January 02, 2006

Iran Flouts U.N. by Calling for Genocide, and for the Destruction of a U.N. Member State

Last October 26, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, called for the destruction of Israel:

At a conference on "The World without Zionism" in Teheran on 26 October 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded that Israel be "wiped off the map." He also menaced all peacemakers: "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury."

This is the same regime that is intransigent concerning Iran's right to develop a nuclear capability.

Yesterday Ahmadinejad spoke of genocide -- in terms he considers favorable:

"Don't you think that continuation of genocide by expelling Jews from Europe was one of their (the Europeans') aims in creating a regime of occupiers of Al-Quds (Jerusalem)?" the official Islamic Republic News agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. "Isn't that an important question?"

So Iran is a state that seeks nuclear weapons, and has now taken a public position in favor of genocide.

In a recent article, René Wadlow and David G. Littman discuss the details of how this violates the U.N. Charter, as well as the U.N. Convention on Preventing Genocide:

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide considers genocide to be those actions "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Non-State parties - such as Hamas with its Charter, especially now that it is a key player in PA elections -are fully covered under punishment article IV of the Convention, and this should provoke "serious concern" at appropriate United Nations bodies.

The statements by Iran's president are in breach of the 1945 UN Charter's article II, 4: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Iran's direct and public demand for the destruction of the State of Israel - with the extermination of a significant part of its population - is undoubtedly a call for genocide, whatever political explanations are put forward. Such direct and public incitement of genocide is punishable under article III of the Genocide Convention which states in its article III that "the following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide."

Wadlow and Littman note that hate speech, although considered absurd by other nations, when repeated within a nation for a sufficient number of years, has frequently led to genocide:

Those who drafted the 1948 Prevention of Genocide Convention had in memory the long incitement to hatred against the Jews by the Nazi machinery. Few took the Nazis seriously in the mid-1930s and did not foresee that hate constantly repeated would lead to systematic genocidal action. Likewise, in more recent times, few took seriously the constantly repeated verbal attacks against the Tutsis in Rwanda over the radio ("Mille Collines" ) and in the press. Yet these attacks prepared the ground for the physical destruction of hundreds of thousands of people and created the regional instability which is still weakening the African Great Lakes region.

Iran seeks nuclear weapons, and wants to use them, not only on Israel, but also on anybody who recognizes Israel. As quoted at the top of this post, Ahmadinejad stated: "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury." That includes every nation on earth that's not an Islamic dictatorship -- specifically every Western nation belonging to the U.N.

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Categories: Counter-Terrorism, Counter - Jihad, Iraq

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