REACTING TO LATEST CARNAGE IN IRAQ, WIESENTHAL CENTER CALLS ON WORLD COMMUNITY TO DECLARE SUICIDE TERROR ‘A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY’

Center says, “International community must apply the full weight of international law to hold accountable all those who promote, validate and abet suicide terror.”

In wake of the latest suicide bombing attacks today that killed at least 175 and wounded hundreds more in northern Iraq, the Simon Wiesenthal Center renewed its call to the international community to declare all suicide terror as crimes against humanity. “The international community must apply the full weight of international law to hold accountable all those who promote, validate and abet suicide terror,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Center. “Today's mass murder is appalling, but we can only expect the casualty rate among targeted innocent civilians to exponentially increase as terrorists increase their access to better technology and weaponry,” he added.

Since 2003, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has led a campaign to have suicide bombings declared a ‘Crime Against Humanity’. The goal of the campaign is to create a legal tool for victims to go after sponsors and those who inspire this deadly culture of mass murder worldwide. Since the campaign’s launch, Center officials have sifted through the bombed-out remains of synagogues with Turkey's Chief Rabbi in Istanbul, conferred with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, lobbied the European Union and Foreign Ministers from Madrid, to Ottawa, to Buenos Aires.

“So long as religious figures can promote such behavior with impunity, innocent people of all faiths will continue to pay the price of the scourge of our time,” Cooper concluded.

For more information, contact the Center's Public Relations department, 310-553-9036.