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Combating Incitement to Terror and Violence

(Algemeiner) Amb. Ron Prosor - Israel's Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor addressed a conference at the United Nations on "Incitement to Terror and Violence," organized by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on Feb. 28, 2013. 64 years ago, the UN ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with the horrors of the Holocaust still fresh in the mind of the international community. One of the Convention's key provisions made it a crime to "directly and publicly incite" to commit genocide. Last August, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on public television and insisted that "the very existence of the Zionist regime is...an affront to all world nations." He called on "all human communities to wipe out the Zionist regime from the forehead of humanity." Yet, in the face of this explicit cry to destroy a UN member state, the UN barely said anything. Terrorism does not begin with an attack on a bus or a raid on a village. That is how terrorism ends. Terrorism begins when its perpetrators are indoctrinated with words and thoughts of hate. Just south of Israel's border, in Gaza, the Hamas government has created an atmosphere of extremism that vilifies Israelis and Jews to the next generation. Gaza kindergarten graduations feature "terrorist dress-up," where five-year-olds stage plays that glorify jihadists and suicide bombers. Families in Gaza watch public television sermons featuring Hamas ministers like 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh, who recently claimed that "the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth." Incitement is no less prevalent under Abbas in the West Bank. Under the PA, students learn history from textbooks that glorify terrorists - and learn geography from atlases that erase Israel from the map. Official PA "educational" television featured a young girl saying: "Our wars are for the Al Aqsa Mosque, and our enemy, Zion, is a Satan with a tail." Counter-terrorism does not just mean combating terrorists wherever they seek to strike and dismantling terrorist infrastructure. True counter-terrorism means disrupting the ecosystem of extremism in which terror thrives and showing zero tolerance for the indoctrination that causes it to thrive. Just as the international community has an obligation to bring terrorists to justice, it must also pursue those who build the foundations of terror by teaching children to detest and despise. We have already lost an entire generation to incitement. We cannot afford to lose another.
2013-03-04 00:00:00
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