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COMMENTARY
June 21, 2008
Genocide
It will be recalled, by readers who follow world news, that the President of Iran has on many occasions unambiguously declared both the desire to annihilate Israel, and the expectation that Israel will soon be annihilated. It will also be recalled, that on the balance of evidence, the Iranian state has been working assiduously to acquire the means for this act of genocide. It is in direct defiance of U.N. resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games with U.N. inspectors.If a man were threatening to kill you, and declaring that you will soon be dead, while reaching for a gun, I think most readers would allow you were within your rights to kick that gun out of his reach. The word “genocide” -- which has been seriously cheapened and abused by rhetorical posturing in the “culture wars” of the West -- does have a meaning. It is an awkward word, with the Latin for “kill” tacked onto the Greek for “tribe,” but it acquired a reasonably precise definition in international law when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was promulgated through the United Nations in 1951 (after a little watering down to appease the Soviet Union). And while that Convention was obviously inspired by the Holocaust in which at least six million European Jews were annihilated by Nazi Germany, work towards it had begun much earlier. Curiously enough it had not borne fruit in the days of the League of Nations, owing to the need felt in the 1930s to appease the demands of Nazi Germany. The examples then were the huge massacres of Armenian Christians, across what is now Turkey, of Assyrian Christians, in what is now Iraq, and of Greek Christians along the Black Sea coast, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, during World War I. To this day all these events are disputed in Turkey, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, but the weight of evidence is overwhelming. At least two million died in the death marches, obviously designed not to relocate, but to eradicate these ethnic groups, whose loyalty to the Ottoman cause was profoundly doubted. The relativist phrase, “One man’s terrorism is another man’s freedom struggle” has been popularized by the Left, and could as well be paraphrased, “One man’s genocide is another man’s self-defence.” This playing on words, while avoiding the things the words signify, has become a commonplace of “political correctness” at the present day. A wanton confusion between “genocide,” which is clear and factual and very bloody, and “hate speech,” which is entirely interpretive, has by now been written even into various Western criminal codes, including Canada’s. In international law “genocide” means specific acts intended to physically destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These range from outright massacre, down to imposing conditions in which the group cannot reproduce itself, or its members are forcibly indoctrinated, its children kidnapped, its women systematically raped. “Hatred” is an emotion. It should not even come into the discussion of what genocide means, and is only brought into the discussion to confuse the issue -- to use all the emotions associated with the Holocaust for the purpose of advancing some other dark agenda. The Iranian state is officially represented not only by President Ahmadinejad, but also in similar statements made by other leading ayatollahs, promising the utter annihilation of Israel. Iran openly arms and funds Hezbollah and Hamas, which likewise publicly promise to annihilate Israel. Actual command of a state, or at least a large paramilitary force, is moreover entirely necessary to make the threat of genocide meaningful. For an attempt at genocide requires the means. Some adolescent neo-Nazi, raving on an Internet thread, is not in a position to attempt genocide. President Ahmadinejad is in such a position. Israel recently rehearsed a military operation over the eastern Mediterranean, on a scale and of a kind to foreshadow a raid on Iran’s nuclear installations. Little attempt was made to conceal it, and we can only conclude it was meant to send a breeze up the ayatollahs’ skirts. But rather than condemn the Israelis, reflexively and neurotically, for “war-mongering,” we should confront the cold, hard reality. Under the Genocide Convention, as currently received, Israel would be entirely within her rights to launch such a raid on Iran -- to, by analogy, “kick away that gun.” Alternatively, Iran must demonstrably withdraw those genocidal threats, and unambiguously recognize Israel’s permanent right to existence.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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