Mr. Speaker, what I think is most disturbing about this debate today is the attempts made by members of the Liberal government over and over to refuse to talk about what needs to be said and named, which is that the acts of ISIS are acts of genocide. Therefore, I will read the definition of genocide from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Article II of the convention defines “genocide” as:
...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.
Article III defines the crimes that can be punished under the convention. They are genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.
ISIS is committing genocide and the Canadian government, on behalf of all Canadians who know that to be true, needs to say it.