Ahmadinejad: Our Part in His Downfall

In December last year I drew attention to what must surely have been the loopiest of pre-election promises by any Australian politician: then Oppostion Leader, Kevin Rudd's promise to charge Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention." (See my post, Testing Time for Rudd)

This bizarre promise surfaced in the context of electioneering in the Sydney seat of Wentworth, held by Howard Government minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Wentworth has the largest number of Jewish voters in Australia, and Turnbull, although not Jewish, was as reflexively supportive of Israel as any of Howard's ministers. How was Rudd to get around this? Maybe it's not enough to have your candidate (George Newhouse) both Jewish and Zionist, so why not outbid Turnbull for the Israel vote by...targeting Israel's current bete noire, Ahmadinijad? At least, that is what I imagine happened. Prior to uttering The Promise, however, it was all pretty much shadow boxing:-

The Australian Jewish News had informed its readers back in December 2006: "Likud leader [and former Israeli PM] Binyamin Netanyahu and a group of top American and Canadian lawyers are spearheading an international bid to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for genocide at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. 'We must cry 'gevalt' before the entire world', Netanyahu said. 'In 1938, Hitler didn't say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren't even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide'. Concurrently - and in coordination with Netanyahu - a group of top legal experts met in New York to claim that Ahmadinejad's incitement against Jews violates the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, speakers said...'We will try the law. We will try politics. We will try everything', said Alan Dershowitz, a prominent attorney and professor at Harvard Law School [& defender of OJ Simpson & Zionist propagandist extraordinaire (The Case for Israel) & torture advocate]. 'But if they fail, we will use self-defence'. In addition to seeking an indictment of Ahmadinejad in the International Criminal Court, Professor Dershowitz disclosed that he and Irwin Cotler, a Canadian legislator and prominent human-rights lawyer [& Chief Council of the Canadian Jewish Congress, aka Canada's Israel lobby], were preparing a brief to justify military pre-emption if legal efforts don't work." ('Indict Ahmadinejad for genocide', 22/12/06)

Then, quite coincidentally and entirely off his own bat, Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister (now attorney general) Robert McClelland told the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) that: "Labor wants Australia to lead a push to have the United Nations Security Council refer the Iranian leader to the International Court of Justice over his statements about 'wiping Israel off the map' and denying the Holocaust. He said a charge of incitement against Ahmadinejad would 'move the international legal system from punishing genocide post-facto to preventing it before it occurs'. Secondly, it would seriously undermine Ahmadinejad's international legitimacy and his standing at home. The preparation of formal changes [sic] and the process of hearing would require Ahmadinejad to justify his inflammatory and destabilising posturing and rhetoric', he said." (Charge Iranian president with inciting genocide - Labor minister, The Australian Jewish News, 9/3/07)

That same month, Melbourne Ports Labor MP Michael Danby tried to table a motion calling on the Howard Government "to bring Ahmadinejad to account through the United Nations and International Court of Justice over his calls for the destruction of the Jewish State," but alas "another motion criticising the recent political violence in Zimbabwe got the nod ahead of Iran on the agenda." (Danby's Iran motion stalled, AJN, 30/3/07) Danby was no more successful in September "because a full schedule meant that Indi MP Sophie Mirabella's motion calling for the release of 3 Israeli hostages took precedence..." Talk about in on the act! Way to go, Sophie! And then, rain, in form of the federal election of 07, stopped play.

The Australian House of Representatives may have given Danby the brushoff, but its US counterpart was taking the matter much more seriously, voting in June 2007 by 411-2 votes to "implore" the UNSC to charge Ahmadinejad with violating the Genocide Convention. A piece by former Israeli ambassador to the UN and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold in The Jerusalem Post (21/6/07) describes how the campaign to get Ahmadinejad was hatched by Dershowitz, Cotler, John Bolton (outgoing US ambassador to the UN, and American Enterprise Institute neoconman), and an Israeli legal team at a December 14, 2006 meeting sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs at the offices of the New York Bar Association. Gold also tells how two British MPs invited Netanyahu, Dershowitz, Cotler and the aforementioned Israeli legal team to address the House of Commons; how, by June 2007 69 British MPs had signed up to "urge" the Blair Government to table a resolution at the UNSC demanding Ahmadinejad be tried for incitement to commit genocide; how, on March 5 2007, shadow minister McClelland, even quicker off the mark than the Brits, had called on the UNSC to do the same; how, in April 2007, the Canadian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Rights adopted the same motion; and how half a dozen US states were divesting from companies doing business in Iran.

Gold's final paragraph is most revealing: "For years, Iran and its allies have tried to systematically delegitimize the State of Israel through fictitious charges about 'Israeli war crimes'. The time has come for Israel to counter with a campaign of its own, which unlike the accusations of its adversaries, is firmly grounded in international law and a growing consensus of increasingly significant international opinion." There you have it: Israel has never committed war crimes, all allegations of same are pure fiction authored by "Iran and its allies" (including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'tselem?), we're not gonna take it no more, and we're hitting back with one helluva PR campaign against the current Hitlerian scourge (no, worse!), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Even though Rudd had foolishly turned the Netanyahu/Dershowitz/ Cotler/Bolton/McClelland/ Danby folie a six into an election promise, I concluded my earlier post thus: "Sheer madness of course, but will Rudd have the ticker to buck a promise to the Israel lobby he should never have made in the first place?"

Newspaper says...'No' - if the Sydney Morning Herald report, Caution at Iranian overtures (Jonathan Pearlman, 27/2/08), is anything to go by: "The Rudd Government is proceeding with a plan to charge Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with inciting genocide and has rejected a call by the Iranian ambassador to split from a United States-led push for harsher sanctions. The office of the [now] Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, said yesterday the Government was pursuing its election commitment to bring international criminal charges against Mr Ahmadinejad over his Holocaust revisionism and his calls to wipe Israel off the map...'On the possibility of taking legal action against the Iranian president, the Australian Government is currently taking legal and other advice on this matter', said Mr Smith's spokeswoman, Courtney Hoogan." Maybe, just maybe, that's code for 'We're currently working on the legalese necessary to drop this hot potato'. One can dream...

Beyond the obvious questions - Is this in Australia's interest? Is it even in Israel's interest? Haven't Smith and his staff got anything more important to do? Isn't the Genocide Convention designed to tackle actual cases of genocide, rather than alleged intentions to commit same? What are we doing in bed with the likes of Netanyahu, Dershowitz, et al? Why are we reading from Israel's delusional PR script? - could it possibly be that, despite an army of bureaucrats, minister Smith is still unaware that Ahmadinejad's alleged call to wipe Israel off the map is a hoax? Let us review the matter:-

Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is always a reliable guide in these matters. Of the abovementioned congressional vote, he wrote: "Now, I hold no brief for the Iranian ranter - whose jeremiads against the West are in the category of Borat-like humour - but this seems [only seems, Justin?] like yet another example of political pandering and congressional grandstanding that bears little, if any, relationship to reality. To begin with, the resolution is motivated by a mistranslation of a speech given by Senor Ahmadinejad, in which he cited the Ayatollah Khomeini and seemed to call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Yet, as Jonathan Steele, and Farsi-speaker and Middle East expert Prof. Juan Cole make very clear, that is not what the Iranian President said, or intended to say. Ahmadinejad...said the current regime in Tel Aviv will be 'wiped off the page of time'. It was a call for 'regime change' not genocide - but, never mind. Like most war propaganda, which is almost never related to reality except in the most tenuous sense, the point is not to tell the truth but to characterize the enemy in a particular way. With Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert in Washington to ramp up the Lobby's ferocious campaign to get the US to attack Iran - or at least credibly threaten to - the pro-Israel forces on Capitol Hill were out in full force, herding their congressional supporters into a massive display of obedience with a whopping 411-2 vote." (The End of Dissent? 22/6/07)

If minister Smith and his department are aware that the allegation is groundless, then an entirely reasonable and unsurprising surmise would be that, like the Howard Government before them (although to give Alexander Downer credit, he was never prepared to go where Smith is now proposing), the Ruddies are mere putty in the hands of the Israel lobby. After all, Rudd has been rambammed twice (2003 & 2005); has rhetorically gone where no American politician has and declared that his support for Israel is "in my DNA"; has been personally congratulated by Israeli PM Olmert on his election victory; and has pledged to undergo a third rambamming in his first term of office.

Pray that sanity prevails and the tried and true Australian politician's distinction between core and non-core promises comes to our rescue.

Postscript: Speaking of jeremiads, cop this from Senor Sheridan: "The odds are against a US strike on Iran under any circumstances, and I would say the odds are even against an Israeli strike. But either or both are much more likely if it looks like Obama will win." (This is no time for a celebrity in the Oval Office, The Australian, 28/2/08)