Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Calgary Midnapore for his very passionate speech on how critical this debate is, and how disappointing it is that the Liberal Party and the Liberal government is not supporting the motion.
They seem to be caught up in this whole idea that what is happening today in Iraq and Syria, and is being perpetrated by Daesh, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, is actually not a genocide. I could not disagree with the government more.
I want to take some time to explain to the Liberals what genocide is. As my colleague stated earlier, he brought a motion before the House about the Armenian genocide and the Liberals voted against it. I was proud that I was able, when we were in government, to bring forward a motion to recognize the Ukrainian Holodomor in 1932-33 as a genocide, which was supported and passed.
If we look at the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly back in 1948, that resolution which was drafted and advocated for by Raphael Lemkin clearly lays out what genocide is. His experiences in witnessing the genocides of the 20th century, starting with the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and Holodomor, really informed his definition, which was accepted by the world.
I just want to remind everyone what article II says in the convention, as it defines genocide. It says:
....any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Then it goes on in article III to say that these crimes can be punished under the convention:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
If we look at what ISIS has been doing in Iraq and Syria, in trying to perpetrate their genocidal tendencies around the world, every one of these articles in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide are checked off. There is no debate on what ISIS has perpetrated and the atrocities they have committed, the way that they have bragged about committing genocide, the way that ISIS has gone out and targeted groups and encouraged hateful crimes against ethnic minorities and religious minorities throughout the region in their attempt to establish their caliphate.
I agree wholeheartedly with the members of the U.S. Congress, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, members of the United Kingdom's House of Commons and the entire British Parliament, and members of the European Union Parliament, who have all said that ISIS has committed a genocide. They have passed resolutions, they have passed motions, and they have condemned the actions of ISIS as genocide.
Why will the Government of Canada not? Why should this Parliament not stand with our most trusted allies?
The government keeps saying there is a process we have to go through under the United Nations, and that takes a resolution through the Security Council. However, we have human rights abusers who hold vetoes and sit on the Security Council. Because of the dysfunction of the United Nations Security Council, we will never get the United Nations to condemn the genocide that is being perpetrated and committed by ISIS.
In that vacuum, without that leadership from the United Nations, it is inherent upon this Parliament, this government, to stand and call ISIL's atrocities what they are, and that is genocide.
We do not have to go into great detail about all the atrocities. My colleague, the member for Calgary Midnapore, just clearly outlined how ISIS had gone out of its way to target the Yazidis, the Chaldeans, the Christians, the Shias. Anyone it considers apostates, who will not convert to its demented ideology and its warped sense of religion, is systematically executed.
We just learned this past week of 19 Yazidi girls who refused to convert to ISIS' way of thinking, to its view of Islam. They refused to be sex slaves to the ISIS terrorists so they were put in a cage and burned alive.
We saw the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar. We saw how the ones who were captured were executed. We have seen how ISIS has gone after Christians. We have seen how it has gone after Turkmen. It continues to isolate and exterminate those who are not like them. That form of racism turned into genocide should never ever be tolerated.
I am sure everyone is wondering why the Liberals will not come out and call this genocide what it is. Even though they like to talk about the United Nations' responsibility to protect, they do not want to go out there and exercise that responsibility to protect.
A case in point is that one of the very first actions of the Liberal government was to pull out of the combat mission against ISIS. Rather than stand with their coalition partners and rather than be there with our fighter jets bombing ISIS, degrading its capabilities, they decided we would step back, let others do the heavy lifting and not be there in a combat role.
As we heard earlier, and as we have seen and witnessed on TV today, ISIS' degradation and its ultimate defeat is only going to be possible through combat and the heavy bombing that our coalition partners are carrying out. The uptake that had to be shared among other member nations of the coalition because Canada pulled back our CF-18s really speaks to what the Liberal government really feels about exercising the responsibility to protect, to protect those who cannot defend themselves, to protect those who are the target of ISIS hate, to protect those who are being killed, eliminated, and displaced because of the genocidal tendencies of ISIS.
We really need to exercise our moral and ethical beliefs and stand up for the words that are spoken by all members of the House.
Raphael Lemkin said, “If you act in the name of conscience you are stronger than any government in the world.” It took great conscience for the Government of Canada, during World War I, to step in and stop the genocide that was taking place by the Ottoman Empire. It took great conscience and strength by Canadians who volunteered and signed up for the Canadian Armed Forces to stop Hitler's Holocaust in World War II.
It was Canadians who went in and fought genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. It was only effective when they could actually fight, not peacekeeping but fighting.
The only way we can actually stop what is happening in Iraq and Syria today is to fight. I call upon the government to do the right thing, to admit that what is happening today in Iraq and Syria is a genocide. I ask the government to do the right thing and put our jets back in the fight, to do the right thing and stop these atrocities.