Support the Iran Accountability Act...

Irwin Cotler's private member's bill is worthy of support...

Irwin Cotler, special counsel on human rights and international justice to the Liberal party, and co-author of this piece, is introducing a private member's bill in Parliament today called the Iran Accountability Act (IAA). While it expressly holds Iran to account -- for its genocidal threats, nuclear ambitions and domestic repressions --it also functions to hold Canada to account.

As a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention, Canada has a responsibility to prevent genocide -- and to punish incitement to genocide -- that it has largely ignored in the case of the world's greatest threat. The IAA would change this; it affirms Canada as a world leader in fighting impunity and takes a stand against Iranian criminal actions.

We were in Geneva when the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stepped to the podium at the United Nations and delivered an address at a conference ostensibly aimed at fighting racism. With that speech -- fettered with anti-Semitic comments (on Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less) and rooted in the very intolerance that the Durban Review Conference was supposed to be combating -- the use and abuse of the United Nations reached a new, shameful low.

President Ahmadinejad is a man who incites to hatred and genocide in violation of the Genocide Convention's prohibition. He has used the podium of the United Nations General Assembly to invoke classic anti-Semitic tropes reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and is engaged in the massive repression of the rights of his own people -- particularly the Baha'i religious minority of Iran.

He is pursuing the most destructive of weaponry in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and he is complicit in crimes against humanity through genocidal terrorist proxies.

Furthermore, Ahmadinejad has presided over the parading in the streets of Tehran of a missile draped with the emblem "Wipe Israel off the map," while exhorting the masses with cries of "Death to Israel." He denies the Holocaust -- even as he incites to a new one -- and warns Muslims that if they recognize Israel they will burn in the umma of Islam.

Such a person belongs in the docket of the accused, not the podium of the United Nations.