Irwin Cotler's Renewed Call to Action Against Iran's Nuclear Threats

The Responsibility to Prevent Petition

GPN Editorial Blog
GPN calls upon the leaders of the world to act on the recommendations of the Cotler Report, without further delay. The world is now facing a plateau effect, similar to what happened in the Darfur campaign in 2004 when protest and publicity failed to get governments to do their job: to use whatever was necessary, including force, to stop the Janjaweed. Some analysts of genocide studies and efforts at prevention believe that in the Darfur campaign we have protestors who make believe they are doing something when in fact they are going through the motions to stop the genocide. We call this genocide shadowboxing. Real history prevails and the killing continues. The mission of those concerned with genocide prevention is to make governments do their job. We need now to bring Ahmadinejad and his accomplices to justice for their very real vitriolic incitement to genocide, their suppression of human rights, to stop their support for terror in other countries, and to prevent, preempt or foil Iran's march toward making nuclear weapons. The clock is ticking.

Introduction to Professor Cotler's Report

GPN is posting a revision of Professor Irwin Cotler’s 200-page report, “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition.” This report updates the earlier Responsibility to Prevent Petition which GPN posted in its first webmag in February 2010 (Issue 1).

Cotler, a former Minister of Justice in the Canadian government, stated that Iran is in violation of four distinct threats: the nuclear, state-sanctioned genocidal incitement, the support for genocidal terror, and the massive repression of human rights. The world has been taking action only against the nuclear threat, while ignoring the Iranian regime’s other offenses. In a Jerusalem press conference held in July, Cotler called for more “threat specific” sanctions to be placed against Iran. The keynote speakers at the July press conference were Cotler, former Chief justice Meir Shamgar of the Israel High Court of Justice, Professor Amnon Rubinstein, former Minister of Justice, and Bassam Eid, the Palestinian Human Rights Activist.

“We want to sound the alarm and wake up the international community,” Cotler said. “The Western belief is that if we turn a blind eye, we will be better off,” said former Israel High Court of Justice president Meir Shamgar, who also spoke at the conference. “This is exactly what occurred in the 30s.”

The report, endorsed by 100 scholars, former world leaders, parliamentarians and human rights activists, contains witness testimony and documentary evidence of each of the four threats. Among the signators are:

• Per Ahlmark, former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden


• Professor Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins University


• Jose Maria Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain


• Prof Yehuda Bauer, Hebrew University


• Sen. Romeo Dallaire, former Senator Canada and Force Commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda


• Prof. Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University


• Kamal Hossain, former Minister of Justice and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan


• Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Cairo


• Anthony Julius, University of London


• Irshad Manji, New York University


• Salih Mahmoud Osman, Sudanese Member of Parliament and winner of the Sakharov Prize in human rights


• Prof. Walter Reich, George Washington University


• Prof. Sheri Rosenberg, Cardozo School of Law


• Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, Interdisciplinary Center in Herziliya and former Minister of Education in Israel


• Soli Sorabjee, former Attorney General of India


• Prof. Gregory Stanton, former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars


• Prof. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Laureate


• Sein Win, Prime Minister of the Burmese government in exile

The full list of signators with details of their identities can be found in the Executive Summary.

The report proposes an 18-point road map for action. It calls upon the international community to heed their obligation and stop such violations before they begin. Incitement to genocide is not only considered an early warning sign of potential genocide, but also is a prosecutable crime in itself.

In this issue of GPN, we also post a GPN timeline for incitement to genocide by Ahmadinejad, his predecessors, and his associates. In upcoming issues, we will post the timelines for Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, its suppression of human rights, and genocidal terror. All predate Ahmadinejad.

“Iran has emerged as a clear and present danger to international peace and security, to the Middle East and regional stability, and increasingly and alarmingly so, to the rights of its own people,” Cotler said. “Unless we have… a comprehensive set of remedies and sanctions, for the fourfold critical mass of threats, we will not begin to properly hold up Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account.”

“There had been a critical mass of precursors to genocide in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, constituting thereby not only the prelude to a preventable tragedy, but a crime in and of itself under international law,” said Cotler. “Simply put, Iran’s leaders have already committed a crime of incitement to genocide.”

Cotler said violations could be prevented by limiting foreign visits from Iranian leaders and by freezing their assets. If governments terminate their contract with companies doing business with Iran, these leaders will stop getting money in their pocket, he said, which would help to stop the repression of the Iranian population. However, Cotler warned that in order to succeed, countries like the US need to stop sending “mixed and disturbing messages to the corporate world regarding doing business in Iran.” According to the report, the US government gave $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran while sanctions were in place. “The United Nations of Security Council Resolution has been honored more in the breach then in the observance,” Cotler said. “So in the matter of sanctions, not only is it crucial that they be adopted, but that they be enforced and done multilaterally.”

Human rights violations including deaths and serious injuries in Iran attracted world attention for a short while after the disputed 2009 elections, but the outrage over violence to Iranian citizens has died down and new violences are an everyday event and are ignored.

Cotler noted that Iran has the highest number of juvenile executions in the world. From 2005 until 2008, the country executed 26 offenders, making up 80 percent of total amount in the world.

Click here for the full report

Click here for the Executive Summary

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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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Sakharov to Obama: Notes on the First Anniversary of the Crushed Iranian Protest Movement

Elihu D Richter

Two years ago, strolling down Jerusalem‘s Aza Street, I picked up a worn yellowed thin paperback copy of Sakharov Speaks, a collection of the writings of the nuclear scientist who founded the Human Rights Committee in the Soviet Union in 1970. The pages may be yellowed but the words come to life decades later. The first anniversary of the Iranian government's brutal suppression and crackdown of protests against the rigged results of its national elections has come and gone. The protesters, it appears, have been cowed, for the time being, and the outside world still appears, for the most part indifferent. What Sakharov had to say back then about the Western world’s response to Soviet repression is a striking indictment of the world’s response to the Iranian crackdown and repression now.

In the 1950’s, Andrei Sakharov was awarded the Stalin Prize for his theoretical work on the hydrogen bomb. Appalled by the dangers of nuclear arms race and the heavy handedness of the Soviet regime, he became a dissident devoted to human rights. He and his wife Elena Bonner were later exiled to Siberia. To show support for Sakharov, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975. In an interview with a foreign correspondent, Sakharov was asked if what was then called rapprochement would lead to democratization of Soviet Society, and what would happen if there was rapprochement without democratization.

Here is what Sakharov had to say, somewhat paraphrased and edited. “Rapprochement in which the West, in effect accepts the Soviet Union rules of the game would be dangerous, because it would not really solve any of the world's problems and would mean simply capitulating to real or exaggerated Soviet power. It would mean an attempt to trade with the Soviet Union, buying its gas and oil, while ignoring all other aspects. Such a development would be dangerous because it would have serious repercussions inside the Soviet Union."

Furthermore, “It would contaminate the whole world with the anti -democratic peculiarities of Soviet society….As a result,..,the world would become disarmed and helpless while facing our uncontrollable bureaucratic apparatus.”

Here is his punch line: “Rapprochement, were it to proceed totally without qualifications on Soviet terms, … would pose a serious threat to the world as a whole.”

Now let’s do a simple thought experiment in history and current events. Take the word rapprochement and replace it with engagement. Do the same for Soviet Union and Iran.

Back then, Western governments listened to several resolute individuals, notably Senator Henry Jackson, and the world stood up to threats posed by Soviet tyranny, repression and mischief making. Sakharov called for adoption of the Jackson Amendment which linked trade to unrestricted emigration -later Basket 4 of the Helsinki Accords. The Soviets, desperate for Western technology, accepted the accords. The emigration triggered by Helsinki Accords started the ball rolling towards the loosening up and eventual break-up of the Soviet system in the late 1980's and early 1990’s.

And we see the results. Just a few weeks ago, as I was writing this piece, a Russian student (in our program for international students) came in to browse through Sakhavov’s book as I dug up some references for her work on air pollution in Ashkelon, an Israeli city. Another Russian student is doing a project on air pollution in Bet Shemesh, a satellite city outside Jerusalem. A third is doing a PhD on road injury epidemiology in Vladimir, the first capital of old Russia, where Raul Wallenberg was imprisoned. Today, world leaders continue to ignore groups standing up for human rights of dissidents in Iran. They fail to invoke the existing tools of international law to indict Ahamadinejad for incitement to genocide, and have done little to stop the spread of metastasis of genocidal Islamic jihadist incitement, now, dangerously becoming embedded in Turkey. (A complete text of the updated version of the Cotler Responsibility to Prevent Petition is published in this issue of GPN. Professor Irwin Cotler, MP of the Canadian Parliament and former Attorney General, was the human rights lawyer who defended Sharansky against his Soviet persecutors.)

So if we substitute Iran and fundamentalist Islamist society in general for the Soviet Union in Sakharov's statement this is what we could get for our era:
'It would contaminate the whole world with the anti-democratic peculiarities of Iranian and Islamist society. As a result, the world would become disarmed and helpless. If engagement were to proceed totally without qualifications, on Iranian or Islamist terms, it would pose a serious threat to the world as a whole.'

Many Western elites, academics, and intellectuals appear to be succumbing to the assault on the core values of respect for life and human dignity. In the name of multiculturalism, they condone such assaults on these values. Last November, over dinner in an elegant restaurant in Lodz, an epidemiologist, the holder of a prestigious chair in a major Scottish university, after holding forth on Israel’s evils, declared that the values of multiculturalism led him to excuse stoning in Iran. This remark, made over wine and pasta, came just after he described in detail his Holocaust tour of the Lodz ghetto. Despite his declared commitment to positivism as a basis for prioritization and decision making in public health, he was uninterested in the statistic that 614 of every 615 Muslims killed since WW2 fell in wars, genocidal conflicts, massacres, and terror attacks between Muslims.

So far, the policies of the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Obama.seem to represent everything Sakharov warned against. The clenched fist has become a limp wrist. Obama so far has projected a sense of distance, himself from those who are democratic and free, and has continued to appease tyrants and rogue states who assault life and respect for life, the most basic of all human rights.

Sakharov was clairvoyantly prophetic about what he called rapprochement-aka engagement-- without democracy resulting in the contamination of the West with the peculiarities of those opposing its values. The contamination has reached into the Nobel Committee - and I suggest President Obama himself.

Sakharov was a lonely prisoner of conscience exiled to Siberia when the Nobel Committee awarded him for protesting repression. It continued the tradition in 1989, when it awarded the prize to the Dalai Lama. Last year, the Committee awarded Obama the same prize, even though his messages have telegraphed a high degree of indifference to state repression, brutality and evil in Iran, North Korea and other members of what I call the Axis of Genocide and Genocidal Terror. So far, Obama appears to have been a minimizer of threats of genocide who shadowboxes with evil.

So the first year anniversary of the Tehran crackdown is the time to heed the quiet words of fire on the yellowed pages of the book I bought on Aza Street. They hold ever more today. Today Iran continues to brutally suppress dissidents and members of non-Islamic religious groups. It executes minors, imprisons homosexuals, and tortures and harasses political dissidents, whose gallantry were saluted in a conference on Iran hosted by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East last November in Cleveland. Its leaders incite to genocide, equip and train genocidal terrorists, and illegally pursue the development of nuclear weaponry. Iran has become the epicenter of an axis of incitement to genocide, genocidal massacres and genocidal terror. The members of this axis are North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Gaza, with Turkey teetering on the brink and Hamas and Hezbollah serving as satellite subcontractors. The West, notably Europe, averting its gaze, now seems to lack the will to confront the Islamist threat, and bows and kowtows to the cults of death, darkness and medievalism, perhaps more sinister than the threats posed by the Soviets. It has become hesitant in standing up for its core values: respect for life, the dignity of the individual, democracy and unfettered inquiry, and the rights of women.

Failure to counter the epicenters of jihadist suppression of human rights, incitement to genocide, genocidal massacres and genocidal terror has already, to paraphrase Sakharov’s words, contaminated the whole world with the anti -democratic peculiarities of [Iranian Islamist] society.

Will we wake up? The clock is ticking.

Elihu D. Richter MD MPH (Jerusalem Israel) was director of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and its Injury Prevention Center until retirement. He now is Head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and is Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem and head of the World Genocide Situation Room of GPN Genocide Prevention Now.

I thank Drs. Yael Stein, Ed Beck, and Joel Fishman for comments and encouragement.

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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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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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Iranian Journalist Sentenced to 13.5 Years Imprisonment

Maziar Bahari, a journalist of Iranian origin who lives in London, has reported that an Iranian court has sentenced him in absentia to 13.5 years imprisonment and to 74 blows of a cane. Bahari, who writes for Newsweek from London said that “the conviction tells more about the Iranian regime than about me.” The charges against Bahari include humiliating the President (Ahmadinejad) and the Supreme Leader (Homeini) and for disrupting public order. Bahara filmed a demonstration in Teheran that developed into a violent confrontation between the security forces and the public demonstrators. “I was told that to report such an event incites the public to rebel against the government.”

On June 21, 2009 Bahari was taken out of his bed to jail. In a gripping detailed report of his imprisonment, tortures and release published in Newsweek, Bahari describes "I would later discover that I had been picked up by the intelligence division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Before the June election, this unit of the Guards was little known. The IRGC reports directly to Khamenei and has been growing dramatically more powerful. Many suspect that the Guards rigged the election. Certainly they led the crackdown that followed.

"IRGC intel is now responsible for Iran's internal security, which means that its rampaging paranoias have suffused the regime. There remain players within the system who can make rational decisions about Iran's international interests; if there weren't, I would still be in jail. But the Guards are exacerbating the Islamic Republic's worst instincts, its insecurity and deep suspiciousness."

Bahari spent nearly four months in jail but was released on bail of 3 billion rials ($300,000) and allowed to leave the country to join his British wife in London in October.

Bahari's sentencing occurred on the same day that five Kurdish activists were hanged following their conviction of membership of armed opposition groups and involvement in bombings. The five were sentenced to death in 2008 after they were found guilty of "Moharebeh," a term Iran uses to describe a major crime against Islam and the state. Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was quoted as warning the executions were part of an "unfair trend" against activists following the election.

Sources:
The Epoch Times, Israeli edition (May 18-26) Weekly issue #162. (Translated from the Hebrew)

Bahari, Maziar (November 30, 2009). 118 days, 12 hours, 54 minutes. Newsweek.
Please click on the following link to read the whole article http://www.newsweek.com/id/223862

The Seattle Times (May 12, 2010). Iran sentences Newsweek journalist in absentia http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2011833720&zsection_id=2003905675&slug=apmlirannewsweekreporter&date=20100511

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Iran Expanding Nuclear Construction Dramatically

A Senior Iranian official said that his country planned to build 10 more nuclear enrichment plants, 2 within the next year, and had identified nearly 20 sites for the facilities. The official, Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, also said the plants would use a new kind of centrifuge, but he did not provide details.

Sources:
New York Times, (February 23, 2010). Iran plans a large increase in enrichment facilities.
The Raw Story (February 22, 2010). Iran to 'hide nuclear plants inside mountains'.
Aljazeera News (November 30, 2009). Iran to build more uranium plants.

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Incitement to Genocide in the Year in Review 2009: With Special Empasis on Jihadist Antisemitism and Iran's Threats to Destroy Israel

  

Elihu D Richter, Yael Stein, Alex Barnea

Incitement and hate language, notably medical metaphors, especially originating from figures of power, official media, places of worship or school texts, are recognized predictors of genocide. In 2009, Jihadist propagation of antisemitic dehumanizing hate language drives a new world-wide axis of genocide. Leaders of Iran sharply increased their use of dehumanizing hate language and incitement, especially throughout the first half of 2008, but after the disputed election, there was a decline. Turkey was also teetering on the brink of propagating state-sanctioned antisemitism. In the Muslim world, Saudi preachers, Egyptian mass media and Palestinian Authority, Hamas in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, the leadership of Fatah in the West Bank in 2009 remain major producers of inflammatory hate language in media, mosques and school books, stigmatizing Jews and Christians. Currently European based antisemitic incitement is coming from an odd coalition of extreme left, extreme right, Islamist, and some human rights groups. The failure of the Goldstone Commission to relate explicitly and with sufficient force to Hamas' incitement to genocide, under Iran's support, was a fundamental error of omission. This legitimizes the use of law to divert attention away from incitement as a crime against humanity.

Incitement on the the Internet for recruiting candidates for genocidal terror is the most alarming trend in 2009. Terror groups now use the Internet to propagate their messages of hate, grievance, resentment and anger to recruit perpetrators from all over the world. They use powerful religious Jihadist motifs of sacrifice, faith and martyrdom to reach out and make contact with susceptible individuals, and create a climate of opinion which is sympathetic and supportive towards terror.

In Sudan, the situation in Darfur showed that genocide can occur without public incitement. Rape victims reported use of racial epithets by Janjaweed marauders. In Kenya, rival tribal factions used text messaging to incite to killing, which the government later countered with its own text messaging to stop the incitement.

The US Genocide Prevention Task Force decided against making recommendations to set up surveillance networks for tracking hate language and incitement on the grounds that they do not necessarily lead to genocide. The "Responsibility to-Prevent" Petition of Irwin Cotler [GPN Issue 1, February 2010], calling upon the world community to indict the Iranian government leaders for their incitement to genocide, promotion of genocidal terror, and illegal pursuit of nuclear enrichment and suppression of human rights, is the template case for the use of the existing tools of international law to prevent genocide.

Introduction:

Words kill. Use of dehumanizing hate language and incitement (HL&I) all too often predicts, initiates, promotes, and catalyzes genocide. HL&I are “out there,” definable and detectable. Since the Nuremberg trials and the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide and its Punishment (UNGC), HL&I are punishable as Crimes against Humanity. The foregoing suggests the hypothesis that prevention of hate language and incitement can substantially contribute to the prevention of genocide.

We give a bird's eye review, admittedly selective and incomplete, of who was inciting to genocide and what was being done to stop it in 2009. We put particular emphasis on hate language and dehumanization.

Hate language refers to terms which are used to stigmatize, demonize or dehumanize groups defined by their national, ethnic, religious, racial, or political identity. Dehumanization in particular refers to hate language which includes metaphors-usually from public health and medicine-- which induce disgust, revulsion and hate for the other.

Since the Armenian genocide, perpetrators have used dehumanizing metaphors to prepare their followers to become killers, rapists, and plunderers or to silence bystanders.

Background

Hate language without incitement and direction is present everywhere—and by itself, is generally not subject to legal prosecution . Racist, religious epithets and expressions of bigotry directed towards the other are endemic the world round, at the kitchen table, in the barroom, the locker room, (i.e., Archie Bunker), the market place, and the board room. The messages may be explicit, euphemistic or coded. The past century has taught us that when leaders of movements or governments use explicit pseudo-medical and epidemiologic metaphors, such as microbes, filth, cancer, typhoid, and rats to dehumanize victim groups, it is prudent to regard such language as an urgent warning sign of imminent genocide—especially when it comes from figures of power, or appears in official media, places of worship or school texts. Because official use and spread of such language signals the speakers' intent, its use and spread is the case for action--- now.

Jihadist Antisemitic Genocidal Incitement

In 2009, there is a strong case for recognizing that the jihadist propagation of antisemitic dehumanizing hate language and incitement drives a new world-wide axis of genocide. Indeed, we can hypothesize that the term “jihad” is all too often a euphemism for inciting to genocidal campaigns of extermination, intimidation, conquest, conversion, and subjugation directed against vulnerable non-Muslim groups, cultures, states, religious, political and ethnic groups, both within and on the borders of the Muslim world.

Groups carrying out such incitement seek to undermine and destroy regimes within their own countries which they consider to be subordinate to the West, corrupt, and wavering in faith. Although its antisemitic terminology derives from Nazi propaganda,jihadist genocidal antisemitism and anti-Christian groups feed on religious notions of exclusivity rather than racist motifs.

Mein Kampf is a best-selling book in the Muslim world. Its 80 year run translates into a multi-generational inducting impact. The reach of jihadist genocidal incitement is now global, reaching out beyond the entire Muslim world as far east as the Philippines and Indonesia, south into Africa , and west into Europe, as well as into Latin America, and the university campuses of North America.

Iran

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has been the most aggressive state propagator of this genocidal jihadist incitement. Its leaders’ repeated calls for destruction of Israel using motifs straight from Mein Kampf, a copy of which in Persian has been reported to occupy center space in the display window of the bookstore at the entrance gate of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Such incitement fuses motifs of martyrdom with dehumanization, demonization and delegitimization and ensures intergenerational perpetuation of hate through the decades. Israeli Jews --“Zionists,” Jews everywhere, Christians, Bahai, Zoroastrians, and Yezedis are the major non-Muslim groups subject to potential threat.

Iran’s state-sponsored hate language is particularly dangerous because it goes hand in hand with action directed towards achieving these means. Iran's progress towards nuclear enrichment and the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, two terror organizations explicitly committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, and its suppression of human rights within its own borders, all imply a disrespect for basic human values and ethics, primarily respect for life and human dignity for all.

Leaders of Iran sharply increased their use of dehumanizing hate language and incitement in the wake of a very faulty new intelligence estimate in 2007 that Iran was not nearing nuclear weapons capacity and especially throughout the first half of 2008, but there was a slight falling off in the Spring of 2009 after the disputed June election. The publicity surrounding the release of the Cotler Responsibility to Prevent Petition which calls for indictment of the leaders of Iran for their incitement to genocide, illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons, support for genocidal terror groups and suppression of human rights of dissidents and minorities—an exercise in naming and shaming in the court of public opinion, may also have helped.

But, as we write these words, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has just declared, on 28th Feb 2010, at an "International Conference on National and Islamic Solidarity for Future of Palestine," that "the Zionist regime is the origin of all the wars, genocide, terrors and crimes against humanity and that they are the racist group not respecting the human principles." He declares that the state of Israel is an "insult to the entire humanity" and that, “World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region." In his speech, Ahmadinejad used all the motifs described above – incitement and hate language: threats, demonization, delegitimization, double standards and dehumanizing hate language.

Turkey: Teetering on the Edge

As 2009 ended, there were major concerns that Iran had drawn Turkey into the orbit of state-sanctioned antisemitism. Telecasts of recycled versions of ancient mythic stories about Israelis as baby snatchers and child killers were alarming warning signs of an extremely dangerous scenario. GPN’s directors GPN [Issue 2, April 2010] have put out an Open Letter to the Presidents of Turkey and Israel, warning that Turkey is "playing with fire" by recycling these inflammatory motifs.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli-Arab Conflict

In the Muslim world, in 2009 Saudi preachers and Egyptian mass media remain major producers of inflammatory hate language in media mosques, and school books in stigmatizing Jews and Christians. Many Saudi support Wahabi mosques around the world and are part of a global network for exporting these motifs to the faithful and converts.

Inside the Palestinian Authority, Hamas in Gaza and, to a lesser extent, the leadership of Fatah in the West Bank are major propagators of incitement and hate language, notably in their texts, television broadcasts, and mosques. According to Arnon Groiss of Impact, a project which monitors textbooks in the Middle East for incitement, Israel is portrayed as a power that harms its immediate environment, as enumerated in a list of more than twenty-five crimes, beginning with its very establishment, through the occupation of Palestine both in 1948 and 1967, expulsion of the Palestinian people, oppression of those under its control, aggression against neighboring Arab states, massacre of Palestinians, assassination of Palestinian leaders, destruction of the Palestinian economy, house demolition, stealing Palestinian land and water, breaking of Palestinian territorial unity, attempts at obliterating Palestinian national identity and heritage, usurpation or desecration of Palestinian Christian and Muslim holy places, and finally, Israel’s responsibility for social ills such as drug addiction in Palestinian society, the meager participation of Palestinian women in economic activity, family violence, and so forth. Both the PA and Hamas extol suicide terrorists as martyrs, the PA names streets and public places in their memory, and its Prime Minister visits and honors families of terrorists involved in killing Israelis. MEMRI The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education - IMPACT-SE and Palestinian Media Watch have documented this incitement to destroy Israel and, in the case of sources in the wider Arab world, all Jews. Such incitement undermines any prospects for a political settlement, because it ensures intergenerational transmission of the motifs of dehumanization, demonization, defamation and delegitimization. In response, Palestinians in turn charge that Israeli settlements are themselves incitement.

Incitement Upscale: Upscale versions of this incitement of delegitimization, often in the form of mis- or dis-information---notably following Operation Cast Lead, have penetrated mainstream organizations, most notably the UN Human Rights Councils, many European based NGOs . 27 (89%) out of 33 resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council are condemnations of Israel. The statements of the Goldstone Commission and various human rights organizations that Israel’s policy in Cast Lead were intentionally to kill, destroy, starve or punish or deny access to medical care to the Gazan Population has been intensively analyzed and refuted. However, there is intense debate, inside Israel itself and in the world at large, where many are calling for a high-level commission by Israel to investigate excesses and possible war crimes within the overall military operation.

European Based Incitement
Currently European based antisemitic incitement is coming from an odd coalition of extreme left, extreme right, Islamist, and upscale human rights groups. The images and casualty reports on Israel’s Cast Lead attack after 8 years of rocket attacks by Hamas and other terror groups on civilian populations resulted in an unprecedented upsurge of soft upscale versions of incitement, characterized by motifs of demonization, disinformation, delegitimization and double standards. A case in point is Mads Gilbert, a physician whose visit to Gaza was funded by Norway, who disseminated massive amounts of false information to support his claims that Israel intentionally sought to commit kill non–combatants in Gaza. Major political figures including the Foreign Ministry of Norway and Scandinavian journalists were at the forefront of these attacks. Israeli based NGOs –Physicians for Human Rights Israel and B'tzelem, in concert with international NGO’s, notably Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International also contributed to an atmosphere of delegitimization. These groups, using the terminology of human rights, also issued critiques of several actions by Israel but in the process promote misinformation and condemnation of Israel’s basic right to defend itself. Observers have noted these campaigns represent an extension of the Durban I strategy, of a coalition of human rights groups, who mapped out a long-term strategy of lawfare to delegitimize ”Zionism” and “Israel”.

At the same time, extreme neo-Nazi groups continue to incite against Muslims as a group, as well as other “outside” groups, especially in Europe.

The explosion of jihadist Islamist incitement on the Internet for recruiting candidates for genocidal massacres, genocidal terror and hate crimes is the most alarming trend in 2009. According to Steven Emerson, there are tens of thousands of such sites on the web, as compared with only tens which promote moderation and tolerance for others. Self-Radicalization, the term used by Secretary Thomas Gates, does not convey sufficient attention to the importance of massive external environmental exposures producing endemic rises in the background level of hate and alienation. Are the recent episodes involving Major Nidal Hassan , the Underwear Bomber and “Jihad Jane” –all reportedly enticed by such websites-- the tip of a larger iceberg of endemic haters?

Another alarming development in the jihadist threat is the use of what some propose to call "lawfare" or using the language of human rights and anti-racism to legitimize perpetrators and promoters of genocidal terror as “resistance fighters,” and to delegitimize those who fight to protect themselves from the violence it produces. Interestingly, many times we see an inversion, when perpetrators accuse their victims of doing exactly the same wrongs they themselves have perpetrated. Failure of the Goldstone Commission to relate explicitly and with more force to Hamas' incitement to Genocide, which is a crime against humanity, and to Iran's massive support for such incitement, which was certainly "out there" during the commission's field visits to Gaza, was a fundamental error of omission. This omission has helped to legitimize the use of lawfare to divert attention from these crimes and is a misuse of the international legislative platform defending human rights.

Genocide Below the Radar Screen without Public Incitement:

Darfur: The fact that open public incitement increases risks for genocide should not blind us to the fact that genocide can occur without it. In Sudan, it is in the interest of the government to camouflage the genocidal intentions its President stands accused of in the ICJ. Even so in Darfur, in 2009, John Hagan called attention to the use of racial epithets by Janjaweed marauders, as reported by rape victims. Yet, the Sudanese regime invokes denial, itself a form of incitement, declaring that that the total victims of what it has designated a civil war exceeds 10,000 , and is careful to avoid any public state sponsored use of epithets.

Kenya: In Kenya, a tense situation remains in the aftermath of the 2008 election. In the wake of that election, rival tribal groups began carrying out massacres and plundering villages of their rivals. In the aftermath, attention was drawn to the fact that perpetrators on both sides were using text messaging before the election to incite followers, often in vernacular dialects and away from urban centers. Later the government itself used text messaging to counter the incitement. Mainstream news media based in urban centers, ignored such incitement because it was considered local news.

The Kenyan story tells us that surveillance networks for tracking incitement need to penetrate deeply into rural areas, especially in the run-up to election campaigns in countries with unstable political systems, traditional ethnic and tribal divides which parallel socio-economic divides, and winner-take-all outcomes.

Sri Lanka: Mass Killings without Blatant Incitement

The Sri Lanka Sinhalese government’s military campaign, crushing the rebellion by the Tamilese tigers resulted in 20,000 dead and the confinement of 200,000 refugees in detention camps who only now are given a measure of freedom of mobility. But, as in Darfur, at this time, evidence is not readily available on the use of open public incitement and hate language in the past year. Research is necessary to determine if there was incitement below the radar screen, what its content was, at what level it existed, and how pervasive it was.

World Responses to Hate Language and Incitement in 2009

Responses and Interventions. Many European countries have laws against incitement on their books and enforce them, although claims are made that while they are used to criminalize those challenging incitement, they do not sufficiently protect those at physical danger from exercising legitimate free speech attacking ideas and beliefs, as opposed to speech demonizing groups.

In 2009, The US Genocide Prevention Task Force decided against making recommendations to set up surveillance networks for tracking hate language and incitement on the grounds that they do not necessarily lead to genocide. This omission seems inexplicable given the history of the role of hate language in mobilizing perpetrators and desensitizing bystanders during the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide. Using the misplaced logic of the Task Force, one could recommend against legal and educational campaigns against smoking on the grounds that not all smokers get cancer and not all persons with cancer were smokers.

The US Government has so far not followed through on action to implement a 2007 House of Representatives Resolution (HCONRes21) calling for it to initiate action towards indicting President Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide. It still has not moved forward to recognize its region wide endemic scope and dangers. It has not addressed the enduring dangers posed by intergenerational transmission of motifs of dehumanization, demonization and delegitimization.

In the absence of legal and other countermeasures, will open and public incitement to genocidal jihadist antisemitism have a free pass? And if so, will there be more hate crimes and genocidal massacres involving the likes of Major Nidal Hassan, the underwear bomber and Jihad Jane?

Although the first version of the Road Map calls for an end to incitement in the Israeli-Arab conflict, neither the UN, the US or the EU have so far taken any measures to set up a surveillance network for defining and tracking state-sponsored public incitement in political statements, media, school texts or places of worship. At present, a US State Department funded committee has begun performing an examination of incitement in texts of Israel and Palestinian Authority. One of the GPN editors, Elihu Richter, has been invited to participate in its Scientific Advisory Panel. The methodological challenges in carrying out such an examination include the need for definitions, inclusion and exclusion criteria and selection and sampling strategies, and validation of the sensitivity and specificity of newly developed search engines. The challenge will be to determine not only if these texts are free of negative incitement, but also if they will promote core values of respect for life and human dignity.

The most important positive event of 2009 was the release of the Cotler Responsibility to Prevent Petition, signed by more than 60 major figures in international law and human rights, calling for indictment of the President of Iran for incitement to genocide, promotion of genocidal terror, pursuit of nuclear enrichment and human rights abuses. This document serves as the tipping point in a long campaign of naming and shaming to delegitimize state-sanctioned incitement to genocide before there is genocide. There is evidence to suggest that its release was followed by a reduction in the Iranian leadership’s use of dehumanizing hate language---although sadly, as 2010 progesses, this reduction appears to have been transient.
Now, the clock is ticking.

The authors thank Israel Charny, Marc Sherman, David Lisbona and Irwin Cotler for comments and encouragement.

In the next issues of GPN, the senior author will present extended writing on incitement to genocide including an essay entitled, "Can We Prevent Genocide by Preventing Incitement?"


Elihu D Richter MD MPH is Editor of GPN, Director of the World Genocide Situation Room and Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. He is Professor and 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.

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.”

Alex Barnea, 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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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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Irwin Cotler Releases Petition to Act Against Iran's Genocidal Incitement

  
The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran:
The Responsibility to Prevent Petition

On January 6 2010, Irwin Cotler released a new international resolution that calls on governments and the UN to take immediate and massive diplomatic and economic action against Iran. The petition is entitled The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran. Cotler presents the case for indicting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for his incitement to genocide, human rights abuses, promotion of terror, and development of nuclear weapons in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions.

At a press conference in Jerusalm, Cotler accused the Iranian government of violating international law regarding nuclear weapons development, incitement to genocide, state-sponsored terrorism and human rights. Other speakers at the press conference included Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, who spoke from the US, British MP Denis MacShane who spoke from London, Bassam Eid, executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and Prof. Suzanne Stone of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. The petition includes a "road map" of sanctions and remedies that the world should apply against the Iranian government to force it to cease its alleged violations of international law.

Professor Irwin Cotler, a member of the Canadian Parliament and a former Attorney General of Canada, is one of the world’s leading experts and practitioners of human rights law. He has served on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Sub-Committee on Human Rights and International Development, as well as on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In 2000, he was appointed Special Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the International Criminal Court.

He has defended dissidents and prisoners of conscience, most notably Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky, Jacobo Timmerman, Said-Eddin Ibrahim from Egypt, Nelson Mandela from South Africa, Maher Arar and others. In Israel, he has been a spokesman for the immigration rights of the Falashamura.

"For sanctions to be effective," Cotler said, "What is needed is the will to act, and what has been absent so far has been political will with respect to each of the threats." Dershowitz warned that "today is a true test of whether international law will survive and whether the rule of law will prevail... This is the time. This is the moment in which the international community must act to prevent genocide." The speakers stressed that taking action against Iran was not an option but an obligation of the international community. Neither Cotler nor Dershowitz ruled out the possibility of military action against Iran, but said that, before reaching that point, all peaceful attempts to curb the Iranian government must first be tried.

"Iran has already committed the crime of incitement to genocide," said Cotler. "We do not have to wait and should never wait for the actual beginning of atrocities before taking action."

Cotler is travelling all over the world to discuss his call for sanctions with various world leaders. Recently, he has visited Austria and Germany, and he said he planned to put special emphasis on 13 countries, including South Africa, the US and Canada, which have a special connection to the issue. He said his own political party in Canada, the Liberal Party, had endorsed the petition and that the Canadian parliament was due to release a statement on the matter. Others who have signed the petition to date include Per Ahlmark, former deputy prime minister of Sweden; Kamal Hossain, former minister of justice and minister of foreign affairs of Bangladesh; John Turner, former Canadian prime minister; author Elie Wiesel; Romeo Dallaire who was the UN Commander in Rwanda; Gregory Stanton, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; and Sein Win, prime minister of the Burmese government in exile. A full list of signators will be found in the linked pdf text of the resolution. GPN will be reporting on further signators to the petition in coming issues.

The Cotler petition extends and expands previous briefs prepared by Justus Weiner of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs and Gregory Gordon of University of North Dakota. GPN believes that the petition serves as a template for advancing the temporal locus of action based in genocide law from proof of intent after the event to deterrence based on predict and prevent before the event. The petition draws on the Genocide Convention, the Nuremberg Trials, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the Rwandan precedents for prosecuting incitement to genocide.

The Cotler resolution was widely reported in the world press.

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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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