UN urged to treat suicide bombs as crimes against humanity
January 4, 2008
Agence-France Press
Original Source: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ik2S-pt3jb1poeAGuGJsxQ5mIy_A
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Thursday said that in the wake of last week's murder of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto it was calling on the United Nations to designate suicide bombings as a crime against humanity.
In a phone call from his headquarters in Los Angeles, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Jewish organization, told AFP here that the Center planned to run full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune Friday urging broad support for the appeal.
Suicide terror. What more will it take for the world to act? asks the ad addressed to UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Srgjan Kerim, the current president of the UN General Assembly.
The horrific murder of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto is the latest in the unending plague of suicide terror attacks that have murdered thousands of innocents and destroyed tens of thousands of families across the globe, it added.
The Center, which aims to fight worldwide anti-Semitism, the resurgence of neo-Nazism and international terrorism, called on the 192-member UN General Assembly to hold a special session to deal exclusively with the scourge of suicide terror.
Hier told AFP that it was now time for the General Assembly to focus on suicide terror the way it does on famine or AIDS.
He suggested that the United Nations draw up an international watchlist of all the enablers of terrorism that would then be subject to a travel ban.
Suicide terrorists believe they act in God's name and enter paradise as holy martyrs, the ad notes. 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.