[Ha'aretz] Natasha Mozgovaya - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements professing a desire to "wipe Israel off the map" are sufficient to serve as the basis for charges of incitement to genocide, two prominent former diplomats from the U.S. and Israel said on Tuesday. Dore Gold, Jerusalem's former envoy to the UN, and former U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among a group of scholars, lawmakers, and survivors of genocide from Rwanda and Sudan who gathered in Washington on Tuesday for a conference examining the plausibility of bringing the Iranian president before an international tribunal. "If the West will fail to respond to Iran's incitement to genocide, Iran will feel it can act. Deterring Iran now is vital," said Gold. Speakers said Ahmadinejad's pronouncements are alarmingly similar to the coded statements of incitement that preceded the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis in 1994, which the international community failed to prevent.
2008-09-24 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive