IRANIAN DANGER EXAMINED AT HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL EVENT
By Paul Lungen – Staff Reporter
Canadian Jewish News, Canada
April 25 2007
TORONTO – The Holocaust Memorial Day event was billed as a panel
discussion examining how the legacy of Nuremberg could be used to
prevent future genocide, so the discussion naturally turned to Iran.
None of the speakers dissented from the premise that the Islamic
Republic poses a danger to Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. As
human right lawyer David Matas noted, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is an "active and aggressive" Holocaust denier, he has
employed anti-Semitic rhetoric, threatened Israel with annihilation
and embarked on a program to develop nuclear weapons while embracing
an apocalyptic world view in which confrontation with enemies is cast
in religious terms.
Taken together with the attack on the Jewish community centre in
Argentina, the conclusion that Iran intends to inflict genocide on
the Jewish people follows. As a result, as senior lawyer for B’nai
Brith Canada, he has drawn up an indictment of Ahmadinejad charging
him with incitement to genocide and has called on the government of
Canada to implement it.
The document was available on a table outside the Donald Lamont
Learning Centre at the Law Society of Upper Canada. The Law Society
co-sponsored the discussion along with the League for Human Rights
of B’nai Brith Canada.
Joining Matas as panelists were Payam Akhavan, associate professor
in the Faculty of Law at McGill University and Jillian Siskind,
senior policy advisor to the Ontario Minister of Community Safety and
Correctional Services. The event was moderated by Adam Dodek, former
chief of staff of the Attorney General of Ontario, and Holocaust
survivor Faige Liebman presented closing remarks.
Akhavan noted several failures to prevent mass killings since
the Holocaust and suggested that since genocide was a deliberate
state-sponsored policy and an instrument of power, it would be
more effective to develop a "culture of prevention" than calling
for intervention to stop it. The killings in both Bosnia and Rwanda
were preceded by incitement and "the Holocaust did not begin in gas
chambers, but with the spreading of hatred against people," he said.
A Baha’i exile from Iran, Akhavan said "we are all part of the
equation. We can’t give responsibility only to our leaders. We must
make this a political issue." He asked why people were more interested
in reading about Monica Lewinsky’s capers with former U.S.
president Bill Clinton than in events unfolding in Rwanda. He also
criticized Clinton for intoning "never again" while doing nothing to
prevent the Rwanda slaughter.
Akhavan said the mass killings in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur "reflect
the failure for what we stand for even while affirming our liberal
virtues by paying lip service to human rights."
Turning to his homeland, he said Iran presents a central challenge
to the rest of the world. Ahmadinejad is a danger not only to
Israel, but to his own people. He suggested Ahmadinejad is promoting
hatred of Israel to divert Iranians’ attention from their own dire
circumstances. His remarks "are a dying gasp of a regime that has
lost all legitimacy with its people."
The average Iranian is not interested in confronting Tel Aviv or
in funding Hezbollah, he said. "They want to be part of the world
and all the government has on offer is anti-Israel and [anti-]
U.S. propaganda."
He suggested Ahamdinejad should invite more ridicule than condemnation
as condemnation cements his reputation as an Islamic warrior.
Instead of confronting Iran, or appeasing it as European states
have done even while 300 Iranian dissidents were killed on their
soil by Iranian agents, he called for a "third way." He suggested
economic sanctions, travel bans, prosecution of Iranian killers
and for Canada to champion individual freedom in Iran. He argued in
favour of aligning with the many Iranian opponents of the regime,
for indicting the Iranian prosecutor responsible for the murder of
Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, and for supporting women’s
and labour groups.
Matas said the indictment of Ahmadinejad was prepared because, "in
my view, he has committed incitement to genocide against the Jewish
people and we should do something about it."
Not only is the Iranian president guilty, but his discourse is likely
to convince others to commit genocide, he asserted.
He dismissed critiques of the indictment – that it would be impossible
to enforce, that Ahmadinejad’s incitement is directed at Israel and
not the Jewish people and that it would complicate negotiations to
end the country’s nuclear program – saying, "It would be a form of
pressure on Iran."
Genocide has to be stopped at the incitement stage, so if the
indictment influences Ahamdinejad to change his discourse, that in
itself would be an accomplishment, he said.
Jillian Siskind opened the discussion with a review of the evolution
of international law on genocide. She noted that the earliest example
of genocide occurred during World War I when Turkey decimated its
Armenian population and U.S. diplomat Henry Morgenthau’s pleas to
his government to intervene "fell on deaf ears."
Later, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, noticed that a
gap in international law existed in situations where a government
committed mass killings of its own citizens. He pioneered the concept
of universal jurisdiction that would permit states to try crimes
committed outside their borders, and he coined the term genocide.
Nuremberg prosecutors limited their charges to events that included
a cross-border element and it was not until December 1948 that the
Genocide Convention was adopted. It came into effect in 1951 and
marked a"step away from the shield of state sovereignty," Siskind said.