Suspected Iranian nuke breach prompts renewed warning from Cotler

Mount Royal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler is warning that Iran poses a greater threat than ever to world peace with its apparent determination to arm with nuclear weapons, after U.S. president Barack Obama accused Iran on Friday of clandestinely building a plant for nuclear fuel production. “The international community is missing the point, and that is that there’s not just one danger here, there are four distinct dangers and they’re interrelated,” Cotler said during a briefing with the media Friday, following Obama’s announcement during the Pittsburgh G20 Summit.

Cotler had just returned from New York City, where he delivered a speech outside the United Nations at a ‘Stand for Freedom in Iran’ rally. Inside the day before, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had addressed the UN’s General Assembly.

In his speech, Cotler alluded to the nuclear threat he said Iran poses, without realizing that the U.S. president would be speaking the following day even more directly about the problem. The first of the four dangers Cotler referred to was the threat of Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons.

He also spoke of the danger of Iranian state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, the danger of state-sponsored terrorism, and “most dangerously” the “persistent, pervasive and pernicious assault on the human rights of the Iranian people. “The danger of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide is what makes the nuclear threat even more ominous for all the reasons Obama mentioned this morning,” said Cotler. “This is a threat to the non-proliferation regime, a threat to Middle East stability. But it also constitutes an existential threat to Israel and beyond that the international community, precisely because it is the Iranian leadership, Ahmadinejad, who connects the dots between the two, not me. It is they who said, ‘with one bomb we will wipe out Israel.’”

Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN, which came less than a week after he issued a new denial of the Holocaust, contained numerous derogatory references to Israel and global Jewish “influence.” It prompted the Canadian delegation at the UN, led by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, to walk out of the UN chamber before the Iranian leader started talking. Cotler said Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the UN “shames the cause of human rights, shames the founding ideals of the UN. Ahmadinejad does not belong on a podium at the UN. He belongs on a docket of the accused.”

In June, Cotler, who is the opposition Liberal Party’s Special Counsel on Human Rights and International Justice, introduced Bill C-412, the Iran Accountability Act, which calls on Canada to use bilateral relationships with other nations to pressure Iran into ceasing human rights violations. Cotler also took part in an attempt by a group of international legal experts to have Ahmadinejad indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.