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Dr. Elihu Richter, MD, MPH, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health
My Last Lecture: Putting Moral Agency and the Precautionary Principle to Work for the Prevention of Genocide and its Incitement
Elihu D Richter MD, MPH (Associate Professor)
Hebrew University - Hadassah School of Community Medicine and Public Health
and the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention, Jerusalem, Israel
Human Choice and Bystander Indifference: The Core Issues
Students and colleagues: remember -- moral agency is central to the definition of the crime of genocide, defined as any act committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part.[1] In short, we are talking about human choice and bystander indifference.
Note that all of Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide (Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial[2]) have to do with human choice and bystander indifference. Innate aggression, Malthusian pressures, poverty, imperialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, colonialism, racism, sexism, north-south inequality, and global climate change all have explanatory power. However, human choice is the driving force in all genocides. As a Talmudic aphorism states,"everything is foreseen, but choice is given." It neatly frames the relationship between all the foregoing so-called deep causes and the role of individual actors with moral agency.
Intervention is the difference between having moral agency and being a bystander—the earlier the intervention, the better. The clock is always ticking, even as I give this lecture.
Pre-empting Genocide: The Precautionary Principle
In this Last Lecture I make the case for the essential role of the Precautionary Principle—a proactive concept from public health and environmental epidemiology—to operationalize our mission to predict and prevent genocide.[3]
This principle states that the case for intervention is triggered by early indicators of catastrophic outcomes, even if the outcomes are uncertain. My special focus is the use of the Precautionary Principle to prevent genocide, the greatest of all man-made catastrophes, by preventing word pollution or incitement to genocide. Indeed, there is no better example of the ethical case for the use of the Precautionary Principle.
The Precautionary Principle states that when there is uncertainty concerning the possibility of the occurrence of a major catastrophic event, the costs of inaction far outweigh those of anticipatory preventive action. The Precautionary Principle shifts the burden of proof from those suspecting a catastrophic risk to those denying it. The Precautionary Principle states that it is better to be safe than to be sorry.[4]
The case for using the Precautionary Principle is that genocide prevention is an oxymoron once the killing starts.
From Public Health to Genocide Prevention
I come from a background in public health and environmental medicine, which is all about prediction and prevention. We were taught that “a fence at the top of a cliff is better than an ambulance at the bottom.” I left the study of history–which is all about what was, for a career in medicine, which is about decisions and changing things here and now.
The Holocaust and genocide interested me very little until 1991, shortly after the First Gulf War and its missile attacks on Israel and gas mask alerts, when my wife and I accompanied a group of Holocaust survivors on a trip to my father’s hometown in Ostroleka, Poland. I was humbled by their unassuming modesty and stories of courage and survival as they retraced their flight from the Nazis into the forests of Belarus near Pinsk, where they discovered the mass grave of their murdered friends and family.
On the day we returned to Israel from Poland, we saw the first TV reports of Serbian paramilitaries burning villages and carrying out forced expulsions. I was revolted by the term “ethnic cleansing.” Then in 1994, we saw the TV images of thousands of murdered victims floating down Rwandan rivers. Organized Hutus hacked 800,000 Tutsis to death over a three-month period, motivated by the dehumanizing words of radio broadcasters.
As an epidemiologist, I could understand how repeated daily exposure to motifs of hate turns ordinary people into murderers. However, I could not comprehend the inaction of the world’s leaders, even with TV coverage of the barbarism and brutality in real time.
The numbers of the murdered made me question the moral agency of world leaders: Srebreniča in 1995, where more than 8000 Bosnians were butchered as UN Peacekeepers stood by; the slow “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur and the "international community's" late and ineffective response (estimated death tolls have now reached more than 400,000[5]).
During these years Palestinian terrorists carried out genocidal terror against Israel using rockets, missiles, and suicide bombs, targeting civilians at wedding halls, cafeterias cafes, schools, food markets and homes—climaxed by the massacre of a group of elderly worshipers celebrating the Passover Seder.
And then came the genocidal terror of 9/11 perpetrated by Al Qaeda (2994 killed immediately and thousands more first responders dying from exposure to the toxins).
Then there was the United States’ invasion of Iraq—itself ruled by Saddam Hussein, a genocidal leader who had carried out gassings, massacres and forced expulsions of the Kurds and Marshland Arabs, with an estimated 50,000-100,000+ murdered during the 1988 Al-Anfal campaign, another 25,000 civilians and rebels killed in the Barzani genocide of 1983, more thousands in the Feyli genocide, and 50,000 more in the 1991 uprisings.
On October 27, 2005, I was stunned to hear the genocidal threats of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recycling the motifs of Mein Kampf, as Iran rushed towards nuclearization, exported terror, and suppressed human rights.
I tracked the timeline of unrelenting indoctrination and incitement by Iran’s leaders. I discovered that Iran's incitement increased in intensity when the world relaxed its vigilance but decreased when the world increased its vigilance—a powerful yet tragically overlooked lesson in the possibilities for prevention.[6]
We now live in the era of world-wide threats from Jihadist, Islamofascist and authoritarian governments and movements. Syria has committed butchery, barbarism, and genocide with over 500,000 dead and millions of refugees.
ISIS’s (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) evil wars of extermination have spread its ideology across Africa and the Middle East.
I asked: what went wrong? Can I—an epidemiologist—use the models and tools of public health and epidemiology to predict and prevent genocide and genocidal terror? Can early warning signs of catastrophic outcomes (i.e. indoctrination and incitement) trigger intervention?
My interest as an epidemiologist in predicting and preventing led me to years of work on incitement and the potential for prevention of genocide and genocidal terror by preventing incitement.
I was forced to ask two more basic questions:
What leads to the incitement?
What can public health professionals do about it?
First, we need a professional Code of Ethics.
Consider the ethics of medicine and public health. Our core value is respect for life and dignity. Therefore, we reject ideologies that dehumanize the other and that glorify mass murder, conquest, forced expulsions, rape as an instrument of conquest and all other crimes against humanity. But let’s never forget that public health language has actually been used to promote genocide.
The best and the brightest practitioners of public health advocated using Eugenics to improve public health. The results were the "racial hygiene" of Nazi medicine,[7] unethical human experimentation, and mass murder. Nazi medicine promoted euthanasia as an act of mercy for the sick and helpless. Eradicating sickness morphed into killing sick persons, which resulted in genocide of “sick” populations.
Nazi medicine preceded the Holocaust. Karl Astel, a medical school dean at the University of Jena and ardent Nazi racial theorist organized euthanasia programs that murdered 200,000 people. He was then active in planning what was euphemistically called “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—i.e. murdering Jews—while simultaneously pioneering anti-smoking programs to protect the Master Race.[8]
During the Armenian genocide, Turkish doctors gassed children in order to protect the purity of Turkishness.[9]
In the 1920’s and 1930’s eugenicists in the US lobbied for compulsory sterilization of African Americans and restrictive immigration to protect the “racial stock” of the US population.[10]
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Japanese microbiologists supervised horrific programs to spread highly contagious and lethal plague and anthrax, producing massive epidemics, and carried out vivisections on live prisoners.[11]
In 2016, Dr. Basher Assad, a Syrian physician, carried out gas warfare against his own subjects in Syria, three decades after the Anfal gassings by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The sordid history of public health’s role in producing genocide teaches us that we need a Code of Ethics to keep us from doing harm on behalf of the greater good.[12]
My concern: could neo-Malthusian concerns send public health down a new slippery slope condoning coercive or selective population restriction based on advances in genetic screening?
But there are other concerns. A Code of Ethics must proscribe undeclared conflicts of interest—which have blighted the field of genocide prediction and prevention. We need to import the rigorous norms and standards of epidemiology and public health for investigating and reporting genocidal scenarios.
The stakes are enormous. Totten’s pioneering work showed how poor protocols and sloppy supervision led to an official UN Report that manufactured doubt concerning whether there was sufficient organization to prove the Sudanese government's genocidal intent in Darfur.[13]
Key Concepts from Public Health: Precaution, Prediction and Prevention
The prediction and prevention of genocide is not a spectator sport. Therefore, I propose using epidemiologic counterfactual what-if timelines of trigger points for human choices by perpetrators, enablers, responders, bystanders, and victims in the timeline of the choices and decisions that have led to genocide and how they impacted cumulative death tolls in the early years of the genocidal civil war in Syria.[14]
But let’s turn to some comments based on a statement that Professor Gregory Stanton and I submitted in 2007 to the US Genocide Prevention Task Force.[15] Those engaged in Genocide Prevention should develop and apply public health-based models for the control of preventable diseases for the prediction and prevention of genocide and politicide—which have killed more than 70 million people since World War II. Genocidal terror must be included as part of the spectrum of genocidal massacres.[16]
Stanton and I noted that “applying the Precautionary Principle to make genocide prevention effective presupposes an international network for the surveillance of hate language and prosecution of incitement to commit genocide.
Until now, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has resulted in some punishment but almost no prevention. Its implementation has been rooted in post-hoc criminal law. Because it is based on the proof of intent after the event, international criminal law cannot be relied upon to prevent and stop genocide.
The Precautionary Principle should be the fulcrum for a paradigm shift from a reactive to a proactive response. Let me reiterate, in genocide prevention, as in environmental health and disaster prevention, the case for action in applying the Precautionary Principle is the catastrophic ethical cost of delaying prevention—which, as in natural disasters, can be measured in massive loss of human lives.
We will achieve nothing in prevention unless we advance the temporal focus of genocide law and preventive decisions from a proof of intent after the event to prediction and prevention.”
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as well as the ICC's Rome Statute, specify that incitement to genocide is an act of genocide. Both specify that incitement—before the killing, raping, expulsion and other crimes—can itself be prosecuted as an act of genocide.
This is the available platform for advancing use of the Precautionary Principle. Incitement to commit genocide is the classic predictive indicator and promoter of genocide.
As Dr. Barbara Harff has proven, “certain circumstantial indicators predict and promote impending genocide: a past genocide or politicide followed by impunity; civil war or political upheaval; an authoritarian regime; ethnic exclusivity in the ruling elite; an aggressively exclusionary ideology; a lack of trade and information openness; and an indifference to crimes against humanity by "the international community."[17]
Extreme competition for limited resources may also contribute to genocidal agendas. But contrary to conventional wisdom, poverty, climate change, and so-called Malthusian pressures by themselves are not triggers for genocide. There have been wars over water in Africa, but regional sharing of limited water sources drip irrigation, and desalination have turned a zero-sum scenario into one of live and let live between Israel and Jordan. This win-win success is an example of moral agency using knowledge and technology to override so-called deterministic Malthusian scenarios.
Genocide deniers ascribe jihadist massacres of Christian farmer villages in Nigeria to "climate change" The deniers ignore the religious indoctrination and sponsorship by large scale, often military, cattle owners that motivate the jihadists to massacre Christian villages while leaving Muslim villages nearby unharmed. This is not to deny that climate change and increased competition for resources may be factors that make armed conflict more likely.[18]
The core of a program for the prevention of genocide and genocidal terror should be based on applying models and tools of public health and epidemiology, for prediction and prevention. This means surveillance, prevention, and control of early genocidal conditions.
Based on the lessons of the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the genocides of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Myanmar, it is clear that state-sponsored indoctrination, incitement and hate language are highly specific early warning signs that should trigger preventive legal and diplomatic action, instead of waiting for prosecution after the genocide is over—as happened in the trials at Nuremberg, the ICTY, and the ICTR.
Proactive epidemiologic models for tracking source, distribution, spread and effects of incitement can be applied to address early warning signs of genocide and to respond to genocidal threats, notably including incitement. The goal must be to stop incitement without waiting for the genocide or the genocidal terror to start.
Today, stopping incitement means strong proactive challenges to the ideologies, indoctrination, and organization of movements that use incitement to inspire their followers. Applying the Precautionary Principle to prevent genocide and genocidal terror by preventing incitement advances the temporal locus of intervention to a stage even earlier than the creation of rapid deployment forces for response and rescue.
The Last Decade: A Darker, More Evil and Dangerous World Order?
Ten years ago, the foregoing comments would have been my Last Lecture. Today, those comments need to be updated by the need to counter ever more brutal assaults on the four foundational legal pillars of the post-Holocaust vision for a better world:
1. The UN Charter prohibiting aggression of one nation against another;
2. the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
3. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and
4. the Geneva Conventions Prohibiting Chemical and Biological Warfare.
Since 2011, Bashar Assad, a doctor with medical training in London, has perpetrated horrific crimes against humanity against his own people resulting in an estimated 450,000 dead, at least 4,815,360 refugees, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and the use of chemical warfare.
Since 2014, ISIS has perpetrated genocidal mass extermination of Yezidis, Christians, Shi’a Muslims and other minorities, with over 33,000 dead and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes.[19]
Iran’s theocratic leadership, the major protector and enabler of Syria and Hezbollah—a terrorist organization—has itself been empowered and emboldened by the P5+1’s craven, Chamberlainesque nuclear deal and the US’s capitulation to Iran's hostage blackmail to release billions in frozen assets that Iran can use to support terrorism and build nuclear weapons. Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran incites to genocide against Israel and suppresses domestic human rights. Iran will eventually be permitted to go nuclear, a grave threat to peace in the Middle East and the world.
Russia annexed Crimea as world leaders projected a willful neglect of the threats. Now Russia has brazenly invaded and is openly committing genocide against Ukraine's citizens.
We see the emergence of a new bloc of totalitarian and authoritarian world powers and their allies, the enablers, and perpetrators of evil in Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and China, as the world's democracies remain serial bystanders.
Has no one noticed that every one of the BRIC group of nations has committed genocide in the twentieth century? The unifying bond of the BRIC bloc is that they share contempt for the fundamental principles and treaties that were designed to promote world order and human rights? The BRIC bloc says they are against "Western imperialism." They are really for unrestrained nationalism and state power.
Meanwhile in the US and Europe, there has been a withering of moral agency at the top—where it matters most.
I see ominous trends, recalling the build-up to World War II. Has pacifism become a fig leaf for bystanderism?[20] Has the new pacifism brought on the wars and crimes against humanity that it seeks to avoid—as Churchill warned after Munich?[21]
Genocide—like open sewage in the streets of 19th century London—seems to have become acceptable in the 21st century. Is there a Churchill among world leaders who believes that genocide is "unacceptable" and is determined to prevent genocide with forceful action?
Classic models of early response (e.g. Charny’s Rapid Deployment Forces) were visionary, but they are useless without the will of powerful nations to act, which in turn presupposes moral agency and urgency.
Recall the disgraceful failure of the UN and the US State Department to respond to UNAMIR Commanding General Roméo Dallaire’s call for reinforcements so UNAMIR could defeat the genocidaires in Rwanda.
That failure foreshadowed the US failure to stop Syria in 2013 following the use by Assad’s forces of Sarin to gas Syrian civilians—when the death toll from Syria's genocidal war was already “only” 100,000.
Today the Precautionary Principle should give a new vision and mission to the Rapid Deployment Force concept. Articles 43 through 47 of the UN Charter would create a world police force. But they have never been implemented because the Perm-5 don't want rivals to their own armies.
We need the tools of epidemiology for detecting incitement, starting with the big perpetrators, all the way to terror movements and so-called lone wolves.
Using Epidemiologic Models to Apply the Precautionary Principle
Epidemiologic models state the case for measures to prevent and deter population-wide exposure to indoctrination and incitement—even before there are genocidal threats on the ground.
For example, the “iceberg model” of disease shows how, for every individual patient sitting in the hospital with severe heart disease, there are thousands out there with subclinical disease—the walking sick—who are the targets for effective intervention, and tens of thousands more without subclinical disease, with poor nutrition and exercise who will be at future risk.
Melting the bottom of the iceberg is more effective than slicing off the top.
Other epidemiologic models show how strategic population-wide promotion of health and removing recognized risks protect far more people and produce better and more enduring results than individual screening. For example, population-wide measures to reduce salt in our diet will be much more effective than screening for high blood pressure in individual cases.
Here are some other key models: repeated dose-response; group and individual susceptibility; increased susceptibility of young and intergenerational transmission; and, most importantly, the role of short incubation periods.
We can apply these epidemiologic models to population-wide exposure to incitement. These models predict that high population-wide exposure to low levels of background incitement increases individual susceptibility to commit genocide.
To operationalize the Precautionary Principle, we need to apply “positive deviance” by identifying the minority in every population who seem immune to incitement, find out what makes them tick, and empower them.
In summary, these simple but powerful epidemiologic models offer the potential for population-wide pre-emptive approaches to prevention and deterrence of genocide and genocidal terror everywhere without restriction to time and space.
Anti-Semitism: The Elephant in the Room of Genocide Prevention
Anti-Semitism is the mother of all hatreds. The obsessive demonization and delegitimization of Israel, now in the guise of anti-Zionism, has distracted and diverted attention from the big real evils of today.[22]
The most striking official example: The Orwellian UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel 61 times—versus 55 for all other countries combined. There have been 15 condemnations for Syria, 12 for Myanmar, 8 for North Korea, 2 for Sudan, and 0 for Russia, China, and Pakistan.[23] Last year the UN General Assembly passed only 3 resolutions against all other countries worldwide, but a shocking 20 resolutions against democratic Israel.
Without such obsessive distraction and distortion, could it be that the world would begin to address its energies to stopping continuing horrors in Syria, Darfur, and the imploding of Sudan and South Sudan in genocidal civil wars?
Institutionalized anti-Semitism has drained the international order of what little energies it has for real moral agency for genocide prevention.
Word Pollution: The Pandemic of Jihadist Incitement
Word Pollution is the use of words, phrases and motifs that incite, defame, delegitimize, dehumanize, intimidate, and threaten with the intent to indoctrinate, coerce, and direct huge populations to hate, kill, plunder, and rape.
Word pollution glorifies evil leaders and inspires people to follow them.
In totalitarian or authoritarian theocracies, word pollution is pandemic and pervasive. In Rwanda, the phrase used for incitement was “heating up the heads.”[24] As with air pollution, everyone was exposed to its effects.
The pandemic spread of Jihadist and lslamist theocratic inter-generational indoctrination and incitement recognizes no conventional geographic or political boundaries.
Today the new threats are directed against Jews, Christians, Kurds, Yezidis, Bahai, Armenians, Copts, and Zoroastrians throughout the Middle East.
Ideological surrogates export genocidal terror to the West. For this newer scenario, the boots on the ground of Rapid Deployment Forces—which usually were not rapid, rarely deployed, and had little force—cannot stop the spread of evil motifs which Inspire (the name of Al Qaeda’s magazine) and motivate millions.
The theatres of engagement are no longer restricted to specific locations. They are global. In the airwaves of cyberspace, they are transmitted immediately to the most remote internet café or smart phone. Words kill, more than ever, in an era of instant spread. They now reach hundreds of millions via the internet, word of mouth, classrooms, places of worship, and mass and social media.
If guns, knives, rockets, and missiles are the hardware, words are the software—and they permeate the world.
We can operationalize the Precautionary Principle to counter the new genocidal terrorism. To do so, we will have to counter the movements that produce indoctrination and incitement that precede genocide.
We must recognize that the term incitement hardly captures the power of Jihadist Islamofascist totalitarian and authoritarian systems that indoctrinate, intimidate, and coerce their subjects.
Iran: Epicenter of Islamofascist Incitement
Today’s Iranian propaganda still uses Mein Kampf-style motifs that demonize, dehumanize, threaten, arouse, indoctrinate, instruct, motivate, and direct hate against the State of Israel.
Over the years, Ayatollah Khamenei, the powerful Supreme Leader of theocratic Iran, has referred to Jews as "rabid dogs", "sinister and unclean", "merciless and inhuman beasts" that are "doomed to collapse." He has proclaimed that the elimination of Israel is the most important issue in the Islamic World. He has announced that without destroying Israel, victory is incomplete.
Khameni has proclaimed: “The only accepted treatment for the wound of Palestine is to cut and remove the cancer gland of the Zionist movement. Israel is a cancer gland. What do people do with a cancer gland? Aside from cutting and removing it, what other treatments are available. This is not a slogan it is logic.”[25]
These genocidal threats are accompanied by denials of the Holocaust. Khamenei's website promotes Israelophobia.
Khamenei’s language is not unique to him. It is pandemic in much of the Muslim world and can be heard throughout Europe and Middle Eastern UNRWA refugee camps.
Yet the world remains a bystander to Iran’s genocidal threats and dehumanization against Israel. The P5+1 has been a bystander to Iran’s enabling the butchery and barbarism in Syria by Assad and Hezbollah—a terror organization whose charter commits it to the destruction of Israel.
The story in Syria poses the following question: Could repeated cradle-to-grave indoctrination in the motifs of hate and word pollution result in addiction to the behaviors it fosters?
The Vision: Redefining the Unacceptable and Zero Tolerance for Incitement
Word pollution can be defined, measured, tracked, and stopped.[26] In principle, eradication of such incitement is achievable because its source and transmission is man-made—as in the campaigns against smallpox and polio, which have been eradicated.
Here is a good precedent for advocacy: The 2007 Resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, written by Gregory Stanton and me, which called for referral of the President of Iran to the International Criminal Court for Incitement to Genocide.[27]
This resolution was the basis for an even stronger resolution (HConRes21) from the US House of Representatives.[28]
We have seen success stories from the use of text messaging to counter inciting text messaging (Kenya and Ivory Coast). Sanctions have been shown to reduce Iranian incitement. These examples show how precautionary and proactive strategies can generate effective intervention in the era of Internet indoctrination and incitement.
In an era of official bystanderism, the initiatives for preemptive and proactive intervention will have to come from those of us working on prediction and prevention of genocide.
If we don’t act, no one will act for us.
If not now, when?
We must go from being spectators (a.k.a. passive genocide scholars) to being agents projecting moral agency.
We can do so by implementing the Precautionary Principle to make our interventions much earlier and more effective in our increasingly complex, difficult, and dangerous world. We must trigger interventions that can prevent genocide by stopping incitement to genocide.
The Takeaway Message
Here is the challenge: we must counter the evil ideologies and belief systems that indoctrinate, coerce, intimidate, instruct, and incite people to commit genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.
We can do so by reasserting life, dignity, and respect for the other as core values. We need to protect and empower besieged people who affirm these values, especially our colleagues harassed by the anti-Israel politically correct.
Members of groups targeted for genocidal persecution should be singled out for protection from these threats. We need to show leadership in repudiating belief systems that glorify terror and death and dehumanization of the "other."
We need to redefine Word Pollution as unacceptable—to use the great Sir Geoffrey Vickers’ iconic phrase—just as 19th-century European public health leaders redefined open sewage in the streets and water pollution as unacceptable.[29]
It is imperative that we in our field promote a new norm of zero tolerance for incitement, notably the pandemic of Islamofascist Jihadist anti-Semitism. We must counter coercive indoctrination and intimidation by figures of authority in governments, movements, theocracies, political parties and international agencies.
And now, more than ever, we need a Code of Ethics for Genocide Scholars to ensure integrity as we carry out our investigations and interventions.
Conclusion
Colleagues, moral agency implies urgency. Because lives are at stake, ethics do not permit delay.
We must reassert the post-Holocaust vision of a moral order based on universal human dignity.
The Precautionary Principle, public health’s gift to genocide prevention, gives us a tool for minimizing delay by promoting prevention. It is triggered by validated warning signs of threats, even before shots are fired.
The time is short, and the Master of the House is waiting.
Be strong.
Be courageous.
Remember: the clock is always ticking.
Acknowledgements:
Prof. Ilana Belmaker, MD
Prof. Elliot Berry, MD
Rony Blum, PhD
Prof. Israel Charny, PhD
Prof. Irwin Cotler, LLM
Prof. Yoram Finkelstein, MD
Joel Fishman, PhD
Prof. Gregory Gordon, JD
Or Nativ, MSc
Rev. David Pileggi, MA
Marc Sherman, MSc
Casey Tait, MA
Prof. Gregory Stanton, JD, PhD
Endnotes
[1] UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: http://oas.org/dil/1948_Convention_on_the_Prevention_and_Punishment_of_the_Crime_of_Genocide.pdf
[2] Stanton, Gregory H. (2016). Ten Stages of Genocide. McLean, VA: Genocide
Watch: https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
[3] European Environment Agency. Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896-2000:
www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental_issue_report_2001_22
[4] Richter, Elihu, and Stanton, Gregory (2007).”The Precautionary Principle: A Brief for the Genocide Prevention Task Force”: http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/By_GS_The_Precautionary_Principle_A_Brief_ for_the_Genocide_Prevention_Task.doc.
See also: https://www.genocidewatch.com/articles-by-dr-stanton
[5] Reeves, Eric. “Reckoning the Costs: How Many Have Died during Khartoum’s Genocidal Counter-Insurgency in Darfur? What Has Been Left in the Wake of this Campaign?” Sudan: Research, Analysis, and Advocacy. March 16, 2016: http://sudanreeves.org/2016/03/18/reckoning-the-costs-how-many-have-died-during-khartoums-genocidal-counter-insurgency-in-darfur-what-has-been-left-in-the-wake-of-this-campaign
[6] Richter, Elihu D., and Barnea, Alex (2009). “Tehran’s Genocidal Incitement against Israel.” Middle East Quarterly 16(3): 45-51. https://www.meforum.org/2167/iran-genocidal-incitement-israel
[7] Blum, Rony, Stanton, Gregory H., Sagi, Shira, and Richter, Elihu D. (2007).
“‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Bleaches the Atrocities of Genocide.” The European Journal of Public Health 18(2): 204-209. See: https://www.genocidewatch.com/articles-by-dr-stanton
[8] Hamilton, Tracy Brown (2014). “The Nazis' Forgotten Anti-Smoking Campaign: The Third Reich Viewed Tobacco as a Threat to the Health of the "Chosen Folk”." The Atlantic, July 9, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-nazis-forgotten-anti-smoking-campaign/373766/
[9] Richter, Elihu. “The Long Shadow: From Turkish Doctors Gassing Armenian Children to Nazi Medicine.” Symposium Commemorating the 99th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Jerusalem, Israel, April 22, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh-GyhXBlwM
[10] Gardiner, Anne Barbeau (2008).”The Darwinian Basis for Eugenics.” New Oxford Book Reviews: http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0908-gardiner
[11] Tatlow, Didi Kirsten (2015). “A New Look at Japan’s Wartime Atrocities and a U.S. Cover-Up.” The New York Times, October 21, 2015: http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/china-unit-731-japan-war-crimes-biological/
[12] Richter, Elihu D. (2008). “Commentary: Genocide: Can We Predict, Prevent, and Protect?” Journal of Public Health Policy 29:265-274.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40207189
[13] Totten, Samuel (2009). “The UN International Commission of Inquiry on
Darfur: New and Disturbing Findings.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4(3): 354-378:
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&context=gsp
[14] Pileggi, Tamar, and Richter, Elihu D. (2012). “Butchers and Bystanders in Syria.” The Times of Israel, July 26, 2012: http://www.timesofisrael.com/butchers-and-bystanders-in-syria/
[15] Richter, Elihu, and Stanton, Gregory (2007).”The Precautionary Principle: A Brief for the Genocide Prevention Task Force”: http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/By_GS_The_Precautionary_Principle_A_Brief_ for_the_Genocide_Prevention_Task.doc
See also: https://www.genocidewatch.com/articles-by-dr-stanton
[16] Izenberg, Dan (2008). “What We're Facing is 'Genocidal Terror'“. The Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2008: Genocide Watch: http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/Genocide_27_Mar_08_What_We_ve_Facing_is_Genocidal_Terror
[17] Harff, Barbara (2003). "No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955," The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), 57-73. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3118221
[18] Richter, Elihu D., Blum, Rony, Berman, Tamar, and Stanton, Gregory H. (2007). “Malthusian Pressures, Genocide and Ecocide.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 13(3): 331-341. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5928558_Malthusian_Pressures_Genocide_and_Ecocide
[19] Miller, Erin. "How Many People Has ISIS Killed? Terrorist Attacks Linked to Islamic State Have Caused 33,000 Deaths", International Business Times, Aug 19, 2016.
https://www.start.umd.edu/news/start-in-the-news/international-business-times-how-many-people-has-isis-killed-terrorist . For killings outside Syria and Iraq: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/25/world/map-isis-attacks-around-the-world.html
[20] Richter, Elihu D., Blog: “The Ethical Import of Delay: Kobani and Srebrenica.” The Times of Israel, October 15, 2014:
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-ethical-import-of-delay-kobani-and-srebrenica/
[21] Churchill, Winston. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” [Churchill’s remark after Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler]. Military Quotes [n.d.]: http://www.military-quotes.com/churchill.htm
[22] Richter, Elihu (2016). Selective, Biased and Discriminatory: The American Anthropological Association Task Force Report on Israel-Palestine. Washington, DC: Louis D. Brandeis Center: http://brandeiscenter.com/blog/tag/elihu-d-richter/
[23] UN Watch. “Total of all Human Rights Council Condemnations”: http://blog.unwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/11796181_10152949125906561_9101587258728718693_n.png
[24] Thompson, Allan (2007). The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. Pluto Press, Fountain Publishers, IDRC: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0745326250; McCormack, Timothy, and McDonald, Avril (2006). Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law - 2003. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: https://books.google.com/books?isbn=906704203. See also: Human Rights Watch. “Genocide.”: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/ij/ictr/3.htm
[25] “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Hate Speech and Threats from 2012-2015”. Israel Resource Review: http://israelbehindthenews.com/ayatollah-ali-khameneis-hate-speech-and-threats-from-2015/13722/
[26] Stein, Yael, and Richter, Elihu D. (2012). Incitement and Hate Language, Hate Education and their Role in Promotion of Violent Conflict and Atrocity Crimes – an Epidemiologic Perspective. Jerusalem, Israel: Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention: http://jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/COREVALUES_Yael_for_publish_31jan13_v1.pdf
[27] International Association of Genocide Scholars. “Resolution Condemning Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Statements Calling for the Destruction of Israel and Denying the Historical Reality of the Holocaust, and Calling for Prevention of Iranian Development of Nuclear Weapons.”:
https://genocidescholars.org/publications/resolutions/
[28] US Congress, 110th Congress (2007-2008). H.Con.Res.21 - Calling on the United Nations Security Council to Charge Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and United Nations Charter because of His Calls for the Destruction of the State of Israel: https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/21.
[29] Cork, Kerry (2010). “Expanding the Field of Public Health Law and Redefining the Unacceptable.” NALBOH Newsbrief 17(2):10: http://publichealthlawcenter.org/sites/default/files/resources/article-cork-nalboh-05-10.pdf