On Tuesday morning at 8.6 a.m. Eastern time in just 12 words, Donald Trump crossed a line that cannot be ignored or walked back. Not by him, not by his enablers, and sadly not by any of us who had nothing to do with his outrageous words.

Posted on his own social media site, Trump threatened the destruction of a people.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, end quote.

One day earlier, he warned in a news conference that the U.S. military could destroy every bridge

and every power plant in Iran if his deadline passed without a deal.

Civilian infrastructure, the kind that millions of ordinary people depend on simply to survive,

under the laws of armed conflict, targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime.

Here's a thing to understand.

Genocide, which is known as the

crime of crimes, does not begin with bombs or bullets. It generally begins with language,

with the slow, deliberate conditioning of otherwise decent people into accepting the unthinkable.

The idea of genocide spreads easily through the silence of a public that looks

away. The practice of a genocide ends with soldiers being ordered to carry out what was once

unimaginable. There is a very specific bridge between bluster and mass atrocity, and that is

dehumanization. Through the casual cruelty of words that are repeated

until they no longer shock us. And once that threshold is crossed, once people are no longer seen

as people, the horrors that can follow become not only possible, but entirely predictable.

This week, Donald Trump did not threaten a military target. He did not limit his rhetoric to a

regime or a government or a leadership. He invoked the destruction of an entire civilization and

entire people, their communities, their history, their past, their present, their future. Iran is home

to more than 90 million human beings.

It is the seat of a Persian civilization nearly 3,000 years old, of people with language, culture, art, families, children.

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