Walking Robert Morgenthau to the hearing room
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The story arises out of a disagreement about etymology. Discussing the legal definition of genocide, Kiriakou's co-host asked whether the word came from the Armenian genocide. Kiriakou said no. 

His account of the word

In Kiriakou's telling, the term was coined by the father of Robert Morgenthau in 1921. The elder Morgenthau, he says, happened to be aboard an American ship in the port of Izmir as the Turks were slaughtering Greeks and Armenians, "literally slaughtering them", and he coined the term in a letter he was writing to the president.  Kiriakou glosses the construction directly: genos is peoples, and genocide is the killing of a people. 

This is Kiriakou's own account of the word's origin, offered from memory in conversation, and it is at odds with the standard scholarly attribution. It is recorded here as he gave it.

The corridor

The personal part follows. Robert Morgenthau, "he was almost like a hundred years old", came to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Kiriakou was working there. In the hall, Kiriakou says, Morgenthau had to take his arm, and Kiriakou walked him to the hearing room. 

As they walked, Kiriakou told him he had just finished a book called Smyrna 1921, and said he had not realised that Morgenthau's father had coined the term genocide. 

Morgenthau said yes, and added something Kiriakou has clearly kept. On his deathbed, the elder Morgenthau had said that coining the word was the thing he was most proud of. 

Why he tells it

Kiriakou uses the story to make a point about what the word covers. Genocide, he stresses, is not only death camps; it can include them, but it is also about making it impossible for people to live in a particular place, and, he agrees, "you could have a genocide that might not kill anyone."  The application he had in mind was the proposal to move two million Gazans to South Sudan, which he had been discussing minutes earlier. 

See also

- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- The Search For A Country To Take Gaza
- The Greek community of Warren, Ohio
