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Hold Iran Accountable

[Ynet News ] Irwin Cotler - The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and of the more recent genocides - in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur - is that they occurred because of state-sanctioned incitement to hatred. This teaching of contempt - this demonizing of the other - is where it all begins. As the Supreme Court of Canada put it, "The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words." We have been witnessing for some time a state-sanctioned incitement to genocide whose epicenter is Ahmadinejad's Iran. It is dramatized by the parading in the streets of Tehran of a Shihab-3 missile draped in the words "Wipe Israel off the map" while the assembled thousands are exhorted to chants of "Death to Israel." The answer is for the international community to act now as mandated under the Genocide Convention, which prohibits the "direct and public incitement to genocide." State parties to the Genocide Convention, such as the U.S., have not only a right, but a responsibility, to enforce the convention, particularly to prevent genocide. Specifically, an application for immediate action against Iran should be submitted to the Security Council pursuant to Article 8 of the Genocide Convention. This would allow the U.S. to detail the compelling danger of genocidal incitement presented to Israel by Ahmadinejad's Iran and seek an effective range of sanctions and remedies against this dire threat. Furthermore, the U.S. should be preparing criminal indictments of Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders on the basis of the "universal jurisdiction" principle, which would become actionable when they set foot on American territory. In addition, Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders should be placed on a watch list, preventing their entrance into the U.S. as "inadmissible persons," as has been done in the past for then-Austrian president Kurt Waldheim because of his participation in the persecution of civilian populations during World War II. The writer is former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada.
2008-07-24 01:00:00
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