Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist
צילום: רויטרס
Suicide attacks to be ‘crimes against humanity'?
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Australia spearheading international campaign to criminalize any act that support suicide bombings; ‘Australia should drive campaign because of pain suffered by its citizens in Bali bombings
The Australian Federal Government is being urged to consider a convention to make suicide bombing a crime against humanity – a move that would have prevented Indonesia from releasing Jemaah Islamiyah’s spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, from prison last week.
The convention, proposed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), was tabled at a meeting between Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and the SWC’s director of international relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, on Wednesday afternoon.
Speaking to Jewish audiences across Sydney this week, Dr Samuels, who is in Australia as a guest of Sydney’s Jewish Communal Appeal (JCA), said the Wiesenthal Centre is spearheading an international campaign to define suicide bombing as a crime against humanity and to criminalize any act that supports it. “It includes the whole chain of terror,” he said.
“Bashir would then be considered a criminal against humanity and ... an international arrest warrant would follow him everywhere,” said Dr Samuels, who is based in Paris.
He said the SWC had already met with 23 foreign ministers as well as former pope John Paul II regarding the convention, which was drafted more than two years ago. “We want to get a statement of political will from the Australian Government,” Dr Samuels told the AJN.
'We are all interdependent'
He said Australia, not the SWC, should drive the campaign, especially because of the pain suffered by Australians from the Bali bombings and the subsequent release of Bashir after only 25 months in jail.
The radical firebrand cleric gave his blessing to the 2002 bombers who killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. But Dr Samuels added the convention would probably not be legally retroactive.
Dr Samuels said he was last in Australia in 2001 when he came to Cairns to attend a United Nations World Heritage Committee meeting, where he told the forum of the existence of a controversial disco built at Auschwitz, which is listed as a UN World Heritage site.
The chair of the session, the ambassador of Finland, told the Polish ambassador to close the disco immediately, which he did, Dr Samuels said. “This is a good example of just how interdependent we all are.”
'Ahmadinejad a new fuehrer'
Australia’s physical isolation was today insignificant in the global war on terrorism, he said. “What happens in Europe is a trip wire for you here. What happens here – the fate of Australia – is integral to the same integral struggle.”
In a wide-ranging address, Dr Samuels painted a picture of doom and gloom for Jews in Europe.
He said the “new apparatus” which replaced the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 – “when anti-Semitic propaganda reached a post-Holocaust peak” – was the anti-globalization movement.
Citing a litany of cases in which French Jews had suffered physical harm from anti-Semitic acts as well as political and judicial indifference, Dr Samuels said the expression “the suitcase or the coffin” was circulating in France.
On Iran, he described President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “new fuehrer”, and slammed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an Asian forum that discusses, among other things, counter-terrorism, for offering Iran observer status. “It’s like Little Red Riding Hood inviting the big bad wolf to dinner,” he said.
The Wiesenthal Centre produces a CD-ROM each year listing terror and hate sites on the internet. This year’s disc, which has just been completed, includes some 6000 hate sites, including some in Australia, Dr Samuels said.
The JCA aims to raise USD 11.5 million in this year’s campaign.
Reprinted by permission of Australian Jewish News
