A Canadian member of parliament and professor of law looks back at Durban:
The first lesson is the danger of a state-sanctioned culture of hate. We learned from World War II and the genocide of European Jewry that the Holocaust did not come about simply as a result of the industry of death and the technology of terror of the Nazis, but rather because of the ideology -- indeed pathology -- of hate. This demonizing of the other, this teaching of contempt, is where it all begins. As the Supreme Court of Canada put it in validating anti-hate legislation in Canada, "The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words."
In fact, some 50 years later those lessons remained unlearned and the tragedies were repeated, because both in Bosnia and in Rwanda it was government-sanctioned hate speech that led to ethnic cleansing. Regrettably, in the Middle East, and particularly with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this government-sanctioned hate speech has not been given the importance it deserves. It is this state-sanctioned culture of incitement that is the most proximate cause of violence and terror. The assault on terrorism should, in fact, begin with efforts to end this state-sanctioned incitement.
Professor Fuad Ajami wrote immediately after the Passover Seder massacre in Israel, with respect to a government-sanctioned culture of incitement and international acts of terror: "The suicide bomber of the Passover massacre did not descend from the sky. He walked straight out of the culture of incitement let loose on the land. He partook of the culture all around him, the glee that greets those brutal deeds of terror, the cult that rises around the martyrs and other families. The menace hovering over Israel is the great Arab-Palestinian refusal to let that country be, to cede it a place among the nations."
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