Irwin Cotler's recent speech on Human Rights
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Posted by Israpundit on 11:16:13 2008/05/03
Recently I reported on a speech by Michael Ignatieff under the title Ignatieff in the lion's den and also posted Ignatieff's non-apology by my friend Rochelle Wilner. Ignatieff had come to the Jewish community to apologize for accusing Israel of war crimes. Unfortunate he kept stressing the need for Israel to abide by international human rights law and the Geneva Convention. Irwin Cotler was in the room.
I wrote to Irwin subsequently to plead with him to make Israel's case vis a vis international law. Whether he was responding to me or not, a week or so later, he delivered a speech to THE SPEAKERS ACTION GROUP and the CANADIAN JEWISH CIVIL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION entitled THE LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS...21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES and he did just that. I was also present to hear that speech. It was a great speech delivered extemporaneously and fortunately recorded. I got a copy of the recording and struggled to type it. In many ways it is grammatically incorrect as license was taken to have more impact. This is not the full speech but the parts that I wanted to focus on.
Irwin Cotler spoke on justice and inclusiveness in the international area.
On the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the State of Israel of the reconstitution of an aboriginal people in its ancestral homeland. And I have used the term aboriginal people with respect to the Jewish people because very often one hears reference to the notion that Israel and the Jewish people as being a colonial implant in the Middle East post holocaust. It is important to appreciate the aboriginalness of the Jewish people with respect to its legitimacy in this present day, The only people in the world today who inhabit the same land, embrace the same Abrahamic religion, study the same aboriginal bible, speak the same aboriginal language, Hebrew, and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did thirty-five hundred years ago. In other words if any of the aboriginal prophets entered the room today, they could conduct a conversation with us across space and time in the common language. This is something that bears recall and remembrance as we move toward the commemoration and celebration of Israel's sixtieth anniversary.
That paragraph also included, "There are two aboriginal people laying claim to the same aboriginal home". I was very disappointed that he would refer to the Palestinians as a people and an aboriginal one at that. I intend to follow that up. In addition, in his speech he kept referring to Srebrenica as a massacre along with the holocaust and Rawanda. I intend to follow that up also.
After referring to the holocaust and our collective commitment to "never again", he identified four lessons that must inform our action.
1 The danger of state sanctioned incitement to genocide and the corresponding responsibility to prevent and protect.
2. The dangers of indifference and inaction.
3. The danger of a culture of impunity
4. The phenomena of discrimination and exclusion in the international arenas
I have extracted only his remarks on the fourth under the title, Justice and Inclusiveness in the International area. CONTINUE
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