JPPPI Master Class - Participants: Prof Irwin Cotler, Mr. Steven Hoffman, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo

11 February, 2007

Bringing Ahmadinejad to Justice

Professor Irwin Cotler, P.C., O.C., M.P.

The outrage over Iran's hosting of a holocaust denial conference has tended to overshadow what should be a greater outrage - Iran's state-sanctioned incitement to commit genocide. Simply put, the denial of genocide became a media event; but incitement to genocide - in violation of the prohibition against the "direct and public incitement to co1mmit genocide" in the Genocide Convention - the "Never Again" Convention - is greeted with a yawn.

In a similar vein, the international community celebrated the adoption by the United Nations of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine so as to authorize intervention to protect populations from genocidal acts, but it ignores the Responsibility to Prevent obligation mandated by the Genocide Convention. Yet, this is regarded as jus cogens, a peremptory norm of international law - binding on us all.

This juridical anomaly is not only of academic interest. For we are witnessing - and have been witnessing for some time - the emergence of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, whose epicenter is Ahmadinejad's Iran. Here, you have the toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes - genocide - embedded in the most virulent of hatreds - antisemitism -and underpinned by a publicly avowed intent to acquire nuclear weapons for that purpose, as former President Akbar Hachemi Rafsanjani put it.

Nor should the words of former President Rafsanjani - characterized as the "moderate" victor in the recent Iranian elections - be dismissed as overheated rhetoric only. For the Argentinian judiciary recently determined that it was this same Rafsanjani who planned, organized and ordered the mass terrorist bombing of the Argentinian Jewish cummunity center (AMIA) in 1994, resulting in the death of 85 people and 300 wounded.

In a fortuitous, yet chilling reminder, the Argentinian prosecutors' decision calling for arrest warrants to be issued against the Iranian leadership was released on the same day that President Ahmadinejad called yet again for the disappearance of Israel; and on the anniversary of Ahmadinejad's first public and direct call for the destruction of Israel - on October 25, 2005- when, as he put it, "Israel must be wiped off the map, as the Imam says."

The Imam, in this instance, is former Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, who had previously declared in 2000 that "there is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish State", while otherwise using epidemiological metaphors in calling for Israel, "the cancerous tumour of a state", to be "removed from the region."

Indeed, Ahmadinejad and the Iranian leadership's denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe - together with the demonization of the Jews as "evil incarnate" and the delegitimization of Israel as the defiler of Islam - appear to be prologue to and justification for a new genocide. Lest this admit of any doubt, Ahmadinejad has presided over the parading of a Shihab-3 missile draped in the emblem that Israel be "wiped off the map" while exhorting the assembled thousands in their chants declaring "Death to Israel," as in the Teheran conference on a "World without Israel."

Moreover, calls for the destruction of Israel by the most senior figures in the Iranian leadership are frighteningly reminescent of calls for the Rwandan extermination of Tutsis by the Hutus leadership. The crucial difference - and which makes the Iranian genocidal threat even more dangerous - is that the Hutus were equipped with the simpl