Pakistan’s defense minister has made a most incendiary, genocidal, and reckless statement.

Khawaja Asif declared Israel an illegitimate state and “a threat to the entire Muslim world.” He called upon Muslim countries to form “a united military front” against it.

He said this one day after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a collective-defense pact that Turkey’s foreign minister compared to Article 5 of NATO.

Asif is the defense minister of a nuclear-armed country.

Every part of that sentence should set off alarms.

This was no criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu, the war in Gaza, settlements, occupation, or any particular Israeli policy. Asif denied the legitimacy of Israel itself. He then called for countries united by religion to organize militarily against it.

That is a genocidal threat.

Israel is home to nearly half the Jews in the world. It cannot be eliminated as a political abstraction. A military campaign capable of destroying Israel would necessarily place millions of Jews at risk of expulsion, subjugation, or death.

Asif did not propose negotiations, territorial compromise, coexistence, or a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He identified Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate and summoned the Muslim world to confront it militarily.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. When a senior official of a nuclear-armed state calls for a religious military coalition against the world’s only Jewish state while denying that state’s right to exist, the genocidal logic is unmistakable.

The nuclear context makes his statement considerably more dangerous.

Asif previously said that Pakistan’s nuclear capability could be made available to Saudi Arabia under their bilateral defense agreement. Pakistan has now entered a broader agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says the new pact is defensive and directed against no particular country. Asif has immediately supplied a very different interpretation.

Which interpretation governs?

Saudi Arabia and Turkey must answer that question now. They cannot sign a collective-defense agreement with a nuclear-armed state and then treat its defense minister’s call for a military front against Israel as incidental rhetoric.

The historical hypocrisy is almost breathtaking.

Asif dismissed Israel as “a product of the Balfour Declaration.” The Balfour Declaration did not establish Israel. It expressed British support in 1917 for a Jewish national home. Israel emerged after decades of Jewish institution-building, the 1947 United Nations partition resolution, a declaration of independence, and a war against neighboring armies determined to prevent the Jewish state from surviving.

Pakistan itself was created through the partition of British India in 1947. The British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act establishing the independent dominions of India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s national claim rested heavily upon the right of Muslims in British India to political self-determination.

A state created through British partition in the name of Muslim self-determination now declares Jewish self-determination uniquely illegitimate.

Pakistan has no territorial dispute with Israel. Israel occupies no Pakistani land. There are no Pakistani refugees awaiting return to Haifa or Jerusalem. The two countries do not share a border.

Asif has therefore clarified something much of the world works very hard to obscure. His hostility cannot be explained by settlements, checkpoints, borders, or competing territorial claims. He opposes the existence of a sovereign Jewish state.

This is Islamism in its most dangerous international form. That word must be used precisely. Islamism is a political ideology, not a synonym for Islam or for Muslims. Many Muslims reject it. Muslim countries have made peace with Israel, maintained relations with it, and resisted the demand for permanent religious war.

Asif is trying to conscript those countries into precisely such a war. He has framed Israel as the common enemy of the Muslim world and military unity as the required response.

Responsible Muslim governments and leaders should be among the first to repudiate him. His claim to speak for the Muslim world should not pass unanswered.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, should state whether Asif spoke for his government. If he did not, Asif should be dismissed. If he did, the international community must reassess its relationship with Pakistan accordingly.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey should declare explicitly that their new agreement cannot be invoked in support of aggression against Israel. Turkey is a member of NATO. Its allies should demand clarification about whether a NATO member has entered a military arrangement that another signatory intends to mobilize against the Jewish state.

The United States, United Kingdom, European Union, United Nations secretary-general, and every government that claims to oppose genocidal rhetoric should condemn Asif’s statement plainly.

Israel should respond with composure and absolute seriousness. It should demand clarification through every available diplomatic channel, review the military implications of the new pact, and make clear that it will defend its citizens against any state or coalition. Israel should issue no theatrical nuclear threats. The facts already provide ample deterrent force.

For years, the word “genocide” has been hurled at Israel so constantly and indiscriminately that much of the world has become numb to it. The degradation of the word cannot relieve us of the obligation to recognize an actual genocidal threat when a nuclear-armed defense minister delivers one in public.

Here is the test.

Will the governments, institutions, activists, academics, and human-rights organizations that speak endlessly of genocide condemn a senior Pakistani official for declaring the Jewish state illegitimate and calling for a united military front against it?

Will Saudi Arabia and Turkey repudiate his use of their new alliance?

Will Pakistan remove him?

Or will the accusation of genocide remain a weapon used against Jews, while openly eliminationist threats against Jews pass as ordinary political speech?

Khawaja Asif has told us what he wants the Muslim world to organize against. We should believe him. Every responsible government should answer him.