(RNS) — As a member of a people and a lover of Israel, a state that has faced sloppy, false accusations of genocide, I had a visceral response to President Donald Trump’s threat to wipe out Iran.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote.  

A whole civilization — that of Iran and Persia, going back to Cyrus, and beyond.  

It should stop everyone cold: Few modern leaders have spoken in such sweeping terms of civilization destruction. Trump’s words had echoes of Adolf Hitler, who warned, in 1939, of the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” 

Yes, at almost the last minute, President Trump backed off. But leading international law experts warned that President Trump’s threats could constitute war crimes under international law. 

He also was giving voice to a threat that aligns with the legal definition of genocide.

Why? Because genocide is not just an act of war, with massive deaths.

Genocide requires intent. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” It continues: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Hitler succeeded at that, killing 6 million Jews in Europe. Threats against Jews and the state of Israel, however, have not stopped.

There was Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the first secretary-general of the Arab League. In October 1947, he said that a war against the nascent state of Israel would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

And then, Hamas. The original Hamas charter (1988) called for the killing of Jews — “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”

And then, of course, Iran itself. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke of Israel needing to be “wiped off the map.” Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that Israel “will not exist in 25 years” and described it as a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed. There had been a clock in Palestine Square in Tehran that counted down the days until Israel’s predicted destruction. 

That is pretty unsavory company for an American president to be in.

Combine that with this administration’s apocalyptic fantasies. Noncommissioned officers reportedly have heard that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

This was not mere harmless Trumpian bluster. History teaches us: Language not only describes reality — it shapes it.

The danger does not begin with the final act. It begins when leaders hear genocidal language and fail to recognize what it is. 

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power named that failure with precision. In “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” she wrote: “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.”

The Genocide Convention sought to prevent not only the mass murders but the creation of conditions that lead to destruction on that scale — conditions that, once set in motion, no longer distinguish between the evil and the good. 

 In the eighth century B.C.E., the prophet Amos offered the first speech about international human rights, warning that the nations would suffer because of their sins — not against God, but against each other:

Thus said GOD:
For three transgressions of Damascus,
For four, I will not revoke the decree:
Because they threshed Gilead
With threshing iron sledges.

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, begins at sundown on Monday (April 13). To remember the Holocaust is to take upon ourselves the moral imperative to speak out against such language. Jews bear the scars of knowledge of what happens when bureaucrats systematize destruction.

Civilizations do not only die from external warfare and violence. They also die from internal moral collapse; when people hear the language of genocide or “civilization-cide” and remain silent; when they normalize what should alarm them; when they choose complacency over confrontation. 

The Jewish voice, therefore, carries responsibility — which is why Jewish groups condemned President Trump’s language. 

Let’s go back to Trump’s words: “A whole civilization will die tonight.”  Yes, a civilization is in danger of dying. That civilization is ours.

It is in danger of dying because the very notion of being civilized, and being civil, in America’s civic spaces, is in danger. 

It is in danger of dying because Americans, influenced by their leaders and influencers, have abandoned civility, and have embraced nihilism.

What, now — now that we have been pulled back from the brink — what, now, will we do to save ourselves?