On September 23, 2008, the day on which Iranian President Ahmadinejad was speaking at the UN, genocide scholars and international war-crimes jurists met in Washington, D.C., to present evidence of Iran’s pattern of official incitement to genocide. The incitement is, as we well know, directed at Israel, its Jewish citizens, and sometimes Jews in general. At the request of Dr. Ed Beck, President of SPME, I flew down to Washington to attend the event.
Among its other accomplishments, the meeting shows how historical and social-science research coupled with legal activism can become a force for justice. Such studies can reveal the early warning signs of genocide and urge remedies meant to halt the momentum toward genocide. Even scholars like me, who do not have the fortitude to dedicate their research to this troubling subject, can play an important role. But before saying more, I ask scholars who do research on Iran, and any researchers who are not Iran-experts but can read Farsi, to stay with me until the end of this article, because I have an urgent request.
After introductory remarks by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Member of Congress for Miami, the first panel was chaired by Prof. Gregory Stanton. He has taught at several universities, founded Genocide Watch and the Cambodian Genocide Project, and now serves as president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. His field of expertise is critical because he has conducted studies on genocide precursors, which have remarkable and disturbing commonalities across the pre-Holocaust period and the periods leading up to genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, not to mention the contemporary period in Iran. The precursors occur in progressive stages in which the targets of hatred are ever more virulently depicted as illegitimate, subhuman, and satanic. This process takes months or years, suggesting that we can now recognize the lead-up to genocide and work to prevent it, not just to wring our hands and try to punish it after the fact.
Incitement under the Genocide Convention
Next to speak was the veteran US diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, who helped broker the peace deal that ended the genocide in Bosnia. He asserted (this is my paraphrase) that Iran is unusually dangerous because it has issued threats at another country based on ethnicity and religion and that the threats appear to qualify as “incitement” under the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Under this convention, signatories are obligated to prevent (not just retrospectively punish) genocide, which is the utmost of human criminality, and to prosecute those who directly and publicly advocate it.
Very importantly for the intent of the meeting, the next speaker was Gregory Gordon, who is a professor at the University of North Dakota and former Legal Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where the first successful post-Nuremberg prosecutions took place for incitement to genocide. It’s worth stressing the significance: several Rwandans, including a ferocious radio announcer, who publicly advocated for the mass murder of Tutsis, were convicted by the tribunal even though they had not themselves participated in the killings.
As I understand it, these successful prosecutions were milestones in international law. Gordon explained the careful logic by which the tribunal was able to differentiate reckless and hateful speech from direct public incitement. Gordon went on to assert that, by the jurisprudential standards developed during the tribunal, the record of Iranian provocation fully qualifies it as incitement to genocide. (Gordon’s article on the topic is scheduled to appear in the next few weeks in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.)
Ms. Esther Musawayo, who is an expert witness and survivor of the Rwanda genocide, and Mr. Salih Mashmoud Osman, Sudanese member of parliament and winner of the Sakharov prize on human rights, addressed the symposium and in disturbing terms confirmed the role of demonizing incitement in setting the stage for murderous mass attacks against people with whom the attackers had once lived more or less peacefully. Musawayo and Osman called for international vigilance to recognize and respond to such incitement around the world.
Some of the Evidence
Two more speakers then presented selections of the evidence on Iranian incitement. They were Dore Gold, well-known author and former Israeli ambassador to the UN, and Irwin Cotler, the global human-rights campaigner who served as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada. Here I rely on the prepared remarks handed out for Cotler’s presentation, which in turn builds on the extensive published research now available on genocide precursors.
As Cotler points out, the purpose of genocidal incitement is to remove the intended victims from the realm of human obligation. Iranian officials have done this by delegitimizing Israel’s existence in the Middle East, referring to it, in the words of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “a forged government and a false nation… [that] gathered wicked people from all over the world and made something called the Israeli nation..All the malevolent and evil Jews have gathered there.”
Cotler and several other commentators observed that a further level of incitement echoes the Nazi and Rwandan dehumanization of their victims, especially through epidemiological terminology. Echoing this Nazi tactic, Iranian officials at various times have referred to Israelis and Jews as filthy germ, savage beast, stinking corpse, cancerous bacterium, cancerous growth, and so forth. The next stage of incitement is demonization, as in President Ahmadinejad’s declarations that “Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan,” and much more in a similar vein. Iran’s state-sponsored Holocaust-denial compounds the demonization: it claims that somehow Jews had the intent or ability to invent the history of the murders of millions of their members, an accusation so bizarre and fantastic that of course it helps set the stage for, and reveals the desire to foster, the next extermination of the Jews.
Cotler terms the next several phases of incitement as “false accusations in the mirror,” depiction of the victim group as an enemy of humanity, and direct predictions or calls for the victim group’s bloody demise. So Ahmedinejad asserts that Zionists want to “swallow up the entire region,” “kill women and children, young and old” and “make plans for the advancement of their evil goals.” These Jews are, in the President’s words, “bloodthirsty barbarians,” who have “no boundaries, limits, or taboos when it comes to killing human beings,” and are “fighting a war against humanity.”
Ayatollah Hossein Nousi-Hamedani gives it an explicitly religious twist, saying “One should fight the Jews and vanquish them so that the conditions for the advent of the Hidden Imam be met.” In further ratcheting up the incitement, Ahmedinejad has made repeated direct calls for genocide, though the wording is sometimes nuanced as a prediction of rather than an imperative to action. So it’s not just the famous call to “wipe Israel off the map” or alternatively wipe it out of history’s pages. Another statement has it that “Israel’s days are numbered.[T]he people of the region would not miss the narrowest opportunity to annihilate this false regime.” Still another asserts that “The region and the world are prepared for great changes and for being cleansed of Satanic enemies.” And again, that “God willing, in the near future we will witness the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime.” The nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is even clearer: “It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region.”
The documentation with references may be found in the volume “The Danger of a Genocidal and Nuclear Iran,” recently issued by Cotler, Gordon, Osman, Mujawoyo, and others, including Elie Wiesel. Though distributed at the symposium, it is not yet available on a web page, but I assume it will be available soon.
The jurists who were present argued that, since the genocidal provocations of the kind I quote above violate the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and since there is jurisprudential precedent from the Rwanda trials, there are now grounds for prosecuting Ahmedinejad and fellow inciters under international law.
Finding the Remedy: Is there an Academic Angle?
I should add that the sponsors of the event included the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Yale University’s Initiative for Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The participants were under no illusions that the UN, sections of which have proven themselves to be participants in, rather than opponents of, the demonization of Israel, or even the Security Council, which is subject to Russian and Chinese veto, is likely to bring forward this kind of indictment. It is possible, however, that one or another country that is party to the Genocide Convention can call on the UN Security Council to refer the charge of Iranian official genocide incitement to the International Criminal Court. Ahmadinejad’s position as president would offer him no immunity from such prosecution.
Even if UN members do not have the courage to take such a step, the very act of petitioning and campaigning for it will bring international attention to Iran’s persistent incitement, and-this is my opinion-reinforce other diplomatic and military steps to pressure Iran to stop the development of nuclear weapons.
What is clear is that the work of documenting Iranian genocide incitement is critical to the whole effort. So far, to my knowledge, the team of Farsi speakers assembled by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has investigated only the statements of government and military officials. I suspect but cannot demonstrate that Iranian academics (I hesitate to call them scholars) have contributed to the demonization.
The case that comes to mind is that of Hasan Bolkhari, who is said to hold a Ph.D in Islamic Philosophy and to teach the philosophy of art at Tabatabaei and Al-Zahra Universities in Iran. He is the one who, in February 2006 on Iran’s Channel 4 TV station, said that, as a result of Jews having money and wealth, they were degraded under Hitler, made to wear yellow stars, and called “dirty mice”; so, the professor declared, Jews conspired to develop the endearing Tom and Jerry cartoons, in order to rehabilitate the image of mice. (Find transcript and clip on memri.org, special dispatch No. 1101).
How much more, some of it no doubt much less entertaining, is propounded by Iranian academics? If among SPME members we have Iran experts and Farsi speakers (who need not have Iran studies as their specialty), it would make for an important contribution if they would form a small group to monitor Iranians’ academic incitement to anti-Semitism and genocide. I believe SPME would be willing to maintain an ongoing posting of the results of the investigation.
ERNEST STERNBERG is on the board of directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He is professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
