Someone I've known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. Out of the blue, he asked me: "Do you think there's a genocide in Gaza?" No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people, he said. Everybody knows that. Not a study. Not a court ruling. Not a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that "everybody knows" is where investigations begin, not where they end. Tomorrow on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies: a plain-language piece on what the word actually means under international law, how Gaza compares on every relevant metric, and why even the strongest case for the genocide charge still doesn't clear the bar the word requires. By the way, I know the title will bother some readers, and I address that directly in the piece. My argument is not that the subject is trivial — it is that the word is being used by people who cannot define it, at a threshold they have never examined, with a confidence that bears no relationship to the evidence.