ORLANDO (RNS) — Comparing the magnitude of Shoah, the World War II extermination of European Jewry, to any other mass killings is always emotionally and intellectually fraught. The question is, are the lessons of the Holocaust unique to the Jewish people, or universal for humanity? Even the Roma, homosexuals and people with disabilities, who also died in the Nazi concentration camps, although in lesser numbers, are often relegated to a historical asterisk. Consider other grotesque mass killings in past centuries: Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere, Armenians, Ukrainians, Cambodians, Rwandans, farmers of southern Darfur, the Yazidis of Iraq, the Rohingya of Myanmar. Those victims, their survivors and descendants maintain that they, too, have a valid claim to the designation of genocide — a term coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazi murder of the Jews — and at least to the lower-case designation of “holocaust.”