Accusation in a mirror

Accusation in a mirror (AiM) is a technique often used to incite hate speech, where someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries. Along with dehumanization, accusation in a mirror is one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide, which has contributed to the commission of genocides such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, and the Gaza genocide. By invoking collective self-defense, accusation in a mirror is used to justify genocide, similar to using the right of self-defense to justify individual homicide.

The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention (OSAPG) defines mirror politics as a "common strategy to create divisions by fabricating events whereby a person accuses others of what he or she does or wants to do", and includes it as a factor in their Analysis Framework on Genocide, which is used to assess whether a given situation poses a risk of genocide. Scholars such as Kenneth L. Marcus and Gregory S. Gordon have investigated ways in which accusation in a mirror is used to incite hatred and how to mitigate its impacts.


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