By Parveen Chopra, IANS
New York : In the wake of Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last week, an influential Jewish human rights organisation has urged the UN to designate suicide bombings as a crime against humanity.
Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international organisation headquartered in Los Angeles, has also started an online petition calling on the UN General Assembly to hold a special session to deal exclusively with the modern scourge of suicide terror attacks, which have killed thousands including India’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The organisation, set up in 1977, aims to fight worldwide anti-Semitism, the resurgence of neo-Nazism and international terrorism.
It took out full-page advertisements in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune Friday titled “Suicide terror. What more will it take for the world to act?” along with a picture of Bhutto.
Harking back to the fact that the world community had declared Nazi death camps as crimes against humanity post-World War II, the text of the advertisement says, “We must find the courage to do the same – to use the rule of law to stop all enablers of suicide terror.”
The petition, which the centre urges people to send to Ban Ki-moon and Srgjan Kerim, UN Secretary-General and General Assembly president respectively, also calls on religious leaders to act because “they can no longer ignore the fact that most suicide terrorists are believers”.
“Suicide terrorists believe they act in god’s name and enter paradise as holy martyrs. Religious leaders must use every sermon and every publication to denounce this belief as nothing less than an abomination of faith and a perversion of all that is godly.”
Talking to a news agency, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the organisation, has also suggested that the UN draw up an international watch list of all the enablers of terrorism that could then be subjected to a travel ban.