Never Again?

From the Jerusalem Post:

December 9 marks the 60th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, sometimes referred to as the "Never Again" Convention. Six decades have passed since this new era of genocide prevention was proclaimed in the wake of the Holocaust. On this oft-ignored anniversary, we must acknowledge our abysmal failure in preventing the most destructive threat known to humankind - the crime whose name we should even shudder to mention - genocide.

The enduring lesson of the Holocaust and that of the genocides that followed is that they occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hatred. As international tribunals have recognized and affirmed, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. These are the chilling facts of history.

Most important, in all other cases of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide - the Holocaust, the Balkans, Rwanda and Darfur - the genocides have already occurred. Only in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran - the epicenter of such incitement - can we still act so as to prevent a genocide foretold from occurring.

For it is in Ahmadinejad's Iran where one finds the toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes embedded in the most virulent of hatreds. It is dramatized by the parading in the streets of Teheran of a Shahab-3 missile draped in the words "Israel must be wiped off the map" and underpinned by the words of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that "[t]here is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state."

Moreover, Ahmadinejad's Iran has already resorted to incendiary and demonizing language, including epidemiological metaphors reminiscent of Nazi incitement. For example, President Ahmadinejad characterizes Israel as "filthy bacteria," "a stinking corpse" and "a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised," while referring to Jews as "evil incarnate," "blood-thirsty barbarians" and the "defilers of Islam" - the whole as prologue to, and justification for, a Mideast genocide, while at the same time denying the Nazi one.

Indeed, calls by the most senior figures in the Iranian leadership for the destruction of Israel are also frighteningly reminiscent of calls for the Rwandan extermination of Tutsis by the Hutu leadership. The crucial difference is that the Hutus were equipped with machetes, while Iran, in defiance of the world community, continues its pursuit of the most destructive of weaponry: nuclear arms. Alarmingly, Iran has already succeeded in developing a long-range missile delivery system for that purpose, the whole recalling former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's open threat that "even one atomic bomb inside Israel will wipe it off the face of the earth."

The failure to stop past genocides, as in the unspeakable, preventable genocide of Rwanda, caused the then-UN secretary general Kofi Annan to lament in 2004 on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide: "We must never forget our collective failure to protect at least 800,000 defenseless men, women and children who perished in Rwanda 10 years ago.

"Such crimes cannot be reversed. Such failures cannot be repaired. The dead cannot be brought back to life. So, what can we do?"

Read the whole thing.