Tuesday 7 April. It was an evening much like any other. At 9pm French TV channels were airing a game show, a repeat of Kitchen Nightmares and, on the Franco-German channel Arte, a documentary soberly titled Europe in Putin’s Grip? (since tracking the Russian threat is its favourite occupation).

The day itself, however, had been far from ordinary. A few hours earlier, Donald Trump had posted an exceptionally violent warning on Truth Social: ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again.’ The civilisation he was referring to was that of Iran and its 90 million people. He even specified the timing of this pre-announced genocide: 8pm in Washington. Prime time.

Words can be criminal. At Nuremberg in 1946 the Nazi publisher and propagandist Julius Streicher – who had not himself carried out or ordered any killings – was convicted of crimes against humanity on the grounds that he had incited the extermination of the Jews. Since then, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has prohibited ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide’. And international humanitarian law forbids ‘acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among (…)

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