Coined in 1944 by Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, "Genocide" is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Genocide Convention) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The term "Genocide" was originally attributed to the systematic intentional Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe. During that "genocide," also known as the Holocaust, over 6 million Jews were murdered in the course of five years. 

Other modern day "Genocides" have included, among others, the Cambodian genocide in which, between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime murdered an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people; the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, in which at least 500,000 people were killed over a period of several months; the Rwanda genocide, in which from April…