Certainly, and they're good questions.
The first question has to do with a comparison of what happened in the Rwandan case versus what we have here in Iran, and then the use of euphemisms. Actually, I think what we have here is a lot more egregious than what we saw in Rwanda, as far as the content of the incitement is concerned. Here you have direct calls, which I've detailed, that are attached to all kinds of other types of incitement. In some cases you see comparable situations or statements to those that have been made in the Rwandan context, but in their scope, their magnitude, and how direct they are, I think the ones in Iran are actually more egregious. There absolutely is a relation to the next question, regarding euphemisms.
Incitement to genocide is almost always committed through euphemisms. We saw a lot of this in Rwanda. For example, in Rwanda, when people spoke to the citizenry and said, “Go to work”, it was a euphemism for killing Tutsis. When there was reference to finishing off the 1959 revolution—in 1959 there were massacres of Tutsis—it was a euphemism. References to Tutsis as cockroaches or snakes—those sorts of euphemisms—were used as well.
I think when you hear Ahmadinejad talk about “the Zionists”, it's not even much of a euphemism at all. It's pretty much understood by everyone what he's talking about. Again, I think these are much more direct.
I think the other thing you have to realize, related to this, is that in Rwanda you had an African country that had a long history and tradition and had a language, Kinyarwanda, that was unique to that country. Terms that could be used in a very veiled way would be understood, would be immediately grasped by the listener, and that's what the direct part of the calculus is.
Here you have somebody, in Ahmadinejad, who's speaking to the whole world. He's using terminology, frankly, that I think everyone can understand and grasp immediately. One issue is that he's speaking in Farsi, and we have to rely on translations. But even if you look at the translations—translations that come from the Iranian government's own websites—they will use words like “wipe out”.
There's been some controversy about whether or not Ahmadinejad has said that Israel should “vanish from the pages of time” as opposed to being “wiped off the map”. I cover that in my article quite a bit. I think the point is that if you look at the translations provided by the Iranian government itself, they're referring to “wiping off the map”. I think we have a very strong case here. I think it's actually stronger than the Rwandan cases, in many respects.
Then, concerning what the obligation is in the genocide convention to prevent genocide, I think it's clear, if you just look at the title of the genocide convention: it's the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the very first words of the title of this document, prevention is there before punishment. That, to me, is really the central focus of the convention.
When you look at incitement—you have your definition of genocide in article 2 and then you have incitement listed as a form of genocide in article 3—it's clear that incitement to genocide is an inchoate crime, as I mentioned in my remarks. That means that the crime is complete once the words are uttered, if the other elements that I talked about are present. You don't have to have causation. The law has been very clearly defined in the Rwandan cases that causation is not an element of incitement to genocide.
So in the case of Ahmadinejad, we see that the crime has already been committed, and given the emphasis on deterrence in the genocide convention, we absolutely have an obligation to act. We need to act now rather than wait until something terrible happens.