Thank you.
The relationship between the risk factors I listed, which have been developed by Barbara Harff and a number of other political scientists and which I went through in my paper, and the process analysis, which I also alluded to but didn't go through in any detail, is the following.
The risk factors are essentially statistical probabilities. We have actually taken computers and developed variables that can be correlated with genocides of the past, and the risk factors that stand out the most strongly are the ones I have listed. First is an exclusionary ideology—in other words, an ideology that excludes whole groups of people from being considered fully people—and we have that here with Jews, for instance. Second is a denial of past genocides, which we have in the denial of the Holocaust. Third is authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Each of these factors is essentially a probability prediction, a statistical risk factor.
The way in which that relates to the eight stages of genocide model I have developed is that the eight stages model was really developed as a guide to policy-makers to see genocide coming as it developed. Instead of just looking at risk factors, it actually sees there is a logic to the process. The eight stages are, in a nutshell, as follows.
The first is classification. Every culture has to distinguish people into us versus them, and in this case the us versus them is Iranians versus Jews and other groups. In fact, even within Iranian society certain people are considered to be “them”—the Bahá'í, for instance, the Azeris, and a lot of other groups that are outside the normal political rights of the society. In the case of Jews, for example, Ahmadinejad has said that Jews, these “fabricated” people, cannot continue to exist. I mean, that's otherness; that is a declaration that they have no rights. He has said, for instance, that Jews have no roots in Palestine.
The second stage, symbolization, is the one in which we give names to these classifications in which symbols may even, in fact, be placed upon the people who represent the classification. The most famous, of course, is the yellow star used by the Nazis. This was also done, by the way, in Cambodia. Ben Kiernan and I discovered that blue and white checked scarves were used to mark the people in the eastern zone before they were forced and deported out of the eastern zone to their deaths.
In this case the main symbols are, of course, the names—Jews, Zionists, and so forth—but they are coupled with the third stage, namely dehumanization. In this, the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad is absolutely replete. He has called Israel a blot, a stain, a cancer, filthy bacteria, a wild beast. He says that Jews are animals, barbarians, mass murderers. He has picked up on the language in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for instance. This sort of dehumanization is characteristic of genocidal regimes. For instance, Tutsis in Rwanda were characterized as cockroaches, or Jews were characterized as vermin during the Holocaust.
The fourth stage, organization, is one in which you develop the organizations to carry out the genocide. In this case I particularly want to stress agreement with my fellow professor here on the point that even if the nuclear weapons of Iran are only used as a shield, they nevertheless would provide a shield for organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorists with genocidal ideologies to organize killings and to continue to terrorize Israel.
The fifth stage, polarization, is one in which the extremists drive the groups apart. We see this in some of the statements by the regime, such as those to the effect that the Zionist regime cannot continue to exist. This is a statement by Ahmadinejad.
The sixth stage, preparation, is one in which the victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. In this case it's Israel, or the Zionists, as he likes to call them. Then they're attacked by terrorist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah or, as in this case, there is an overall pattern of attack that is sponsored and paid for by the Iranian state.
The seventh stage, extermination, is genocide itself. It's the commencement of the actual mass killing. Genocide is not an all-or-none thing. It can be slow; it can be done very gradually, as we have seen in Sudan, for example. I believe that is the ultimate long-range proposal that Iran has for Israel--to wipe them out slowly--but if they don't do that, they will have the nuclear weapons to do it all at once.
Finally, denial is the eighth and final stage of every genocide. Every genocide is denied by the people who are committing it, and that stage actually begins right from the start. The people who are going to commit the genocide will deny that they're about to commit it, they will deny it while they're committing it, and then they'll deny it after they have committed it. We've seen all of that in Iran.