More "Mein Kampf": A Chronology of Statements of Incitement and Hate Language by Ahmadinejad and other Iranian Leaders

Yael Stein, Tamar Pileggi, Alex Barnea Burnley

In GPN Issue 1, we published a time line of statements of hate language and incitement (HL&I) by President Ahmadinejad, his predecessors, associates and other major figures of the Iranian ruling leadership.

In this issue, we update this timeline, but now assess each statement in terms of what types of hate language and incitement it represents.

Perpetrators use hate language to incite groups to commit genocide and other mass atrocities directed against vulnerable populations. Equally important, perpetrators use HL&I to silence, intimidate and desensitize bystanders and to signal intent.

This timeline shows that the leaders of the Iranian regime are continuing their genocidal incitement, as they continue to suppress human rights of their own people with ever increasing brutality, move towards nuclear capacity, support terror surrogates, and engage in terror themselves. The Islamic Regime’s motifs recycle those in Hitler’s Mein Mampf, and echo those in traditional Shiite texts. Our past work has shown that this incitement goes back to 1979-80, or thirty years, a period some two and a half times longer than that of the 12 year life span of the Nazi regime.

• Standard definitions of incitement refer to something that incites or provokes; a means of arousing or stirring to action. Incitement to action can be cast in the form of threats, or threats phrased as predictions and prophecies, or praising persons who have carried out acts of genocide or genocidal terror, or elevating them to hero status.
• Hate language refers to terms which are used to dehumanize demonize, stigmatize, delegitimize, or slander groups defined by their national, ethnic, religious, racial, or political identity.
• Dehumanization refers to hate language which includes terms and metaphors-usually of epidemic disease, cancer, or physical decay from public health and medicine-- which induce disgust, revulsion, fear and hate for the other.
• Demonization usually invokes motifs overpowering danger and threat abd evil intent. Delegitimization refers to terms and motifs which deny the identity and political, national, ethnic or religious status of a group, and denigrate its status.
• Double standards are used to judge a group by norms not applied to all other groups, so as to cast the group or members of the group in an unfavorable light.
• Disinformation pertains to the spreading of misinformation with the aim of demonization or delegitimizing a group.
• Denial of past genocides –e.g. denial of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide, is used to lay the groundwork for future genocides. There are other forms of hate language, such as the use of euphemisms, and mirroring, as well.

In this timeline we indicate whether each statement individually includes one or more of the foregoing six D’s: dehumanization, demonization, delegitimization, double standards, disinformation or denial of the Holocaust, or plain incitement.

Click here for Timeline of Iranian incitement to genocide.

This project results from the work of GPN World Genocide Situation Room of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem (www.genocidepreventionnow.org) in conjunction with the Genocide Prevention Program of the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine.

For more information, contact Yael Stein at yst.gpn@gmail.com

Yael Stein MD is a researcher-team member of the World Genocide Situation Room, the website of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem of GPN. She has experience in Occupational Medicine, Epidemiology and Hospital Administration and is currently studying towards a PhD degree in Public Health at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Yael describes herself as a "goal-oriented, idealistic entrepreneur, seeking spiritual and ethical fulfillment" in her work; "I focus on making a difference."

Tamar Pileggi studied for her BA at Atlantic University and Florida State University in Pre-Health and International Relations. She has volunteered for Shevet Achim, a non-profit amutah that provides life-saving heart surgeries to Palestinian children in Israel; Four Homes of Mercy, a home for physically and mentally handicapped children in the West Bank; French Hospital, a Catholic Hospice and Christ Church, an Anglican Church in Jerusalem.

Alex Barnea Burnley, MSc in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict is Research Assistant and Project Manager of the World Genocide Situation Room section of GPN, the website of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. He acted as project manager for UK relief work in Tsunami-affected Thailand and later as consultant to a Cambodian NGO - orphanage.

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FINALE TO ISSUE 4

MAD AHMAD: The Ahmadinejad Case Now includes Attributing 9/11 to the USA, Denying the Holocaust, and Experiencing the Hidden Imam with Him at the UN

Putting aside Charlie Chaplain's excellent portrayal, Hitler was hardly a joke. Nor is Ahmadinejad in our times a joke. He is telling us clearly what he intends to do, very much for real, in our world. Ahmadinejad's wild distortions of civilizations' codes of rational thinking and political leadership must be taken seriously at their face value.

Unlike Hitler, Ahmadinejad also has a "supreme leader" above him with whom to share a messianic vision, but all indications are that they share an apocalyptic vision. A political culture of destruction is upon us.

Ahmadinejad's passionate mission to destroy human lives must be stopped.

See in this Finale:

• Ahmadinejad at the U.N. Sept 2010 Claims USA Designed 9/11


• Obama, Ban Ki-moon Condemn Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments


• Yale Students Host Ahmadinejad


• Ahmadinejad: ‘Holocaust is a Fairy Tale'


• Khameini and Ahmadinejad Pursue a Messianic Course, but there is a Rift Among Iran's Clerics


• MAD AHMAD: A Psychologists' Blog

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Ahmadinejad Claims USA Designed 9/11

Reuters reported that Iran's Ahmadinejad said at the UN on September 23, 2010 the following:

(1) "There is no evidence that 3000 people were killed on 9/11"

(2) "The U.S. trumped up 9/11 to cover its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq"

(3) "No Zionists were killed in the attacks because one day earlier they were told not to go to their workplace"

Addressing the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010, Ahmadinejad said that the September 11 attacks were orchestrated by elements within the US government in order "to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime."

Ahmadinejad said there were “three viewpoints” in identifying those responsible for the September 11 attacks. The main viewpoint, he said, “advocated by American statesmen,” is that “a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.”

The second viewpoint – which Ahmadinejad called the viewpoint of “the majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians” – was “that some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack in order to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.”

Finally, he said, some believe September 11 “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.” He conceded that “this viewpoint has fewer proponents.”

Ahmadinejad announced that, in light of this professed ambiguity as to the guilty parties, Iran will host a conference “to study terrorism and the means to confront it.”

The Reuters report said, "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United Nations most people believe that the U.S. government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, prompting the U.S. and European delegations to leave the hall in protest. "They were joined by all 27 European Union delegations and several other countries... Addressing the General Assembly he said it was mostly U.S. government officials and statesmen who believed al Qaeda Islamist militants carried out the suicide hijacking attacks that brought down New York's World Trade Center -- less than 4 miles from where the Iranian president was speaking."

Ahmadinejad is perhaps having a 'good influence' on other Islamic leaders. MEMRI reported at least three other Islamic leaders have echoed the Big Lie of 9/11. In the U.S., in an interview on Al Jazeera English, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Lewis Farrakhan said, "What proof have we heard from those wicked deceivers [the U.S.A.] that it was Osama bin Laden who carried out 9/11?"

Former Egyptian Deputy Foreign Minister Abdallah Al-Asba'ai said, "9/11 was the single work of U.S. Intelligence and the Israeli Mossad." Former Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N., Muhammoud Al-Douri said: "The U.S. has managed to unite almost all the world behind it. In light of this we can offer at least one reason for the events of 9/11 - it is possible that the U.S. itself was behind it."

Sources:
Horn, Jordana and the Associated Press (September 26, 2010). Obama, Ban Ki-moon condemn Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments. Jerusalem Post.

Charbonneau, Louis (September 23, 2010). Reuters. Ahmadinejad tells U.N. most blame U.S. gov't for 9/11.

Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] (October 20, 2010). Farrakhan on Al-Jazeera English TV: No proof that Bin Laden carried out 9/11; former Egyptian Foreign Minister and former Iraqi Ambassador to U.N.: The US was behind 9/11. Special Dispatch 3310.

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Obama, Ban Ki-moon, Condemn Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks during his address to the General Assembly:

"I strongly condemn the comments made by a leader of a delegation that called into question the cause of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US soil," Ban said.

US President Barack Obama accused Ahmadinejad of making "offensive" and "hateful" comments when he said most of the world thinks the United States was behind the attacks in order to benefit Israel.

"It was offensive," Obama said. "It was hateful. Particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhatten, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones, people of all faiths, all ethnicities who see this as the seminal tragedy of this generation, for him to make a statement like that was inexcusable."

Sources:
Horn, Jordana (September 26, 2010). Obama, Ban Ki-moon, Condemn Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments. Jerusalem Post.

Bull, Alister (September 24, 2010). Obama condemns Ahmadinejad comments on 9/11. Reuters.

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Yale Students Host Ahmadinejad

The Yale Daily News reported that hours after Ahmadinejad spoke at the United Nations accusing the United States of secretly perpetrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, prompting American and European delegates to walk out, Ahmadinejad sat down for an hour-long chat with 13 Yale students. The special visit was arranged by Hillary Mann Leverett for her graduate seminar “U.S.-Iranian Diplomacy.”

At the hotel where the Iranian delegation was staying, students questioned and talked with Ahmadinejad, his senior policy advisor and his chief advisor for international affairs. Leverett, a senior fellow at Yale’s newly created Jackson Institute, is a proponent of engaging with Iran rather than imposing sanctions, and she said she tries to convey her overall approach to U.S.-Iranian relations to students in her seminar. The Yale Daily News observed, "She has drawn much attention — and criticism — for her views, which do not align with the conventional thinking in Washington."

The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence had listed Yale as one of 60 subversive organizations in January 2010 but Leverett said being blacklisted did not pose a problem when arranging the meeting with Yale students. She said Yale’s ties to various human rights organizations that criticize the regime likely landed the University on the list, which she said was largely meant to make a statement that Iran does not approve of programs that challenge the government in Tehran. Leverett said she arranged the meeting by contacting someone in the Iranian delegation, as students in her seminar had asked whether they could meet with Ahmadinejad while he was in New York.

"Leverett said she thinks students took away from the meeting in New York that Ahmadinejad is 'not a crazy, irrational leader,' and whether students agree with him or not, he has a strategy for Iran. She added that she also hopes students understand “that it will take a lot more from the U.S. if we want to have a real policy of engagement.' ”

Source: Greenberg, Sam (September 27, 2010). Relating to Iran, in seminar and in person. Yale Daily News.

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Ahmadinejad July 2010: ‘Holocaust is a Fairy Tale'

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the historic dimensions of the Holocaust but rejected the label of an anti-Semite, the Fars news agency reported. “The West made a claim – about the Holocaust – and urges all the people in the world to accept it or otherwise go to prison,” Ahmadinejad told a group of Islamic scholars in Nigeria, where he attended a summit of the Developing Eight, a group of countries with large Muslim populations. “The West allows everybody to question prophets and even God but not to pose a simple question and open the black box of a historic event,” he charged. Ahmadinejad had earlier sparked international fury by calling for the eradication of Israel from the Middle East and its relocation to Europe or North America, and by describing the murders of 6 million European Jews by Germany’s Nazi regime as a “fairy tale.” He said that the Holocaust was an excuse for Israel and the West to take land away from millions of Palestinians and give it to Israel.

Iran does not recognize Israel and maintains that a referendum by all Palestinians, including refugees, and Jews should decide the future fate of a Palestinian state. “We are after a diplomatic settlement through a referendum, but they [the West] say Ahmadinejad wants to kill people and is an anti-Semite,” the Iranian president said. “No, this is wrong,” he added. “I love all Muslims, Christians and Jews. What I dislike are the Zionists, which are a party that has availed itself of the Holocaust as an excuse to establish the illegitimate state of Israel.”

International concern has increased amid fears that Iran might be using its nuclear program to make an atomic bomb. Iran possesses 2,000-kilometer range missiles capable of targeting any part of Israel. Tehran has said it has no secret nuclear projects and all its military capabilities were merely for the purpose of self-defense and deterrence. But Tehran also warned that if Israel attacks the country’s nuclear sites, Iran would use its missiles to bomb Israel in retaliation.

Nobel Prize Winner and Human rights activist, Elie Wiesel, called for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be arrested when he visits foreign countries because of his calls for genocide.

“We should arrest Ahmadinejad when he comes to the world,” Wiesel, 81, a Holocaust survivor and professor at Boston University said. “Ahmadinejad is president of an ancient and great country,” Wiesel said. “He said there was no Holocaust, but that he will produce one. And he even says how … 6 million Jews in Israel, he wants to destroy them.”

Wiesel, who survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and Buchenwald in Germany also stressed the importance of not forgetting, even though we may want to. “The body fights memory,” Wiesel said, because it is sometimes about pain. But, he added, “history without memory can’t exist. Civilization without memory can’t prevail.”

Referring to the Holocaust, Wiesel said: “If this tragedy were to be forgotten, it would be a tragedy not just for the Jewish people, but for the entire world.”

Sources:
Only Democracy for Iran (July 9, 2010). Ahmadinejad questions 'fairy tale' Holocaust, denies being anti-Semite.
http://www.onlydemocracy4iran.com/2010/07/09/ahmadinejad-holocaust-is-a-anti-semite-fairy-tale/

Haaretz.com (July 9, 2010). Ahmadinejad questions 'fairy tale' Holocaust, denies being anti-Semite.

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Khameini and Ahmadinejad Pursue a Messianic Course, but there is a Rift Among Iran's Clerics

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa on his Web site, demanding that the Shiites obey him as the ultimate spiritual leader on earth. In his words, Khameini said he was the earthly "deputy" of both the Prophet Mohammad and the Hidden Imam, who is the 12th imam Shiites believe will return to earth one day to save the world.

Some theologians believe no one can claim to represent the Prophet on earth. There is now a full blown rift between Khamenei and many of the conservative and traditional clerics who once supported him, or at the very least, did not publicly oppose him.

It was Khameini who declared Ahmadinejad the winner of the June 12, 2009, disputed presidential election.

Brother of Iranian Leader Khamenei Warns Against Second Islamic Revolution by Messianic Circles Led by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad

In a May 2010 speech at the Organization for Honoring the Imam Khomeini, Hadi Khamenei, the younger brother of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, harshly criticized his brother's policy of allowing members of the messianic Hojjatieh circle to infiltrate the ranks of the regime – in clear contravention of the instructions of Islamic Revolution founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In 1980's, the Hojjatieh circles in Iran, which held that no Islamic government should be established until the Hidden Imam (the Shi'ite messiah) appeared, clashed with Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1983, the Hojjatieh announced that they were stopping their activity due to his vehement religious opposition to their views, and thereafter they remained on the political and religious margins in Iran. After Ali Khamenei's appointment as supreme leader, and especially after the rise to power of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they began to act in the open again, and today, their influence on the regime's centers of power is significant. Ahmadinejad is apparently affiliated with the Jamkaran group within the Hojjatieh, which is led by his mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi.

Hadi Khamenei's criticism of his brother, Supreme Leader Khamenei, focuses on the leader's legitimization of the messianic Hojjatieh circles in their penetration of regime circles, their inculcation of their messianic outlook, and their takeover of the centers of power. These messianic circles make frequent statements about the imminent appearance of the Hidden Imam; for this, they are criticized by Iran's traditional ayatollahs who reject the legitimization and politicization of the messianic stream in the Shi'a.

In his speech last month, veteran oppositionist Hadi Khamenei warned against a messianic coup within the Islamic Revolutionary regime, by the very same figures who had in the past opposed the path of Islamic Revolution founder Ayatollah Khomeini.

It should be noted that Hadi Khamenei's daily newspaper Hayat-e No was shut down by the regime in December 2009 because of its opposition to Ahmadinejad.

Sources:
Abdo, Geneive and Aramesh, Arash (August 6, 2010). The widening rift among Iran's clerics. International Herald Tribune.

Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] (June 19, 2010). Brother of Iranian Leader Khamenei warns against second Islamic revolution by messianic circles led by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4387.htm

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MAD AHMAD

A Psychologist's Blog


Author's Introductory Note: I cannot emphasize enough that people who do evil, which obviously means genociders and those who plan to commit genocide, MUST be contained and punished by our legal, law enforcement and military systems. Yet this does not mean that the psychological/mental health professions do not have to take a stand about their behaviors. If definitions of normal and abnormal behavior also are signposts of our culture as to what behavior is healthy and desirable and what behavior is undesirable, we better identify the violents and killers as unhealthy and abnormal. This does NOT mean that genociders are to be treated with the sympathy we give the ill, nor that they may plead for the privileges of the ill to escape punishment. I will clarify this philosophical-semantic conundrum in a more learned article in the future. Right now, we have the immediacy of facing a mad leader calling for the mass destruction of another people. He can not be honored as anything but mad.

"Madness and insanity," I was told in my training as a clinical psychologist at an excellent American university and at first-rate government and university psychiatric hospitals, "are characterized by delusional statements and florid distortions of known reality." In my time people making bizarre statements – I think one example in one of my textbooks read something like, "The Jews control the world and they are trying to poison the water in this city"—were sent to a "Bellevue" or psychiatric hospital Emergency Room. They usually ended up with bona fide diagnoses like "paranoid schizophrenia" (granted, an overused diagnosis that was proven to be dispensed promiscuously but that's another matter, and there really are plenty of correctly diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics).

The exception seems to be that if you have an identity as a political leader, you can pretty well get away with saying anything. Not so if you are a general, director of an engineering project, a medical professional, or the head of a stock exchange. But if you're a political leader you can say pretty much what you want about whomever—blacks, whites, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Indians, Orientals—you name them. And you can say whatever terrible things you want to say about other countries and nations and political movements and ideologies. In fact you can even express the opinion that so and so deserve to be wiped out, you can predict that they will be, and you can even barely hint that you are going to be the one who ensures their fate.

Note that all of the above refers to what is getting said before any actions are taken --how the world reacts to actual mass murder and genocide is a further subject in its own right.

The fact that a political leader ostensibly can say anything also spills over into a degree of allowance of nutty statements by lesser persons so long as they contextualize their mad distortions of reality in motifs and formats that are political-like. Thus, "There was no Holocaust," or "The Jews were entertained by music in Auschwitz," or "There were no gas chambers and/or no mass crematoria"; or "There never was a genocide of the Amenians," or "The Ottoman Turks protected and provided for the Armenians who were expelled into the desert"; or "The Serbs did not commit genocide of the Bosnian Muslims." It's pretty much OK to say any of these things so long as you are making a good wholesome statement of bigotry and racism, and not just shouting off that the world is flat for your own evident personal craziness.

So was I trained correctly in psychology and psychiatry? Do politics really transcend differentiating between the sane and insane? Do the intense political positions many of us take, where in our passions we call leaders whom we hate but who are perfectly sane "mad" and other such names, inadvertently create an impenetrable camouflage for the quite real madness of anointed leaders?

Should we allow political position and power to exempt leaders – many of them dangerous to the nth-- from judgments of very real failures of their basic reality testing?

Or is it possible that good old common sense and good old down to earth medical science and psychological science, know that if even a president or a king or a prime minister say things like, 'Everyone knows that 9/11 was done by the USA to itself in order to generate support for the Zionist state,' the person saying so is mad. Very mad. And dangerous.

He will not be the first head of state who is crazy dangerous with a serious potential for mass murder and genocide.

The same leader, flushed with one of his triumphal successes of addressing the UN in New York – a sad contemporary substitute for once intoxicating rallies in Nuremberg, I wonder -- reported elatedly that "the aura of the Hidden Imam enveloped him during his speech." That kind of statement too was clearly noted in my clinical training. Doesn't it count with national leaders?

I have never thought that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many others of their ilk, for all that they functioned quite successfully and even brilliantly, were models of mental health. They were, obviously, evil twisted people with a distinctly sick compulsion to torture and kill masses of people. And it is entirely clear that such leaders can build up with them a complex web of many other leaders as well as many ordinary people who will execute any and all evil with them, but it is also clear that their strong and charismatic mad leadership is a key to much of the ensuing pageantry of mass murder by all of those who get into the ugly tragedy of murdering millions.

It is our so-called cultures and civilization that have been too timid and paralyzed with political correctness and over-subservience to anointed leaders' authority and power so that we miss the diagnosis until it is tragically and wrongfully much too late.

For those who worry that I am giving evil people an out of being "sick" and deserving of sympathy, forget it. The first clearcut treatment of evil is to contain it and punish the evildoers.

- Israel W Charny

The author, Israel W Charny who is the Editor of GPN, is otherwise also a clinical psychologist who devotes half of each day to a practice of psychotherapy – which he defines as "existential-psychoanalytic-systemic—with the hyphens the most important part of the description." He is a retired Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy, from Tel Aviv University where he founded and directed graduate and postgraduate programs in Family Therapy, and then the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he was invited to found and direct a postgraduate Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy.

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What If: Obama and Biden against Hitler, or….Chamberlain and Halifax against Ahmadinejad?

Elihu Richter

The parallels to the run-up to WWII are striking. During this period, Hitler bullied and bluffed as the world cringed. Suppose Obama and Biden had been in power in the US at the time. What would they have done?

As Ahmadinejad struts into the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty meeting, Obama and his Administration continue to dither. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are racing towards nuclear capacity and ever more potent missile delivery systems, stepping up their genocidal incitement and support for terror proxies, and suppressing dissidents. Obama's clenched fist has withered into a limp wrist.

The parallels to the run-up to WWII are striking. During this period, Hitler bullied and bluffed as the world cringed. There was the Anschuss of Austria in March 1938, the Munich Agreement in Sept 1938, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on Aug 23 1939, one week before Hitler invaded Poland and Chamberlain’s UK declared war.

Let’s do a little counterfactual history to examine the roles of yesterday’s appeasers and today’s engagers. Then the actors were Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who were pitted against Hitler and his Axis. Today they are Barack Obama and Joseph BIden, his all influential Vice President, and formerly the powerful chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today's Hitler wannabe is Ahmadinejad, along with his Axis of Genocide and Genocidal Terror.

Fact and counterfact
Counterfactual history is the academic buzz term for playing “what if."

The idea is to simulate how the big players in past crises would act in current crises, or conversely, to simulate how players in current crises would have -- or should have --acted in past crises. Because we know the results of decisions in past crises, we can make some educated guesses about the results of such decisions in similar crises today. Counterfactual history implies there are lessons from yesterday's then and there to today’s here and now ---, and vice versa. As a medical doctor with history as a hobby, I think it would be interesting if historians were to diagnose prognose, prescribe, make house calls, and tell us when our leaders could be sued for malpractice.

Hitler and Ahmadinejad:
Both Hitler and Ahmadinejad mobilized hate language to dehumanize, demonize and delegitimize. A copy of Mein Kampf in Iranian is the centerpiece of the show window in the bookstore alongside the entrance of Iran's Foreign Ministry, but Ahmadinejad's explicit calls for destruction of Israel surpass Hitler's euphemisms. Hitler annexed Austria, forged alliances with Italy and Japan, and then signed the notorious non-aggression pact with Russia, while discreetly supporting indigenous Nazi front movements in Norway, the Netherlands and France. Ahmadinejad’s diplomats have shrewdly built an axis of genocidal and genocidal terror, which now includes Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, with Venezuela as a possible enabler, protector and accomplices, and they are drawing Turkey into Iran's orbit. Ahamadinejad, like Hitler, disarms appeasers and doubters, by making eloquent and moving peace speeches every now and then--while intimidating the world.

In the meantime, the clock on Iran is ticking. (Today the two big US players are Barack Obama and Joe Biden, now as powerful as Cheney was in Bush Jr's first term.)

Obama and Chamberlain
Google gives more than 600,000 hits for the phrase “Obama and Chamberlain.” Obama sees himself as a mediator healing the rift between clashing civilizations---Christian and Muslim; Chamberlain saw himself as saving the world from war. Like Chamberlain, he has been socially progressive, humane and enlightened, but does not support groups subject to conquest, (Tibet), and projects a low profile towards human rights abuses of repressive regimes (the state orchestrated political starvation campaigns in North Korea and the repression of the Falun Gong in China, and the protestors of a stolen election in Iran). Some historians say he appeased to buy time for a weak England to get ready. He has backed away from supporting dissidents in Iran---e.g., his famously closing the New Haven Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. I would not be surprised to discover that he sees himself as a future Secretary General of the UN, as the Grand Conciliator.

Obama’s administration has even turned a blind eye to Iran’s support, equipping and training of groups attacking civilians and US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This prolonged dithering in response to loss of American lives goes far beyond Chamberlain’s appeasement, which abruptly came to an end on Sept 1 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland, a faraway place for Brits. Chamberlain then declared war on Germany--to honor the UK's treaty with Poland. Would Obama have done so, had he been the UK’s Prime Minister, and if so how long it would have taken him to decide?

We have forgotten Chamberlain's progressive domestic policies, but remember his appeasement and its disastrous consequences. But Chamberlain was a faster learner than Obama has been until now. Right after returning from Munich, he ordered increases in the British defense budget, manufacture of aircraft and heavy weaponry, and distribution of gas masks to the population for the war he knew was coming. And after all, he went to war immediately in response to Hitler's invasion of Poland. This was the very war which appeasement sought to avoid, but in fact brought on. By contrast, Obama's dithering has bought time for an originally weak Iran to raise the ante against the U.S.



Biden and Halifax
Many know about Chamberlain, but few remember Lord Halifax, his Foreign Secretary, and perhaps the strongest proponent of appeasement. Halifax was a pillar of British society and a deacon in the Anglican Church. After replacing Anthony Eden, who resigned in February 1938 in protest against Chamberlain’s appeasement, he supported the Munich Agreement with Hitler to destroy Czechoslovakia. Halifax also meddled in French politics, toppling Leon Blum, who had his doubts about appeasement. Daladier, Blum’s replacement, was a more compliant type, who went along with Chamberlain's Munich deal.. During the 5 days of Dunkirk, when Hitler was sending out generous peace feelers, Halifax wanted to take England out of the war.

Just before Dunkirk, after backbenchers led a rebellion to force Chamberlain to resign, there was a touch-and-go period in which Halifax could have become Prime Minister instead of Churchill. Had he been the man, one shudders to think what would have happened to Europe, and Western Civilization. Thanks to Churchill, all the rest is history.

Is Joseph Biden today’s Lord Halifax as it were? A liberal Democrat on domestic issues when in the Senate, as the powerful Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he voted against sanctions against Iran. Most notably, he blocked the Senate from considering a 2007 House of Representatives Resolution calling upon the US Government to use the tools of international law to indict Ahmadinejad for his incitement to genocide, support for terror, and illegal development of nuclear weapons. He has called for dividing up Iraq, which would have turned over its western side to Syria and its eastern side to Iran. Biden is said to be the Iranian Mullah’s favorite senator. He has been silent on their brutal repression of dissidents.

What would Chamberlain and Halifax have done to confront the Iranian threat? They probably would have appeased. What would Obama and Biden have done against the Nazi threat had they been in charge of the UK? They might have engaged, endorsed the Munich agreement, and wobbled on the UK treaty to join Poland when Germany attacked it. Would Biden, had he been in the US Senate in the dark days of the Battle of Britain, have advised FDR, to go along with Joe Kennedy to abandon the UK?

Joe Biden’s influence may be one reason why President Obama’s clenched fist has withered into a limp wrist. JB Kelley has used the term “preemptive cringe” to describe “engagement.” In fairness to Chamberlain and Halifax, some historians say their appeasement during the mid 1930’s right up to Sept 1939 and even after, was based on a realistic perception of the UK’s military weakness and unpreparedness and the need to buy time.

Furthermore, the world then lacked a coherent body of historical experience on the furious evil energy which drives modern megalomaniac totalitarian genocidal regimes. The tools of international law to counter genocidal threats did not exist yet. There was no UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, or a body of cases in criminal international aw, Universal Jurisdiction, or a Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court specifying that incitement to genocide is a crime against humanity.

Today, Obama and Biden would expected to know what happens when such regimes are appeased, a.k.a. engaged. Yet the two have been distinguished by their failure so far to make use of the tools of international law against genocide and its incitement. The world developed these tools precisely to prevent such threats. There can be no more compelling case for applying these tools than Iran's incitement to genocide, its support of genocidal terror and its suppression of human rights. Since incitement to genocide leads to genocide, Obama and Biden's indifference to the dehumanizing hate language of Ahmadinejad and his associates means they have become complicit bystanders.

I suggest that the foregoing counterfactual comparisons suggest a harsh counterintuitive conclusion: Obama and Biden deserve lower ratings than Chamberlain and Halifax.



What if: The bit players
Others have bit roles in this exercise in What If's. William Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich writes about how Geoffrey Dawson, the editor in chief of the London Times, killed reports from his correspondent in Berlin on the Nazi brutality inside Germany. He was protecting Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. I was reminded of Dawson’s role by the postures of the editors of the NY Times in US and Haaretz in Israel, both the Daily Bibles of the liberal classes. Recall the NY Times Roger Cohen’s description of the vibrancy of Islamic democracy in his pre-election reports on Iran just before the regime's brutal crackdown on dissidents. David Landau, the former editor of Haaretz, suppressed reports of the investigation of Sharon’s corruption so as to not to jeopardize the withdrawal from Gaza. He remains notorious for telling Condoleeza Rice that Israel needed to be raped for its own good.

Let’s get back to Anthony Eden, who quit in protest against Chamberlain’s appeasement. Is Robert Gates trying to play Obama’s Eden? As John Bolton has pointed out on Fox News, Gates’ leaked memo to Obama warning that the US government has no Iran policy is the classic Washington DC CYA maneuver for paving the way for a resignation.

Is there a Churchill in the House?
Churchill towers over all, but only in hindsight. In real time, he was regarded by his peers as a failed military strategist after the Dardanelles disaster in World War I. A political opportunist who ditched the Liberals for the Conservatives, he had been on the outs for some 20 years, having the reputation of a brilliant, witty, boozing loose cannon. A non-apologetic imperialist, he was hated by Indians for calling Gandhi a dirty little Indian. An opponent of the socialists, he was hated by trade unionists for crushing the strike of coal workers. But he instinctively sized up Hitler as a monster of apocalyptic evil.



As the genocide scholar Robert Melson has written, had Churchill been Prime Minister in 1938, he might have’ gone to war to protect Czechoslovakia, and perhaps would have toppled Hitler. But thousands of British soldiers would have been killed. He would have been hauled before a Parliamentary Commission of Investigation, and hounded out of office. Opponents would have said he had no business pursuing a reckless military adventure so far away from home.

Suppose Obama and Biden had been in power in the US at the time. Would they have distanced themselves from Churchill? There were plenty of reasons to do so. The US had not recovered from the effects of the Depression’s second hit in 1937. Anti-Semitism was endemic. The US population was isolationist. Would Obama and Biden have orchestrated some backchannel moves to topple Churchill, perhaps with the help of Joe Kennedy. I infer this “what if" scenario” from their failure to counter Iranian terror raids in Iraq, Syrian support for terror, their lukewarm support for the dissidents in Iran, their shutting off of funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and the cold reception for the Dalai Lama. Add to this list the appeasement of Syria as well as Iran, the wobbliness on North Korea, and their attempts to bludgeon Netanyahu and destabilize his government.

Today’s Joe Kennedy could be Martin Indyk. And John Bolton may be today’s John Kennedy, who later wrote the book, Why England Slept.

Back then, the air was thick with appeasement, Now it is thick with engagement. But appeasement produced a chain reaction, ending with the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, after Stalin panicked, and felt that the Western allies would do nothing if Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Churchill would have thundered against the dangers of the United States pandering to the enemies of freedom and democracy and dumping its friends.

I thank Professors Israel Charny and Elliot Berry, Gregory Stanton and Jacob Neusner and Dr. Yael Stein, Richard Hellman and David Bedein for encouragement, criticisms' and feedback, and Dr. Joel Fishman and Professor Richard Landes for incisive editorial comments.

Professor Elihu D Richter MD MPH, an environmental epidemiologist, is Editor and Director of the GPN World Genocide Situation Room and Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. He is also Head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine and former head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has published and lectured on the use of public health models for the prediction and prevention of genocide.

Please click here for a fully referenced pdf version of this article.

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NEWSPEAK Issue 3

A Canadian Professor Speaks in Defense of Ahmadinejad

Suit for Denial of Serb Genocide

B’nai Brith Canada Condemns UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for Publishing Blood Libel of Israeli Organ Harvesting in an Official UN Document

Hamas Deputy Minister of Religion Says Jews are Bacteria, not Human Beings

Tiananmen Square? Ask Any Tour Guide in China: Nothing Dramatic Ever Happened

China Says it Will Keep Censoring the Internet Read full text......

9/11 Was a Big Lie Says a World-Class Liar of Our Time, Ahmadinejad

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday called the official version of the September 11 attacks a big lie used by the United States as an excuse for the war on terror, state media reported. Ahmadinejad's comments, made during an address to Intelligence Ministry staff, come amid escalating tensions between the West and Tehran over its disupted nuclear program. He called the attacks a complicated intelligence scenario and act. He has questioned the official U.S. version of the attacks before, but this is the first time he ventured to label it a lie."

Source: Haaretz English Edition [AP Story] (March 7, 2010). Ahmadinejad dismisses 9/11 attacks as a 'big lie'.

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Defining Jew-Hatred Down: The curious response to Ahmadinejad at the U.N.

Matthias Küntzel
Hamburg-based Political Scientist
Author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11

It is a topsy-turvy world: At the United Nations – an organization born out of the struggle against Nazi Germany and intended to embody the lessons of the Holocaust – a head of state openly spouts anti-Semitic propaganda in an address before the General Assembly. Granted, he takes the trouble to denounce “Zionists” and avoid the word “Jew,” but this dodge is transparent to any student of the Nazis. His speech is greeted with acclaim, and neither the U.N. secretary general nor any Western head of government bothers to object. The media are mostly silent.

It happened on September 23, and the speaker was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A familiar figure at the U.N., Ahmadinejad has a history of using his turn at the rostrum to sermonize about his yearning for the return of the Shia messiah. This time, he went further, drawing inspiration also from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Zionists, he told the assembly, are the eternal enemy of “the dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people” (this is the English translation of his remarks on the U.N. website). Although they are few in number, the Zionists “have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the United States in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”

Indeed, so influential are the Zionists around the world that even “some presidential or premier nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.”

In particular, even “the great people of America and various nations of Europe” are caught in the clutches of Jewish power: They “need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.”

Yet liberation is near. “Today,” according to Ahmadinejad, “the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse. There is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters.”

For Ahmadinejad, of course, such talk is nothing new. Addressing the international Holocaust deniers’ conference in Tehran in December 2006, he declared (in a speech translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI) that “the Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated”—freed, that is, from the “acquisitive and invasive” minority he “outed” in New York as the real power behind Western governments.

The sentiment is not so far from that expressed in a Nazi directive of 1943: “This war will end with anti-Semitic world revolution and with the extermination of Jewry throughout the world, both of which are the precondition for an enduring peace.” Just as Hitler’s utopia, his “German peace,” required the extermination of the Jews, so the Iranian leadership’s “Islamic peace” is conditioned on the elimination of Israel.

Ahmadinejad’s performance elicited applause from his audience and a warm embrace from the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a 75-year-old Catholic priest and holder of the Lenin Prize of the former Soviet Union. D’Escoto is a close friend of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, in whose government he served as foreign minister from 1979 to 1990. This is the same Ortega who, four weeks after the Tehran Holocaust deniers’ conference, joined President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in welcoming Ahmadinejad to Latin America as a “a president willing to join with the Nicaraguan people in the great battle against poverty.”

Equally noteworthy was the lack of reaction to Ahmadinejad’s U.N. performance in Western capitals—with three exceptions. The German and French foreign ministers criticized Ahmadinejad’s “blatant anti-Semitism,” and Barack Obama expressed disappointment that the Iranian president had been given “a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views.” Otherwise Ahmadinejad’s misuse of the U.N. to spread anti-Semitic propaganda didn’t even register as a provocation.

On September 23, the very day of his speech, Ahmadinejad was Larry King’s guest on CNN. King offered the Iranian president an hour-long opportunity to hold forth as he pleased.

The next day, in an article for Salon, the Iran specialist Juan Cole of the University of Michigan took Obama to task for his comments on Ahmadinejad. Cole quoted a single sentence from the U.N. speech – one in which Ahmadinejad criticized the United States – while ignoring the anti-Semitic passages. “Larry King got at the true Ahmadinejad,” Cole insisted, whereas Obama “fell into the trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and anti-Semitic ones.”

Then on September 25, Ahmadinejad visited the New York Times. In the interview published the next day, he rehearsed his anti-Semitic notions without protest from interviewer Neil MacFarquhar. “Zionism,” Ahmadinejad explained, “is the root cause of insecurity and wars. … What commitment forces the U.S. government to victimize itself in support of a regime that is basically a criminal one?”

This was in striking contrast to the Times’s outrage in 2003 when Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia delivered an anti-Semitic speech. Back then the Times wrote:

“It is hard to know what is more alarming—a toxic statement of hatred of Jews by the Malaysian prime minister at an Islamic summit meeting this week or the unanimous applause it engendered from the kings, presidents and emirs in the audience.”

Not only that, but the Times concluded its editorial with a sharp rebuke to the European Union:

“The European Union was asked to include a condemnation of Mr. Mahathir’s speech in its statement yesterday ending its own summit meeting. It chose not to, adding a worry that anti-Semitism displays are being met with inexcusable nonchalance.”

The Times is doing now what it so recently held to be “inexcusable.”

Sixty-three years after Auschwitz, then, has anti-Semitism entered “acceptable” discourse? Or is the New York Times actually fooled by a rhetorical trick? Where Mahathir was crude enough to denounce the machinations of “the Jews,” Ahmadinejad attacks only “the Zionists.” He says, “Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world.” He says “the Zionists” have for 60 years blackmailed “all Western governments.” He says, “The Zionists have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors.” Perhaps this is why he is hailed as an anti-imperialist star.

But the Iranian president uses the term “Zionist” in precisely the way Hitler used the term “Jew”: as the embodiment of evil. Even if the Iranian regime tolerates the presence of a Jewish community in Tehran, whoever holds Jews responsible for all the ills of the world – whether calling them “Judases” or “Zionists” – is propagating a potentially genocidal creed.

In fact, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have gone hand in hand for over 80 years, not only in the annals of Nazism but also in the intellectual foundations of the Iranian revolution.

In 1921, the future Nazi ideology chief Alfred Rosenberg published a book entitled Zionism, Enemy of the State. In 1925, Hitler likewise attacked Zionism in Mein Kampf, warning that “a Jewish state in Palestine” would only serve as an “organization centre for their international world-swindling, … place of refuge for convicted scoundrels and a university for up-and-coming swindlers.” Or does this reading of Hitler fall into Juan Cole’s “trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and anti-Semitic ones”?

As a scholar who can read the writings of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the original, Cole is surely familiar with Khomeini’s anti-Semitism. And yet he passes over this anti-Semitism in silence, just as he passed over the offensive passages of Ahmadinejad’s speech.

Up until the revolution of 1979, Khomeini was entirely open in his choice of words. “The Jews … wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world,” he wrote in 1970 in his major work, Islamic Government. “Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that … they may one day achieve their goal.” In September 1977, Khomeini declared: “The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite, they are devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and still they are not satisfied.” The quotation comes from an official compilation of Khomeini’s works published in Tehran in 1995.

Starting in 1979, however, Khomeini substituted the word “Zionist” for “Jew,” while leaving the fundamental anti-Semitism unchanged. The mullahs’ regime disseminated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion throughout the world. In 2005, an English edition of the Protocols was displayed by Iranian booksellers at the Frankfurt Book Fair—the very year Khomeini’s fervent admirer Ahmadinejad was elected president.

Today, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is espoused in Tehran with all the zeal that fuels religious war. As Ayatollah Nouri-Hamedani, one of the regime’s leading religious authorities, declared in a statement published in 2005 by the official Iranian news agency, Fars (but quickly pulled from the Fars website, according to MEMRI): “One should fight the Jews and vanquish them so that the conditions for the advent of the Hidden Imam are met.” What makes the Iranian nuclear program so dangerous is not the technology, but the religious and anti-Semitic mission that the regime would use it to pursue.

“Tehran … is pregnant with tragedies,” Israeli president Shimon Peres told the U.N. General Assembly the day after Ahmadinejad’s appearance. “The General Assembly and the Security Council bear responsibility to prevent agonies before they take place.” And not only the General Assembly and the Security Council—but Larry King, the New York Times, and the rest of us as well.

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State-Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide in Ahmadinejad’s Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent

  

Irwin Cotler
Member of Canadian Parliament
Law Professor (on leave) at McGill University

The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and that of the genocides that followed is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement. Today, the epicentre of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. In it, one finds a toxic convergence of advocacy of the most horrific of crimes embedded in the most virulent of hatreds. The threat is dramatized by parading in the streets of Teheran a Shihab-3 missile draped in the words “Israel must be wiped off the map” while assembled thousands are exhorted to chants of “Death to Israel.” The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, makes it clear that the annihilation of Israel is the basic premise upon which the State operates. The incitement to genocide thus committed is not only the prelude to a preventable tragedy; it is a crime in itself under international law.

In other cases of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide – the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Balkans, Darfur – the genocides have already occurred. Only with respect to Ahmadinejad’s Iran can we still act so as to prevent the genocide foretold from occurring. State Parties to the Genocide Convention have not only a right but a responsibility to prevent genocide and to punish direct and public incitement to genocide. As a former Minister of Justice in Canada who was involved in the prosecution of Rwandan incitement, I can state that the precursors of incitement in the Iranian case are more threatening than were those in the Rwandan one. It is astonishing that this criminal incitement has yet to be addressed, and that the immediate and practical steps available under international law are yet to be taken.

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Genocide is the most insidious and destructive threat known to humankind. It is the ultimate crime against humanity—the unspeakable crime whose name one should shudder to mention; a horrific and unspeakable act whereby state-sanctioned incitement transforms hatred into catastrophe. The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and that of the genocides that followed is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred. As international tribunals have recognized, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. These are the chilling facts of history. This enduring lesson finds contemporary application in the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide whose epicenter is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Indeed, today, in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, one finds the toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes embedded in the most virulent of hatreds. It is dramatized by the parading in the streets of Teheran of a Shihab-3 missile draped in the words “Israel must be wiped off the map” while the assembled thousands are exhorted to chants of “Death to Israel.” In all other cases of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide – the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Balkans, Darfur – the genocides have already occurred. Only with respect to Ahmadinejad’s Iran can we still act so as to prevent the genocide foretold from occurring.

Genocidal Incitement in Ahmadinejad’s Iran: The Evidence

We have been witnessing for some time a state-sanctioned incitement to genocide whose epicenter is Ahmadinejad’s Iran. I take care to distinguish Ahmadinejad’s Iran from the peoples of Iran who are themselves increasingly the target of the Iranian regime's massive repression of human rights—a fact underscoring the principle that countries that violate the rights of their own citizens will surely violate those of neighbouring countries. Ahmadinejad’s Iran is increasingly resorting to incendiary and demonizing language, including epidemiological metaphors reminiscent of Nazi incitement. Moreover, calls by the most senior figures in the Iranian leadership for the destruction of Israel are also frighteningly reminiscent of calls for the Rwandan extermination of Tutsis by the Hutu leadership. The crucial difference is that the Hutus were equipped with machetes, while Iran, in defiance of the world community, continues its pursuit of the most destructive of weaponry: nuclear arms. Iran has already succeeded in developing and testing a long-range missile delivery system for that purpose, recalling former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s infamous declaration that “the employment of even one atomic bomb inside Israel will wipe it off the face of the earth.” The hate propaganda and incitement emerging from Ahmadinejad’s Iran lamentably follows a pattern established in past genocides, as victims are delegitimized, dehumanized and demonized before their intended extermination. Indeed, hate speech fitting each of these categories is both public and pervasive in Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

Genocide is a crime almost unfathomable in its cruelty and its scale. It is impossible to perpetrate against victims that appear, to the genocidaires, as worthy of any respect. As genocide scholar Helen Fein notes, potential victims must be seen in the minds of the genocidaires as beyond “the boundaries of the universe of obligation.” The first step, therefore, is to classify the “other” – the targeted State and its people – as illegitimate and unworthy of that universe of obligation. The delegitimization of Jews and Israel in Ahmadinejad’s Iran finds expression in the rhetoric treating Israel as a foreign and alien entity that has no rightful place in the Middle East. It is exemplified by the comments of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (“What are you? A forged government and a false nation. They gathered wicked people from all over the world and made something called the Israeli nation.”) and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, in front of the United Nations General Assembly, labeled Israel a “criminal” and “forged” regime of “murderers” created on “other people’s land by displacing, detaining, and killing the true owners of that land.”).

Dehumanization

Against this context of the singling-out and delegitimization of the alien “other” Israel, the next genocidal precursor is the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews through the use of epidemiological metaphors reminiscent of the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust and the dehumanization of Tutsi during the genocide in Rwanda. In the genocide-fostering process, biological euphemisms are not just rhetorical tools; they seek to preclude the intended victims from even being considered human to begin with. Thus, just as Jews were labeled as “vermin” by the Nazis and the Tutsi were labeled as “cockroaches” in Rwanda, so too have Israelis and Jews been dehumanized and labeled in Iran as: a “filthy germ” and “savage beast;”

• a “cancerous tumour;”

  
  

• a “stain of disgrace” on the “garment of the world of Islam;”

  
  

• a “stinking corpse;”

  
  

• a “cancerous bacterium;”

  
  

• stuck in a “cesspool created by itself and its supporters;”

  
  

• “like cattle—nay, more misguided;”

  
  

• a “rotten, dried tree;” and

  
  

• an “unclean regime.”

Demonization

Related to the dehumanization process is the demonizing process. Under this paradigm, the would-be victims of genocide are portrayed as inspirations of the devil. Dehumanization coupled with demonization accomplishes the dual purpose of making the would-be victim appear not only to be less than human (if not sub-human), but also to appear more threatening, thereby providing a warrant for genocide. Demonized, Israelis and Jews are portrayed in Ahmadinejad’s Iran as “the true manifestation of Satan.” They are “bloodthirsty barbarians” with “no boundaries, limits, or taboos when it comes to killing human beings,” who are fighting a “war against humanity.” Age-old conspiracy theories – according to which a secretive cabal of Jews brings horror and tragedy to the world – are resurrected. Before the international community at the United Nations, President Ahmadinejad declared that “the dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists… [who] have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has taken this demonizing conspiracy theory even further by declaring that: [T]he occupation of Palestine [by the Jews] is part of a satanic design by the world domineering powers, perpetrated by the British in the past and being carried out today by the United States to weaken the solidarity of the Islamic world and to sow the seeds of disunity among us.

Ultimately, the strategy of demonization seamlessly leads to prophecy and incitement, and President Ahmadinejad declared: A Zionist organization with 2,000 [members] and with 7,000 or 8,000 activists have brought the world to a state of confusion. Let me tell them that if they themselves do not wrap up Zionism, the strong arm of the peoples will wipe these germs of corruption off the face of the earth.

From State-Sanctioned Hate to State-Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide

Empowered by the culture of hate it has planted with impunity, Ahmadinejad’s Iran feels no need to leave its genocidal intentions as an unspoken conclusion. To the contrary, the calls for Israel’s destruction by Iranian officials are explicit and without ambiguity. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has thus publicly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Despite international condemnation, when given the opportunity to retract his statement, President Ahmadinejad chose instead to add to their weight, remarking: “My words are the Iranian nation’s words.” In his call for annihilation, President Ahmadinejad referenced the former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. On June 2, 2008, speaking at the shrine where the Ayatollah is buried, President Ahmadinejad repeated: [Ayatollah Khomeini’s] ideal is about to be materialized today... The Zionist regime is in a total dead end and, God willing, this desire will soon be realized and the epitome of perversion will disappear off the face of the world.

It is not only President Ahmadinejad who calls for the annihilation of Israel. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, makes it clear that this is the basic premise upon which the State operates, stating on different occasions that “[i]t is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region,” “[t]here is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state,” and “we are on a collision course with the occupiers of Palestine and the occupiers are the Zionist regime. This is the position of our regime, our revolution and our people.” Repeated calls for the destruction of Israel, and “prophecies” of its demise, all work to normalize the idea of genocide to the Iranian population. Articulated in the context of demonizing rhetoric implying a clash of civilizations, calls for the annihilation of the Jewish State begins to appear not only moral and justifiable, but natural as well. Chillingly, all this incitement appears to be sinking into the popular consciousness. President Ahmadinejad’s audience responds to his words instantly with chants of “Death to Israel.” And the media follows the Government’s lead in inciting genocide as well. For instance, Resalat, an Iranian newspaper, mirroring a Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006, wrote in an editorial: The nation of Muslims must prepare for the great war, so as to completely wipe out the Zionist regime, and remove this cancerous growth. Like the Imam [Ayatollah] Khomeini said: ‘Israel must collapse’.

Delegitimization

Genocidal Incitement in Ahmadinejad’s Iran: The Remedies

The failure to stop past genocides, as in the unspeakable, preventable genocide of Rwanda, caused the then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan to lament in 2004 on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide: “We must never forget our collective failure to protect at least 800,000 defenseless men, women and children who perished in Rwanda 10 years ago. “Such crimes cannot be reversed. Such failures cannot be repaired. The dead cannot be brought back to life. So, what can we do?” The answer is for the international community to pay heed to the precursors of genocide in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, and to fulfill its responsibilities under international law. For what is so often ignored – or surprisingly is not even known – is that State Parties to the Genocide Convention have not only a right, but a responsibility to enforce the Convention—a landmark treaty that recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, and which obliges its signatories to act to prevent genocide, and to punish direct and public incitement to genocide. Indeed, as one involved as Minister of Justice in Canada in the prosecution of Rwandan incitement, I can state that the aggregate of precursors of incitement in the Iranian case are more threatening than were those in the Rwandan one. The remedies in international law are established and ready to be exercised. They include: The criminal incitement to genocide by President Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders should be referred to the appropriate UN agencies. It is astonishing that this criminal incitement has yet to be addressed by the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, or any other body of the UN.

State Parties to the Genocide Convention should initiate an inter-state complaint against Iran before the International Court of Justice for its “direct and public incitement to genocide” in violation of the Genocide Convention, to which Iran is also a State Party.

Ahmadinejad and other designated Iranian leaders should be placed on a watchlist by concerned countries, preventing their entrance as “inadmissible persons.”

State Parties to the Genocide Convention should call upon the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to refer Ahmadinejad’s genocidal incitement to the UN Security Council as a matter threatening international peace and security, pursuant to Article 99 of the UN Charter. Such action is not a mere policy option; it is an international legal obligation. Voices against intolerance and impunity must work to initiate one or more of the above options. As the United Nations General Assembly was told last fall, “The rallying cry ‘Never again!’ can only be used so often before it loses credibility.” The time to act is now.

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The Honourable Irwin Cotler, P.C., O.C., is a Canadian Member of Parliament and Special Counsel on Human Rights and International Justice to the Liberal Party. The former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Cotler is a leading legal scholar and expert on human rights. He founded and chairs the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition, led the Canadian delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide, and co-founded the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Cotler is currently on leave from the Faculty of Law at McGill University, where he is a law professor and chair of InterAmicus, an international human rights advocacy centre. Cotler has also been called “Counsel for the Oppressed” for his work on behalf of prisoners of conscience such as Andrei Sakharov, Nathan Sharansky, and Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Cotler has been at the forefront of international efforts to hold Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account for state-sanctioned incitement to genocide and is among the over-50 internationally-renowned jurists, genocide experts and survivors endorsing “The Danger of a Genocidal, Rights-Violating and Nuclear Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition.”

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