With the Obama administration and much of the organized Jewish community focused
on the schizophrenic Palestinian bid for UN membership, a series of recent
remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seem to have largely slipped
under the radar.
“Iran believes that whoever is for humanity should also
be for eradicating the Zionist regime,” Ahmadinejad said in an August 26
interview according to the Iranian Student News Agency. The following day, in a
Tehran speech in support of the Palestinian cause, he again advocated what
amounts to genocide. “Do not think that your [Israel’s] existence will be
recognized with the recognition of the Palestinian state,” he threatened. “You
have no place in our region and among our nations, and you will not be able to
continue your ignominious life on even a small part of the Palestinian
territories.”
While unctuously offering to “arrange for the release” of
two American hikers jailed in Iran for the past two years on bogus espionage
charges, Ahmadinejad shamelessly resurrected the old anti-Semitic stereotypes
that make Jews the scapegoat for every evil, plague and natural disaster on the
face of the earth. Zionists, Ahmadinejad told The Washington Post’s Lally
Weymouth on September 13, were “behind the First World War and the Second World
War.”
“Whenever there is a conflict or war,” he said, without
contradiction on the part of the interviewer or in the published transcript,
Zionists – read Jews – are “behind it.”
Ahmadinejad should have been held
to account under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide long ago. The crime of genocide, in the words of the UN General
Assembly Resolution 96(I), “is a denial of the right of existence of entire
human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human
beings,” and Ahmadinejad’s intent “to destroy... a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group” thus falls squarely within the scope of the
Convention.
Moreover, “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”
is also a direct violation of Genocide Convention, to which, incidentally, Iran
is a party. Repeatedly dismissing the Holocaust as a “myth” and a “lie” invented
to justify the creation of the State of Israel, Ahmadinejad has been advocating
the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish citizens for years. As Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Elie Wiesel succinctly said after yet another of the Iranian
leader’s diatribes, Ahmadinejad “preaches hatred and therefore he should be in
jail, actually, in The Hague, for incitement of genocide. That is a crime
against humanity.”
Along the same lines, former Massachusetts governor
Mitt Romney wrote in an op-ed as far back as September, 2007, that since
Ahmadinejad “calls for the elimination of a nation and pursues the means that
would allow him to carry it out... he should be indicted under the Genocide
Convention.”
Romney deserves credit for pointing out repeatedly and
consistently over the years that Ahmadinejad’s “regime threatens not only
Israel, but also every other nation in the region, and ultimately the world. It
is a repressive regime... an intractable enemy of liberty and human rights...
the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and subversive war.”
It would be
foolish in the extreme for any of us to lose sight of the fact that
Ahmadinejad’s continued saber-rattling constitutes a far greater time-bomb than
anything that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, or any other
Palestinian leader, says or does.
Very specifically, we need to remember
that incitement to commit mass murder has been recognized as a crime ever since
the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg where Julius Streicher, the
publisher of the virulously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer received the
death sentence for his incendiary words.
“Streicher’s incitement to
murder and extermination, at the time when Jews in the East were being killed
under the most horrible conditions,” the Tribunal held, “constitutes persecution
on political and racial grounds in connection with War Crimes, as defined by the
Charter, and constitutes a Crime against Humanity.”
“According to the
International Law Commission,” the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
wrote 52 years later in its judgment against Jean-Paul Akayesu, a Hutu
politician on trial for his role in the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population,
“public incitement is characterized by a call for criminal action to a number of
individuals in a public place or to members of the general public at large by
such means as the mass media, for example radio or television.”
Placing
Ahmadinejad’s words in this context is not an idle academic exercise. He
does not miss an opportunity to publicly call for the destruction of Israel by
violent means, which perforce means the mass killing of its citizens. He
focuses his vitriol exclusively on Israel’s Zionist – that is Jewish –
population. It is critical that the international community be made to
acknowledge once and for all that such genocidal rhetoric cannot be allowed to
be continuously ignored and swept under the rug.
The writer is adjunct
professor of Law at Cornell Law School, lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School,
and distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law.
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