Ottawa Citizen, Canada
June 21 2008

The right of self-defence

David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008

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 acquiring
the means for this act of genocide. Iran is in direct defiance of UN
resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games
with UN 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 the First World War. 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.

David Warren’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.