Inconvenient genocide - by Caroline Glick

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation?

Caroline Glick..
Column One/JPost..
07 April '16..

The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.

And now the Christian communities, which like the Jews, predate Islam, are being targeted for eradication.

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation? True, after years of deliberately playing down the issue and denying the problem, the Obama administration is finally admitting it exists.

Embarrassed by the US House of Representatives’ unanimous adoption of a resolution last month recognizing that Middle Eastern Christians are being targeted for genocide, the State Department finally acknowledged the obvious on March 25, when Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Islamic State is conducting a “genocide of Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ites.”

Kerry’s belated move, which State Department lawyers were quick to insist has no operational significance, raises two questions.

First, what took the Obama administration so long? Persecution of Christians in Iraq began immediately after the US-led coalition brought down Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the rise of Islamic State in 2012, the process of destroying the Christian community went into high gear. And now these ancient communities are on the brink of extinction.

In Iraq, Christians comprised 8 percent of the population in 2003. Today less than 1% of Iraqis are Christians. In Syria, the Christian community has lost between half and two-thirds of its members in the past five years.

One of the appalling aspects of ISIS’s deliberate, open targeting of Christians for destruction is how little resistance it has received from local Sunni populations. As Raymond Ibrahim from the David Horowitz Freedom Center has scrupulously documented, the local Sunnis have not stood up for their Christian neighbors, who have lived side-by-side with them for hundreds of years. Rather, in areas that have been conquered by ISIS, the local Sunnis have collaborated with their genocidal masters in raping and murdering Christian neighbors, plundering their property, destroying their churches, and driving them from their ancestral homes.

Although precise data is hard to come by, it is clear that thousands of Christians have been slaughtered. Thousands of Christian women and girls have been sold as sex slaves in ISIS slave markets, subjected to continuous, violent rape and beatings. Nuns and priests have been enslaved, crucified, mutilated, kidnapped and held for ransom, as have lay members of Christian communities. Christians have been burned alive.

For years, the administration said that the persecution doesn’t amount to genocide because according to ISIS’s propaganda, Christians are allowed to remain in their homes if they agree to live as dhimmis – that is, without any human rights, and subjected to confiscatory taxation.

But as Nina Shea from the Hudson Institute has reported, these claims were shown to be false in Mosul, Nineveh and other places where ISIS has claimed that such practices were instituted.

The jihadist genocide of Christians isn’t limited to Iraq and Syria. Boko Haram – ISIS’s affiliate in Nigeria – is undertaking a systematic campaign to annihilate Christianity in Africa. ISIS’s affiliates in Sinai and Libya have similarly targeted Christians, staging mass beheadings and other monstrous acts.

And of course, a region needn’t be under direct ISIS control for Christians to be targeted for destruction. The Easter massacre in Pakistan was further evidence that wherever radical Islamists gain power, they use it to murder Christians.

And as Larry Franklin from the Gatestone Institute noted in a recent article, the exodus of Christians from the Palestinian Authority is the direct consequence of deliberate persecution of Christians by the PA.

Given the prevalence of Christian persecution, why is the West – which is overwhelmingly Christian – so reticent about mentioning it? And why are Western leaders loathe to do anything to stop it? There are two ways to end genocide. First, you can defeat those conducting it on the battlefield.

If you destroy the forces conducting the genocide, then the genocide ends.

BTW, Iran is Also Funding Hamas Preparations for War

...That means that contrary to Kerry’s belief about Iran having no plans in place to eliminate Israel, the entire process that will unfold from the deal is part and parcel of just such a plan. The only difference is that unlike past efforts, what will follow will happen while it has become America’s diplomatic and business partner.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
11 August '15..

When asked repeatedly by Republicans about Iran’s repeated threats to destroy Israel during Congressional testimony about the Iran nuclear deal, Secretary of State John Kerry sighed and looked at his questioners the way an exasperated teacher regards dumb students. Yes, he admitted, they say that but he explained patiently, he’s seen no evidence of them planning anything to put that into effect. Kerry repeated that answer, though no doubt without the look of disdain on his face, to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg saying “I haven’t seen anything that says to me” that their “ideological confrontation with Israel at this moment” [my emphasis] will “translate into active steps.” For all intents and purposes, President Obama says the same thing when he dismisses threats to Israel from Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even if he just published a book outlining his plans. But, as Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency made public today, Iran is taking active steps toward war with Israel. The Israelis revealed that information obtained from a prisoner as well as from other sources showed that Iran is taking an active role in allowing Hamas to rebuild its military infrastructure as well as terror tunnels aimed at facilitating murder and kidnapping. Though the administration pretends that its negotiations with Iran are proof that the Islamist regime is moderating, evidence on the ground shows that its role as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror is unchanged. So, too, is its role in aiding the ongoing war on Israel’s existence.

As Haaretz reports:

During his interrogation, [Hamas operative Ibrahim] Sha’er also told of the links between Iran and Hamas, under which Iran has transferred military support into the Gaza Strip to strengthen the organization. The Iranians provide funds, advanced weaponry and electronic equipment such as equipment for disrupting radio communications to bring down Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles over Gaza, Sha’er told the Shin Bet. Iran has also trained Gaza fighters in the use of hang gliders for the purpose of penetrating into Israel, he said.

Perhaps to Obama and Kerry, these efforts should be considered minor annoyances to Israel. After all, what possible impact can terror attacks or giving Hamas the ability to wage and sustain a new war against Israel have to do with Israel’s existence? The Israeli military is strong and presumably is capable of dealing with anything that Hamas can come up with. Perhaps, the same is true of Hezbollah, which even Kerry admitted to Goldberg, had 80,000 rockets pointed at Israel.

Quick Question. Are All Dead Children Created Equal?

...Ritter was willing to do it because he had the same morals as Saddam. That is the same attitude that the placard wavers have toward the children of Gaza, of Iraq and of countless other places. They use them to wage war in the name of peace when they come in handy. And when they die of Hamas rockets and clan feuds, when they are killed by ISIS and the entire murderous alphabet soup of Islamic terrorism, they drop them like yesterday’s garbage.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
07 August '14..

While furious mobs of leftists draped in Keffiyahs and corn syrup were shrieking about Gaza in the public squares of every major city, ISIS was continuing its genocidal advance on Baghdad. In the last 24 hours, the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority, fled ISIS to a mountaintop where their children are dying of thirst.

The stark reality of their plight, caught between thirst and a genocidal army, is in sharp contrast to the phony claims made about Gaza where truckloads of goods continue passing from Israel during wartime, where the malls have iPhones and the five star hotels offer cakes so tall they can only be cut from a crane.

The dead Yazidi children won’t inspire any protests or much in the way of outrage. The hysterical rallies for Gaza won’t suddenly turn into anti-ISIS rallies. If any of the angry white hipsters with dead baby posters are asked about it, they will offer some variation on, “It’s Bush’s fault” or “It’s Tony Blair’s fault.”

And they had been out there in the early part of the century denouncing any move to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The dead children gassed by Saddam, along with the children in his prisons, were unfortunately created less equal than the photogenic, oddly blonde children of Gaza’s Hamaswood.

Anna, a two-year-old girl whose feet were crushed by Saddam’s torturers, never mattered to them. It isn’t the children that they care about, not the dying Yazidi children in Iraq, the tortured children in Saddam Hussein’s prisons, or even the dead children of Gaza, used as human shields by Hamas in life and then brandished at rallies after their deaths as cardboard propaganda shields by furious Marxists.

When they thought that Israel had bombed a playground near the al-Shati refugee camp killing nine children, they went into murderous paroxysm of outrage. When it turned out that a misfired Hamas rocket was responsible, they fell silent.

(Continue)

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The Free World’s Silence Except When It Comes To...Israel

...It is the same progressive, liberal media that printed a story about 133,000 children killed because of Islamists in Somalia, yet on the same day, on the same page, in a newspaper that faithfully represents the liberal press, the main story was about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsing a national referendum on a future peace treaty with the Palestinians.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Times of Israel..
28 August '13..

It is not Russia and China that disgrace the international community. It is the Free World that for dozens of years now has been sliding toward hypocrisy, double standards and appeasement, while getting much more violence in return. It is the Free World whose “human rights activists” sympathize with the apparatus of evil and get much more violence in return. Should the Free World not get to the apparatus of evil, this instrument of evil shall reach the Free World. It’s already getting there.

Some 1,300 Syrians were slaughtered in one day, yet the streets of Paris, London, Madrid and Brussels are empty. After all, it is the Free World that has adopted a new, odd moral compass. According to these moral standards, dozens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of fatalities in the Muslim, Arab and/or Third World do not bother the world peace camp. This did not start this week. It has been going on for years now, dozens of years.

Where was the Free World when hundreds of thousands were being massacred in Rwanda? Where was it when hundreds of thousands were being butchered in Darfur? Where was the Free World when Sri Lanka slaughtered 40,000 Tamils? Where was it when Russia oppressed the rebels in Chechnya and while at it also killed hundreds of thousands of innocents? The Free World was silent. For dozens of years now, the Free World has been telling the Third World: That’s none of our business. So why are China and Russia now being asked to behave any differently?

The international community produces countless “human rights groups,” but these organizations have no connection whatsoever to the real world. After all, the Free World’s “human rights activists” never hit the streets en masse to fight against the apparatus of extermination that comprises Iran, Hamas, Taliban, Hezbollah and the other jihadist tentacles. They never hit the streets to protest against those who resort to extermination or those who declare, like Hamas and Hezbollah, that the Jews should be exterminated.” They only protest against Israel, which is trying to fight the apparatus of extermination.

This is the Free World, where academics like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein made pilgrimages to the leaders of Hezbollah. These are the intellectuals, authors and Nobel Prize laureate, like Mairead Maguire, who arrived on ships to sympathize with Hamas’ regime of horrors. Make no mistake about it: While they indeed spoke of humanitarian solidarity, their solidarity was also extended to the Hamas government.

There is no need whatsoever for the Free World to intervene in every conflict. Not every conflict calls for such intervention. That’s not the intention here. Hesitating to intervene is legitimate. After all, the Syrian conflict does not pit a moral party against a monstrous one. The problem lies with the Free World’s “progressive” parts when they sympathize with evil and fight against those who fight evil. After all, the people who are silent now poured into the streets of the West when Israel embarked on a war against evil.

According to the new moral compass, Israel is belligerent because it allegedly struck Syria’s nuclear facility, and previously Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Where would the Free World be today had Israel not razed these means of mass destruction? And what is the implication of the immense crime committed this week by the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah apparatus of evil for the Iranian nuclear program? Does Iran pose “no danger,” as many “experts” argue?

In the past decades, the Muslim world produced hundreds of thousands of fatalities and millions of refugees. Arabs and Muslims killed Arabs and Muslims. Statistically, Israel’s contribution to global violence is almost nil. Yet the Free World’s “human rights activists” protested against Israel. They did not protest against the true evil. They did not protest against Hamas, which for years was the protégée of Iran. They never protested against the kingdom of evil, but rather, only against those who tried to defend themselves against this evil kingdom.

At Human Rights Watch - Dancing Around Genocide

David Feith..
Wall Street Journal..
04 December '12..

Is promoting genocide a human-rights violation? You might think that's an easy question. But it isn't at Human Rights Watch, where a bitter debate is raging over how to describe Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel. The infighting reveals a peculiar standard regarding dictatorships and human rights and especially the Jewish state.

Human Rights Watch is the George Soros-funded operation that has outsize influence in governments, newsrooms and classrooms world-wide. Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran's regime for inciting genocide. "Sitting still while Iran claims a 'justification to kill all Jews and annihilate Israel' . . . is a position unworthy of our great organization," Sid Sheinberg, the group's vice chairman, wrote to colleagues in a recent email.

But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees.

Asked in 2010 about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel "must be wiped off the map," Mr. Roth suggested that the Iranian president has been misunderstood. "There was a real question as to whether he actually said that," Mr. Roth told The New Republic, because the Persian language lacks an idiom for wiping off the map. Then again, Mr. Ahmadinejad's own English-language website translated his words that way, and the main alternative translation—"eliminated from the pages of history"—is no more benign. Nor is Mr. Ahmadinejad an outlier in the regime. Iran's top military officer declared earlier this year that "the Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."

Sultan Knish - The Genocide Doctrine

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
02 January '12..



Whether or not Ron Paul actually said that he would not intervene to stop the Holocaust, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about this position. The United States has never intervened to stop a genocide. Not in WW2 and not since when several genocides have taken place, most notably in Africa, without any military intervention.

The United States did participate in two NATO wars justified with phony claims of genocide, but the only ethnic cleansings that have taken place have been of Serbs from Kosovo and of Africans from Libya. Which is to say the closest thing to a genocide in either case was perpetrated by our allies against the people we were bombing on their behalf in two civil wars. And neither of those rise anywhere near the level of genocide.

We have maintained close ties with two genocidal Muslim states, Turkey and Indonesia. The latter conducted genocide against Christians in East Timor on our watch and with our weapons. Obama's Indonesian stepfather was a likely participant in that genocide, his former Director of National Intelligence helped keep it going. And Obama has been on record opposing any intervention in Sudan.

It is doubtful that any American president would have intervened militarily to stop the Holocaust, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Ron Paul can't be given credit for much, but his response is honest if nothing else. Or at least partly honest. It's more likely that he is actually sympathetic to another party in the conflict. His newsletter where he blames Churchill for prolonging WW2 by not letting the USSR and Nazi Germany "fight it out" suggests as much. It's an echo of similar themes put out by Pat Buchanan and other fellow travelers.

Sultan Knish - Palestine is Genocide

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
09 April '11

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/04/palestine-is-genocide.html

On the 11th of March, two Arab Muslim men climbed through the window of a home in the village of Ithamar, and massacred an entire family, killing both parents, stabbing a 4 year old boy twice in the chest, murdering an 11 year old while he sat up reading in bed and slitting the throat of a 3 month old baby girl.


A week later, Israeli and Arab pollsters conducted a survey in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. A third of the Arabs surveyed supported these atrocities.

All the justifications for a Palestinian state fall away in the face of this simple fact. That a third of the residents of any Palestinian state favor the murder of Jewish children. Not to achieve any larger goal, but just because they are Jewish children. To call for a Palestinian state in the face of that fact is to advocate genocide.

The Arab Muslims who approved of the attack gained nothing from their deaths. The dead children were not soldiers. They were not killed as collateral damage. Their deaths had no strategic value. There was no reason to kill them, but for the sake of killing them.

Thursday afternoon, Muslim terrorists carefully timed a school bus route and hit the bus. The bus had been full of students, but luckily most had gotten off before the attack took place. It wasn't the first time they had deliberately targeted school buses. The most famous of which was the Avivim School Bus massacre all the way back in 1970. That same day a kindergarten was hit by a rocket. Schools have been frequent targets of Muslim terrorists. So have pregnant women. There's a word for all this. Genocide.

Deliberately targeting children has only one tactical purpose. The extermination of an entire people. Had the Muslim world really wanted a Palestinian state, they could have created one by accepting the UN partition plan, or at any time between 1948 and 1967 when Gaza and the West Bank were in their hands. Had the Israeli Arabs who dub themselves 'Palestinians' wanted a state of their own, they could have had one between 1992 and 2011. They don't want a state. What they want is a state of war.

Genocide cannot be resolved by territorial compromise. People who approve of slitting a baby's throat and stabbing a 4 year old in the heart are not out for an extra kilometer here or there. The Nazis were not going to be appeased with the Anschluss or the Sudetenland-- and Muslims are not going to be pacified with partial control over East Jerusalem. It isn't East Jerusalem that they want. Or even all of Jerusalem. Or even all of Israel. What they really want is a reason to keep killing.

A man who murders a child might be insane, but millions of people who act and think that way are not insane. They have developed a moral code that says their victims are subhuman, while they are the 'True People'. That code allows them to act out their worst impulses in the name of an ideal. Whether that ideal is the Third Reich or the Caliphate doesn't matter at all. The ideal is there to justify the atrocity.

Men make laws to rise above the beast inside them. But sometimes it is the beast who begins making the laws. The Koran is the law of the beast. The law that says you may kill a man who is different than you and take his wife for your own. That he is less than you because he is different than you. The law of the beast does not seek the peace of equals, but the peace of predators and prey. The right of the beast to prey on you because you are not of his kind.

Liberals may plant Coexist stickers on their bumpers decorated with a string of religious symbols beginning with the Islamic star and crescent, that renders it first among equals-- but it is all in vain. On his deathbed, Mohammed proclaimed that, "two religions cannot coexist in the Arabian Peninsula". You may cry peace, peace-- but there will be no peace. For the Prophet of Islam has commanded it. There can be no peace or coexistence. Only servitude, genocide or resistance. If you refuse to serve, then you will be massacred or driven out. That sentence is all you need to know to understand the Islamic war of extermination against Israel.

Palestine is genocide. It is genocide under the cloak of nationalism. Genocide under the facade of retaliation. Genocide dressed up as righteousness. Genocide disguised as the outcry of the oppressed. The Nazis dressed themselves in that same garb. They were the victims fighting back against oppression and they went on being the victims until they drowned half the continent in blood. The law of the beast is cunning, and the name of the book of the beast may change, but its end is always the same. The beast wants power, it wants glory and wealth-- but above all things it wants blood.

Palestinian Incitement Of Hate Against Israel Is A Crime--The Crime of Genocide

Daled Amos
21 February '11

Dr. Joel Fishman, a historian and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has written a powerful article, distinguished by the new perspectives it provides on what has become an old and continuing problem: Palestinian incitement.

His article, Palestinian Incitement: The Real “Deal Breaker” (PDF) analyzes a phenomenon ignored by the West, the media and by those human rights groups who supposedly are concerned with war crimes outside of the state of Israel.

Examining the issues the likes of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International ignore, Dr. Fishman details how Palestinian incitement is a violation of the Crime of Genocide as outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention

As we know from experience, incitement that is diffused publicly for the purpose of encouraging others to commit an offense is a grave matter because it can well be criminal. It provides the means for translating hatred into an interpretive framework (to use Herf’s formulation) and, for example, was identified in the genocidal crimes that took place in Rwanda. Moreover, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has identified direct and public incitement as a crime, whether or not it results in genocide. Robert Cryer, in his entry on incitement in The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, described the nature of this crime:

(Read full "Palestinian Incitement Of Hate Against Israel Is A Crime--The Crime of Genocide")

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Hamas inverts reality, ADL only partly notices

Fresnozionism.org
07 January '11

The ADL is shocked — shocked, I tell you — that Hamas is antisemitic:

New York, NY, January 6, 2011 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today condemned the remarks of a senior Hamas official who claimed that the Holocaust was “a lie that has crumbled” and suggested that Zionists had committed “countless Holocausts” on the Palestinian people.

The League called his statements “a disturbing reminder of the virulent anti-Semitism promoted by Hamas and the ongoing threat the group poses to Israel.”

Mahmud Zahar, a senior leader of the Gaza-based terrorist group, made the remarks during a memorial ceremony for 43 Palestinians killed at a U.N. school in the Jabaliya refugee camp during Israel’s military incursion into Gaza in December 2008. — ADL press release

I can’t help but remark that the press release itself is misleading. It fails to mention that IDF shells did not hit the school, and that all the fatalities were in the street outside the school where a Hamas mortar team had set up and fired at IDF troops. Five Hamas fighters were killed there, and an undetermined number of civilians who were next to them (certainly fewer than 43). Even the ADL has accepted the Palestinian version of the event!

It’s important to understand the difference between what happened in Gaza and what happened in Treblinka, as the ADL suggests. So here is the official IDF account:

(Read full 'Hamas inverts reality, ADL only partly notices")

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Talking to Hamas? - Increasing Expressions of Genocidal Intent by Hamas Leaders Against the Jews

Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
JCPA
Vol. 10, No. 19
03 January '11


- Over the last few years there has been a steady drumbeat of calls from leading figures in the international community for Israel to open a dialogue with Hamas.

- Unfortunately, there is no evidence of a new pragmatism among the Hamas leadership, but only greater indications of a much harder line, which is expressed by its adoption of expressions of genocidal intent in its war against Israel and the Jewish people.

- In a December 2010 booklet marking the 23rd anniversary of the establishment of Hamas, Mohammed Def, head of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing, wrote: "We say to our enemies: you are going on the path to extinction, and Palestine will remain ours....You have no right to even an inch of it."

- Ahmed al-Jaabari, the acting supreme commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, wrote: "Our eyes will...not be confined to the borders of Gaza. Our plan of struggle shall extend as always, sooner or later, to our entire plundered country....As long as the Zionists occupy our lands, only death or exile await them."

- Senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya told al-Hayat on November 11, 2010: "We retain our Islamic, Arab and Palestinian faith that Palestine will be returned to its inhabitants and Zionist existence will conclude....The Jews will have no right there, save for those who lived on Palestinian land prior to the First World War" (meaning that only Jews above the age of 96 will be permitted to live in Islamic Palestine).

Over the last few years there has been a steady drumbeat of calls from leading figures in the international community for Israel to open a dialogue with Hamas. Despite Hamas' call for Israel's elimination, Hamas representatives have obtained platforms in some of the most prestigious mainstream Western media. Thus, Ahmed Yousef, a senior political advisor to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, appeared on the op-ed pages of both the Washington Post and the New York Times in 2007, where he presented the most minimal goals of "the end of occupation" and "freedom to be a nation."1 In an article on PalestineChronicle.com on December 25, 2010, Yousef, who serves today as the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, repeated the moderate message that: "Gaza will always extend a hand of friendship to the international community; and will always welcome any dialogue that will help achieve stability, security and growth in the region."2

(Read full "Talking to Hamas?")

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Iran's Nuclear Anti-Zionism is Genocidal, Not Political

Kenneth L. Marcus
Jewish Policy Center/inFocus
Winter 2009

Charles Asher Small, director of Yale's Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism, tells the story of the reception he received from Rwandan activists at this year's Durban II Conference. As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to the Geneva stage, the Rwandans asked Small why the Jewish community is not doing more to prevent the obvious consummation of Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric. The Rwandans had heard similar propaganda before.

They used this language against your people in the 1940's, they said, and they used it against our people in the 1990's. Why do you not see that Iran's treatment of Israel today is no different?

From bitter experience, the Rwandans recognized genocidal intent in the Iranian leader's invective. They could not understand how a people that had its own state, organizations and resources is not able to understand and combat the growing threat that Iran presents.

The Threats

Broadly speaking, there are three ways Iran's fast-developing nuclear arsenal could be put to use in its confrontation with Israel, the United States, and the West: strategic, political, and geopolitical. Experts often argue that the real danger of an Iranian nuclear weapon has less to do with whether the weapons would be fired, and more to do with how their mere possession would alter the balance of power. This could be true. Yet, if Iran's leadership should use these weapons to annihilate the people of Israel, the surprise will not be that they have done so, but that the world had failed to recognize the unmistakable signs that they would.

Ahmadinejad notoriously declared in 2006 that, "Israel should be wiped off the map." Repeatedly, and in many public venues, the Iranian leader has heaped extraordinary scorn on Israel and its Zionist supporters. Ahmadinejad's aspersions often fall into the two categories that genocide scholars characterize as hallmarks of mass-murderous incitement: dehumanization and demonization.

Denying the personhood of the Israeli people, he lectured in 2006 that Israelis are not human beings: "They are like cattle, nay, more misguided." At the same time, he attributes to Jews a diabolical evil: "Next to them," he stated, "all the criminals of the world seem righteous."

Following a pattern of other world historical figures responsible for genocide, Ahmadinejad predicted in 2008 the consequences for the target people: "Thanks to God, your wish will soon be realized, and this germ of corruption will be wiped off the face of the world."

As if to dispel any ambiguities about his intentions, he paraded a Shahab-3 missile through the streets of Tehran in 2008 with the message, "Israel must be wiped off the map."

The Case for Prosecution

There is a legal significance to Ahmadinejad's murderous charges. Several prominent international human rights lawyers and jurists have urged that Ahmadinejad be prosecuted for incitement to genocide.

(Read full article)
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