ecosystems found ways to process the massacre while preserving their existing hostility toward Jews. On the far right, Holocaust mockery became more open. In anti-Zionist discourse, Holocaust inversion became respectable.

The vocabulary is different, but the maneuver is remarkably similar: the Holocaust is being weaponized against Jews, because they are Jews, by both Leftist and Rightist Jew-haters.

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