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US assassination of General Soleimani was ‘immoral action’: New York Times

Friday, 17 January 2020 10:33 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 26 December 2020 6:51 AM ]

Demonstrators in Lahore, Pakistan, take part in an anti-US protest on January 12, 2020, over the assassination of Iranian Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani. (AFP photo)

The US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on the orders of President Donald Trump was an “immoral action” and a “clear violation of national and international law,” according to an editorial in The New York Times.

“The administration recently announced that, on orders of the president, the United States had ‘taken out’ (which really means ‘murdered’) an important military leader of a country with which we were not at war,” the Times article said, which was written by Benjamin Ferencz, a Hungarian-born American lawyer.

“As a Harvard Law School graduate who has written extensively on the subject, I view such immoral action as a clear violation of national and international law,” Ferencz wrote in his op-ed.

“The public is entitled to know the truth. The United Nations Charter, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague are all being bypassed. In this cyberspace world, young people everywhere are in mortal danger unless we change the hearts and minds of those who seem to prefer war to law,” he added.

Ferencz, 99, said he “cannot remain silent” anymore over US war crimes.

Ferencz was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the chief prosecutor for the US Army at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the 12 military trials held by US authorities at Nuremberg, Germany.

Ferencz was born in 1920 in Transylvania, which is part of Hungary, but was occupied by Romania at the time. He was ten months old when he emigrated to the US with his Jewish family.

“Now in my hundredth year, I cannot remain silent. I entered the United States in January 1921 as a poor immigrant boy, and I have felt obliged to repay the United States for the opportunities given to me,” Ferencz wrote in the Times article.

Tensions between the US and Iran have skyrocketed in recent weeks after the US military carried out an airstrike on the order of Trump at Baghdad’s international airport January 3, assassinating General Soleimani and the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, as well as eight other companions.

Iran responded by launching missiles at Iraqi military bases that house US troops.

US officials have made confusing remarks about what prompted Trump to order the assassination.

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