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Weekly Commentary: Exploiting the window before Iran may get the bomb One certainly hopes that the nightmare of a nuclear Iran never comes to be. But it would be irresponsible not to prepare for that terrible possibility. Some have suggested that Israel rush to "resolve" its differences with the Palestinians and Syria to reduce the chances that the Jewish State finds itself threatened by Iran with a nuclear response in their support. But there is a reason for putting the term "resolve" in quotation marks. That's because a quick fix creating a terror Palestinian state and a hand over of the Golan Heights that would dramatically reduce the risk taking Israel could afford to take in the case of suspicious Syrian moves could readily increase rather than reduce the dangerous possibility of an incident that leads to Iranian intervention. What, then, could help to reduce the possibility of Iranian - or for that matter other malicious third party - intervention? Rapid conflict incident resolution. Simply put, a conflict incident that goes on for many days or even weeks can heat up the Iranian and Arab street with rallies, pronouncements and threats of intervention. In sharp contrast, a conflict incident resolved in a short period is considerably less likely to suck others in - even if resolution means numerous casualties. Creating a situation on the ground that is amenable to rapid conflict incident resolution goes beyond military training and equipment. It means developing a workable and effective approach to the human shields challenge. It means exploiting an appreciation of the nature of media coverage of conflicts (brutally put - the bad press for bloody battles in five civilian areas that take place simultaneously is almost the same as the bad press for one battle). It also means restoring a military presence in the Gaza Strip to facilitate the intelligence gathering so critical for rapid conflict incident resolution. Today the Olmert team is doing the opposite as it stands by permitting the Palestinians to invest millions of dollars in a network of battle tunnels in the Gaza Strip as they amass huge quantities of both smuggled and openly trucked in weapons. Yes. Today the Palestinians are aiming some of these weapons against each other, but it is only a question of time before they embrace Egypt's proposal to unite for the common cause. If there is one silver lining in the mess, the appointment of a man from Golani as IDF Chief of Staff could make it just that more possible to reach the goal of rapid conflict incident resolution before a nuclear Iran may arrive on the scene. Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis) (Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava) Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730 INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il Website: http://www.imra.org.il
"Remembering the Holocaust: What Have We Learned? What Must We Do?"
Mr. Director-General, Ambassadors, Excellencies, Survivors, and Friends: May I preface my remarks with a personal statement. Whenever I speak on the Holocaust (the Shoah) I do so with a certain degree of humility, and not without a deep sense of pain. For I am reminded of what my parents taught me while still a young boy — the profundity and pain of which I realized only years later — that there are things in Jewish history that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened; that Oswiencim, Majdanek, Dachau, Treblinka — these are beyond vocabulary. Words may ease the pain, but they may also dwarf the tragedy. For the Holocaust was uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Elie Wiesel put it, "not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims". We meet at an important moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and warning: • on the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the death camps — of the liberation of the surviving remnants of "Planet Auschwitz" — the most horrific laboratory of mass murder in history; • on the 62nd anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg in January 1945 into the Soviet Gulag — this Hero of Humanity, this Saint Just of the Nations, whom the United Nations called the greatest humanitarian of the 20th Century, who showed that one person could confront evil, resist and prevail, and thereby transform history; • on the eve of the 62nd anniversary of the United Nations, which as former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, "emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust", and intended "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war"; and where, as he reminded us, "a UN that fails to be at the forefront of the fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, denies its history and undermines its future"; • in the aftermath of the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Principles, which became the forerunner of what has come to be known as international humanitarian and criminal law, but reminding us also of the double entendre of Nuremberg — the Nuremberg of jackboots as well as the Nuremberg of judgments, the Nuremberg of racism as well as the Nuremberg principles; • on the first anniversary of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust — which is being commemorated for the first time in the Salle des Assemblées — the venue of the "gathering storm" of the Thirties that was not averted — so that we may remember and be reminded, bear witness and heed the warning — never again — not now, not ever. And so, on this Anniversary of Anniversaries, on this day of days, some 60 years after the Holocaust, the birth of the U.N. — the double entendre of Nuremberg — on the eve of the 60th anniversary in 2008 of the Genocide Convention — the "never again" convention — and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — we have to ask ourselves, what have we learned and what must we do? May I now summarize the universal lessons of the Holocaust — the lessons to be learned and the action to be taken. For as Kierkegaard put it, "life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards". Lesson 1 — The Importance of Holocaust Remembrance The first lesson is the importance of Zachor, of remembrance itself. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah — defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide — we have to understand that the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics. For unto each person there is a name — unto each person, there is an identity. Each person is a universe. As our sages tell us: "whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe." Just as whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have killed an entire universe. And so the abiding imperative — that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny. Lesson 2 — The Danger of State-Sanctioned Incitement to Hatred and Genocide — The Responsibility to Prevent The enduring lesson of the Holocaust is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the industry of death and the technology of terror, but because of the state-sanctioned ideology of hate. This teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all began. As the Canadian courts affirmed in upholding the constitutionality of anti-hate legislation, "the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers — it began with words". These, as the Courts put it, are the chilling facts of history. These are the catastrophic effects of racism. Forty years later, in the Nineties, these lessons not only remained unlearned, but the tragedy was repeated. For we witnessed, yet again, a growing trafficking in state-sanctioned hate and incitement, which in the Balkans and in Rwanda took us down the road to genocide. And as we meet, we are witnessing yet again, a state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, whose epicentre is Ahmadinejad's Iran — and I distinguish President Ahmadinejad from the people of Iran, many of whom have themselves repudiated his remarks. For President Ahmadinejad denies the Nazi Holocaust as he incites to a Middle Eastern one — an assault on Jewish memory and truth in its denial of the Holocaust, which the U.N. General Assembly rebuked several days ago; and a violation of the prohibition against the "direct and public incitement to genocide" in the Genocide Convention, which U.N. Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon respectively called "shocking" and "unacceptable", indeed, an assault on the very U.N. charter, which prohibits such incitement and threat. Lesson 3 — The Danger of Silence, The Consequences of Indifference — The Duty to Protect The genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the state-sanctioned culture of hate and industry of death, but because of crimes of indifference, because of conspiracies of silence. We meet today in the majestic Salle des Assemblées of the former League of Nations. It was here that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie pleaded in vain for protection from Mussolini's 1935 aggression. Fascism marched ahead, winning one victory after another. It was here that while the gathering storm of war advanced, with Czechoslovakia surrendering to Hitler in 1938, further appeals for protection went unheeded. The response was international indifference, a failure of moral resolve, and the result was world war and genocide. We are assembled here on the banks of Lake Geneva, on the other side of which lies Evian-des-Bains. It was here in 1938 that the international community considered the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees desperate to flee worsening persecutions in Nazi Germany and Austria. But the nations looked away. As it was said at the time, the world was divided into those places where the Jews could not live, and those places where they could not enter. Hitler drew his lessons. As we gather here today to commemorate the Holocaust in this historic Assembly Hall, with the representatives of the international community and civil society, let us pledge that never again will we be indifferent to aggression, hatred and incitement. And indeed we have witnessed an appalling indifference and inaction in our own day which took us down the road to the unthinkable — ethnic cleansing in the Balkans — and down the road to the unspeakable — the genocide in Rwanda — unspeakable because this genocide was preventable. No one can say that we did not know. We knew, but we did not act, just as we know and have yet to act to stop the genocide by attrition in Darfur, ignoring the lessons of history, betraying the people of Darfur, and mocking the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. And so, it is our responsibility to break down these walls of indifference, to shatter these conspiracies of silence and inaction — to stand up and be counted and not look around to see whoever else is standing before we make a judgement to do so; because in the world in which we live, there are few enough people prepared to stand, let alone be counted, reminding us of the words of Edmund Burke, "the surest way to ensure that evil will triumph in the world is for enough good people to do nothing". Indifference and inaction always mean coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim. Let there be no mistake about it — indifference in the face of evil is acquiescence with evil itself — it is complicity with evil. Lesson 4 — Combating Mass Atrocity and the Culture of Impunity — The Responsibility to Bring War Criminals to Justice If the 20th Century — symbolized by the Holocaust — was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice; and so, just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must there be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind. In this context, the establishment of the International Criminal Court must be seen as the most dramatic development in international criminal law since Nuremberg — to deter mass atrocity, to protect the victims, and to prosecute the perpetrators. Lesson 5 — The Trahison des Clercs — The Responsibility to Talk Truth to Power The Holocaust was made possible, not only because of the "bureaucratization of genocide", as Robert Lifton put it, but because of the trahison des clercs — the complicity of the elites — physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects, educators, and the like. Indeed, one only has to read Gerhard Muller's book on "Hitler's Justice" to appreciate the complicity and criminality of judges and lawyers; or to read Robert-January van Pelt's book on the architecture of Auschwitz, to be appalled by the minute involvement of engineers and architects in the design of death camps, and so on. Holocaust crimes, then, were also the crimes of the Nuremberg elites. As Elie Wiesel put it, "Cold-blooded murder and culture did not exclude each other. If the Holocaust proved anything, it is that a person can both love poems and kill children". And so it is our responsibility to speak truth to power, and to hold power accountable to truth. And those entrusted with the education and training of the elites should ensure that Elie Wiesel is studied in schools of law and not just in classes of literature; that the double entendre of Nuremberg — of Nuremberg racism as well as the Nuremberg Principles — is part of our learning as it is part of our legacy; that Holocaust education underpin our perspective as it informs our principles — on justice and injustice. Lesson 6 — Holocaust Remembrance — The Responsibility to Educate Sweden is a case-study of how Holocaust education, can not only teach an entire society of the importance of Holocaust remembrance and reminder — of witness and warning — but how it can engage that whole society in "living history" — in the teaching, learning, and internalization of Holocaust sensibility — where the particularity of the Holocaust has universal resonance. In particular, in the spirit of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, states should commit themselves to the constituent elements of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, which included, inter alia, the understanding that: "the Holocaust fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization…[its] unprecedented character will always hold universal meaning…[its] magnitude…must be forever seared in our collective memory…together we must uphold the terrible truths of the Holocaust against those who deny it. We must strengthen the moral commitment of our people and the political commitment of our governments, to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences. We pledge to strengthen efforts to promote education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust… We share a commitment to encourage the study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions…a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it…a commitment to throw light on the still obscured shadows of the Holocaust…a commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past…a commitment…to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice." Lesson 7 — The Vulnerability of the Powerless — The Protection of the Vulnerable as the Test of a Just Society The genocide of European Jewry occurred not only because of the vulnerability of the powerless, but also because of the powerlessness of the vulnerable. It is not surprising that the triage of Nazi racial hygiene — the Sterilization Laws, the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Euthanasia Program — targeted those "whose lives were not worth living"; and it is not unrevealing, as Professor Henry Friedlander points out in his work on "The Origins of Genocide", that the first group targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled — the whole anchored in the science of death, the medicalization of ethnic cleansing, the sanitizing even of the vocabulary of destruction. And so it is our responsibility as government representatives — and, morally, as citoyens du monde — to give voice to the voiceless, as we seek to empower the powerless — be they the disabled, the poor, the refugee, the elderly, the women victims of violence, the vulnerable child — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Indeed, perhaps the most important human rights lesson I learned was taught to me by my daughter, now 27, when she was 15 years of age, when she said: "Daddy, if you want to know the real test of human rights, always ask yourself, at any time, in any situation, in any part of the world, 'is it good for children? Is what is happening good for children?' That's the real test of human rights, Daddy." Conclusion May I close with a word to the survivors of the Holocaust — for you are the true heroes of humanity. You witnessed and endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow you found in the depths of your own humanity the courage to go on, to rebuild your lives as you have built your communities. And so it is with you, and because of you, and because of the righteous among the nations — like Raoul Wallenberg — that we remember that each person has a name and an identity — that each person is a universe — that in saving one life we save an entire universe. We remember — and we pledge — and this must not be a matter of rhetoric but must be a commitment to action — that never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate; that never again will we be silent in the face of evil; that never again will we indulge racism and anti-semitism; that never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable; that never again will we be indifferent in the face of mass atrocity and impunity. We will speak and we will act against racism, against hate, against anti-semitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice — and against the crime of crimes whose name we should even shudder to mention — genocide. And yes, always, against indifference, against being bystanders to injustice. For in what we say, or more importantly in what we do, we will be making a statement about ourselves as a people, we will be making a statement about ourselves as people. For in our day, more than ever, qui s'excuse s'accuse, whoever remains indifferent indicts themselves. May this day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but let it be a remembrance to act, which it must be. Professor Cotler is a member of Canada's parliament and its former Minister of Justice. He is a distinguished academic and a prominent human rights lawyer, whose dedication to humanitarian causes has earned him the Order of Canada and many other awards. Professor Cotler has represented Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky in the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and most recently Saad Edin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and democracy advocate whose criticism of Egypt's Mubarak government resulted in his incarceration. Maclean's magazine has referred to Cotler as "Counsel for the Oppressed." He has been a leader in the development of international humanitarian law and has to his credit landmark cases in free speech, freedom of religion, women's rights, minority rights and peace law.
Will the US decision to arm the Palestinian Authority's Military Capability Backfire on the Legacy of President George W. Bush? The day after the armed forces of Palestinian Authority President Machmud Abbas shared credit for the bombing of a bakery in the Israeli port city of Elat which claimed the lives of three young Israelis, President Bush announced an aid package to Abbas's armed forces. Following that Bush announcement,Israel's leading news internet magazines, a Hebrew news blog located at nfc,co.il, ran an unusual headline: "Terror Attacks with US funding". That news item noted that Abbas's armed forces had been strongly armed by Egypt and by Jordan in the past few months, in coordination with the US government, which has made it a matter of policy to strengthen Abbas. Egypt armed 1900 troops of Abbas's militias, while Jordan armed 3000 troops loyal to Abbas, Senior White House official Elliot Abrams made it clear that since Hamas took formal control of the Palestinian Authority in January 2006 that the US would indeed do everything in its power to support and arm the forces loyal to Abbas, even though Abbas has made it his policy goal to unite his armed forces of the Fateh with the armed forces of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all of the Palestinian organizations still at war with Israel. To that end, the American government helped establish training camps for Abbas's armed forces in Ramallah and in Jericho, with the help of the British government. However, senior policy makers at the Pentagon have been critical of the Bush Administration decision to arm Abbas's troops. One Pentagon official has told the Israeli media that " not only will Abbas's troops turn on Israel – they will also turn on Jordan, the majority of whose population remain Palestinian Arabs" Former Defense Sec'y Donald Rumsfeld was quoted by Pentagon sources as advising President Bush that any and all attempts to arm Abbas against Islamic forces would also increase enmity to US interests in Islamic countries and not serve US interests in the war in Iraq. Pentagon officials also note that senior policy advisors at the CIA also warned against the Bush program to aid Abbas and were overruled. Senior officials of the Israel National Security Council have also stated, off the record, that any US attempt to arm Abbas would only strengthen, united and inspire the Islamic forces under the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who would see this as a blatant attempt of US/Western/Christian interests to establish a new imperial stronghold in the Middle East. Ironically, the reason why Hamas assumed power in the Palestinian Authority was the Bush Administration's insistence that democratic elections take place in the Palestinian Arab entity. The issue that the Palestinian Arab people face is that while both Abbas's Fatah faction and the Islamic factions maintain the same goals of regaining all of Palestine, and not just the west bank and Gaza, the whereabouts of the six billion dollars of foreign aid and the mystery of the missing billions from Arafat's bank account have created a situation that no amount of aid to Abbas will ever win credibility for Abbas in the Palestinian Authority constituency, since Abbas is and was the protégé of Yassir Arafat. Abbas is, therefore,viewed by the Palestinian Arab people as the man most responsible for the graft and corruption in the Palestinian public domain. After all, stealing from the public trust is viewed by Islam as stealing from Allah, or God, as the Almighty is referred to in the Western nations who have seen fit to bolster Arafat and his successor, Abbas George W, Bush, a deeply religious person, should understand that his choice to back a movement that is most closely associated with rampant corruption cannot be a wise or moral choice for his legacy to be respected in the middle east.
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