KICKING AWAY THE GUN

Windsor Star
July 2, 2008 Wednesday
Ontario

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. 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 toward 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 its 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.