Robert Tait and Ed Pilkington
London
Guardian
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton,
is backing a call for the president of Iran to be charged with
inciting genocide because of his speeches advocating the destruction
of the state of Israel.
Barely a week after he announced his resignation from the UN
post, Mr Bolton will appear tomorrow among a panel of diplomats
and lawyers calling for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be prosecuted.
The panel has been convened by a Jewish umbrella group in the
US, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations.
Mr Bolton was forced to quit his post after his appointment was
blocked by Democrats and several Republicans in the Senate foreign
relations committee. President George Bush said he accepted the
resignation but was unhappy about it.
The call for legal action came as Mr Ahmadinejad repeated his
onslaught against Israel at an international gathering of holocaust
deniers in Tehran. The president, who has dismissed the murder
of six million Jews by the Nazis as a myth told up to 70 visiting
speakers that the Israeli state would soon be wiped out.
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will, the trend for
the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what
God has promised and what all nations want," he said.
He was praised by several participants for his "bravery
and democratic actions" a source who was present told the
Guardian.
The event came under fierce attack abroad. At his monthly Downing
Street press conference, Tony Blair condemned the conference as
"shocking beyond belief" and singled out the decision
to invite David Duke, a former leading Ku Klux Klan member, as
proof of Iran's extremism. Meeting Israel's prime minister, Ehud
Olmert, in Berlin, the chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany
rejected the conference and would "act against it with all
the means that we have". Franco Frattini, the EU's justice
commissioner, denounced it as "an affront to the whole democratic
world".
By contrast, Mr Duke praised the event as "a tremendous
step forward" and said Mr Ahmadinejad said "sensible
things".
Mr Bolton will be joined in tomorrow's launch of the legal action
against Mr Ahmadinejad by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz,
and the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, together
with experts from the US, Canada and Israel. A suit will be lodged
with the international court of justice at The Hague, which will
decide whether to hear the action. The panel said the Iranian
president was guilty of inciting genocide "by making numerous
threats against the United States, calling for the destruction
of Israel and instigating discrimination against Christians and
Jews". His words violate a 1948 UN genocide convention, to
which Iran is a signatory, they said.
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