No More Excuses for Gaza

By Faris Kakish

Reading through the book: "Genocide Bad" written by Sim Kern and published by

Interlink Publishing, Massachusetts – April 22, 2025, I found out that Sim Kern’s "Genocide Bad" is not polite literature. It’s a slap across the face. It tears away the comfortable distance that lets people talk about genocide as if it were a word from the past. 

Kern’s book screams a truth that politicians, pundits, and polite society keep dodging: Gaza is not a "conflict.” It is a genocide in real time. Pretending otherwise is complicity.

A Jewish anti-Zionist activist, Kern does not write like a detached scholar. These ten essays are part history, part testimony, part furious moral argument. They cut through propaganda like a blade. For Kern, Gaza is not a faraway crisis. It is a cage where bombs, blockades, and starvation grind an entire people into dust while the world stands by, wringing its hands and mumbling about "complexity.”

What makes Genocide Bad devastating is its clarity. It dismantles the excuses: biblical entitlement, "self-defense” slogans, the Western addiction to Israel-as-project. Kern shows how the promise of safety for one people has been built on the systematic destruction of another. And there is no academic shield here no safe, neutral tone. This is confrontation: someone grabbing you by the collar and asking, how many dead children will it take before you call it what it is?

There is humor in these pages, but it is bitter the humor of someone who has watched truth twisted into lies. There is history, but never the kind that hides behind footnotes. And there is empathy sharpened into a weapon against indifference. Kern’s viral videos and grassroots work for Gaza run through this book’s DNA: blunt, accessible, impossible to ignore.

The timeliness of Genocide Bad is also its indictment. These essays make painfully clear that Gaza is a mirror showing the world’s moral bankruptcy: neighborhoods turned to rubble, food and water weaponized, children starving on live streams and still the language of "disputes” and "operations” persists. Kern argues convincingly that genocide is sustained not only by those who pull the trigger but also by those who watch, explain, and shrug.

Even the title Genocide Bad is a rebuke. It should not need to be said. And yet here we are, in 2025, still debating whether the word applies while Gaza buries another generation. This book will not allow that luxury. It demands that we drop the euphemisms, call this what it is, and decide which side of history we are on.

Read this book, and your excuses are stripped away. You may disagree with Kern’s politics, but you will not be able to claim you didn’t know. Genocide Bad is not just a book. It is a line in the sand. It asks, bluntly: which side are you on?