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Daniel Goldhagen

This according to American author Daniel Goldhagen, who responded to The CJN’s questions about the latest existential threat to the Jewish people and Israel: the Iranian regime and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In Toronto last month to promote his latest book, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (PublicAffairs Books), Goldhagen said the world needs to brace for the rapid rise of radical Islam spearheaded by Iran, which threatens not just Israel, but democratic states worldwide.

“Very few leaders have uttered genocidal threats publicly, and when they have, they’ve usually followed through on it,” Goldhagen said, noting the very real threat which he believes is presented by Ahmadinejad and by what he calls “political Islam.”

Worse Than War is Goldhagen’s nearly 700-page treatise on how the world can identify nascent genocidal regimes and prevent would-be, murderous leaders from advancing their agendas.

Justifying the book’s title, Goldhagen writes that since the beginning of the 20th century, perpetrators of mass murders have taken the lives of more people than all military conflicts around the world combined.

“War is no longer the means by which most states relate to each other in the world. But we’ve done nothing to eradicate eliminationism,” he said.

In researching the book, Goldhagen – whose father was a Shoah survivor – spent the last few years interviewing perpetrators and victims of some of the world’s worst massacres and genocides. The latter term, he insists, has been misappropriated by politicians and lay leaders alike to mean “mass murders of gargantuan size… many hundreds of thousands or millions,” while in fact, it should also apply to governments who commit mass murder of “any size.”

Goldhagen said he wants the book to be viewed as a “road map” for defining and  countering genocide and the eliminationist buildup by regimes to mass murder.

He argues that genocidal actions by countries and their citizens are not simply “one-offs” that happen every so often due to some vague notion of unstoppable human nature, but rather are “systemic problems, with systemic causes” that won’t disappear until people begin to prevent them with effective strategies.

One of those calls for world governments to set up a new international institution – and do away with an “illegitimate, ineffectual and corrupt” United Nations, he said –  to prevent leaders who purport to commit mass murder by telling them that they will personally pay a price should they embark on any genocidal campaign.

Goldhagen said ideally, all political leaders should be put on notice that “the international community will never stand by if they initiate eliminationist assaults” and that international “policy measures” should be put in place to bring this about.

This would go some ways to forestall any genocide, he said, because these leaders would then know that “acting upon their eliminationist desires will almost certainly lead to their loss of power and imprisonment or death.

“Most of the political leaders opting for mass elimination are in weak and poor countries. If they knew that initiating mass killings… would trigger million-dollar bounties on their heads, backed by the most powerful countries in the world, it would deter all but the most ideologically besotted.”

Another of Goldhagen’s preventive measure asks the media to change the language it uses to refer to world leaders and people who commit these crimes.

He writes that the media should not use terminology that renders the victims and perpetrators of murder as “abstractions.”

“We should not use terms such as ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’… because they automatically and usually wrongly suggest that conventional political means cannot persuade or stop the perpetrators.”

Instead, Goldhagen writes that killers should be identified by their general nationalities. Rather than calling them “Hutu extremists,” “the SS” or Darfurian “tribesmen,” these perpetrators should simply be called German, Hutu or Sudanese killers.

“Terms such as mass murder and genocide should be readily used while eliminationist assaults take place. The usual practice of prefixing ‘alleged’ before ‘mass murder’ or ‘genocide’… only obfuscates what’s clearly happening,” he writes.

Worse Than War has also been turned into a TV documentary, which is slated to air in North America on PBS April 7, 2010 at 9 p.m. EST (check local listings).

In it, Goldhagen interviews the subjects for his book, including survivors and perpetrators of massacres in Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda, as well as the Holocaust.

“My book is a scholarly work, but speaking to people [for the film] who watched their children murdered… I couldn’t imagine suffering the way they did. It’s disturbing beyond anything,” he said.

With regard to today’s top world genocidal inciter, Ahmadinejad, and what Goldhagen terms “the most serious security threat to the world,” the author believes the international community must start its prevention strategy in earnest.

“[Iran’s] drive for nuclear weapons is beholden to a cult of death… to allow such people to have this is folly,” he said. “Any right-thinking person understands that there is a non-trivial possibility that Iran would drop a bomb on Israel.”

Goldhagen believes there may be no alternative but to attack Iran first and in fact advocates “bombing” its nuclear reactors now.

“It may be that the only way to stop them,” he said. “Anyone who looks askance at this possibility should ask themselves what would have happened had Israel not bombed Iraq’s [Tammuz1] nuclear facility [in the Israel Defence Force’s 1981’s Operation Opera].”

However, he concedes that Israel now faces a “terrible choice” on its Iran policy.

“I don’t see how any Israeli leader could allow [Iran] to acquire nuclear weapons. But if Israel has to go it alone, there’ll be a terrible price to pay. The hypocrisy of the world with regards to Israel is extensive. Even if some countries would be delighted in private [by an Israeli strike on Iran], most would condemn Israel.”

CJN