Protest This

Last week at Columbia University, before a packed room of students and faculty, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi called for the United States to change its policies in the Middle East--a position heard often on campus. But this time should have been different: while Kharrazi chastises the U.S. for being insensitive to the peoples of the region, his own government wages a nearly all-out war against its own citizens, brutally and violently suppressing its students whose only crime is calling for democracy and human rights. And yet the audience, and the rest of the University, was silent.

The utter triteness of his statements, and the fact that his arrival sparked no protest or angry op-eds, reveals the dangerous myopia of political correctness that has become the norm within the Columbia community in specific, and among the human rights community in general. The fact of the matter is that if a human rights issue does not concern either America's "imperialism" or Israel's "occupation," the human rights community simply does not act--no tables are set up, no angry slogans are sung, and no buttons are printed. And that's just too bad.

Looking through what the philosopher John Rawls would call a "veil of ignorance," it would be hard to miss the blatant abuses of power and racist policies of such countries as Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. And yet little is said or done on this campus to raise awareness on the plight of the black Christians held in bondage in the Sudan, the legalized religious persecution of Sufi--practitioners of Islamic mysticism--in Saudi Arabia, or the continued occupation of Lebanon by the Syrian army. This ideological blindness has gotten so bad that when Minister Kharrazi defends his country's execution of homosexuals by saying that "human rights is a relative term," the e-mail listservs of the human rights and "progressive" solidarity networks remain silent, implicitly condoning Iran's policies.

On the other hand, these activists--among them much of Columbia's faculty--are up in arms about American "imperialist" policies, citing as proof the work of Ambassador Edward Djerejian's advisory group on public diplomacy. Using focus groups and opinion polls from the Arab and Muslim world, this research found that "hostility toward America has reached shocking levels."

But these polls and surveys on Arab and Muslim public opinion of America--now spreading like a rash over the front pages of the most respectable of newspapers--are only half the story and are fundamentally flawed to boot. Public opinion simply does not exist as an accurate measure within tyrannical and authoritarian countries and should not in any way be seen as an indicator of America's progress or policies in the Middle East.

What many activists on this campus seem to forget is that those countries that are most "angered" by America's actions in the region are ruled by an iron fist, mostly by minority ethic groups. These tyrannical minorities regulate the information flow, do not permit or encourage freedom of speech, and are above all interested in preserving their regime, which in many cases motivates them to blame all of their problems on whatever scapegoat suits them at the moment--usually either the United States or Israel.

The fact that Americans even contemplate changing U.S. policies in order to create a more favorable atmosphere in the Middle East is ridiculous enough--does anyone really think that Iran cares what the United States thinks about its execution of homosexuals, or that Syria cares about our opinion regarding its occupation of Lebanon? Does anyone really believe that either would consider changing their policies based on surveys of America's popular opinion? What's worse, though, is that human rights activists are for the most part willfully ignorant of this hypocrisy. These activists by default accept the appalling treatment of the peoples of the region by their governments and neighbors, all the while condemning the United States for ending a reign of terror in Iraq.

The majority of the 150 new Iraqi newspapers that have opened since the fall of Saddam agree that the American presence in Iraq has the potential to improve the lives of the Iraqi people. Therefore, instead of condemning that presence, human rights activists should pressure our government to demand from its allies and strategic partners that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become more than just ink on paper. This Declaration, adopted over 50 years ago by the United Nations in "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family," enumerates rights yet to be afforded to nearly half of the world population, rights we take for granted here in the United States.

Instead of constantly condemning U.S. foreign policy, activists should work with the government and pressure the administration to put its money where its mouth is by awarding trade contracts and alliances based on the progress those countries make in providing their citizens their inalienable human rights.

Instead of trying to please the Arab and Muslim world by fitting our policies to their tyrants' self-interest, it is time we empower the world by holding it to the same standards of human decency to which we hold ourselves. It is time to stop the hypocrisy of lower expectations, which imply that only U.S. actions and policies matter. One would hope that the next time a representative of a government that unabashedly oppresses its own people visits campus, he will be met with protests and condemnations even half as intense as those against the war over Iraq.

Ariel Beery is a junior in the School of General Studies majoring in economics and political science.