By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 9, 2006 One day before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the CNN “Law Center” has chosen to post an interview that tends to exonerate Richard Reid, the “Shoe Bomber,” and provides multiple excuses for his efforts to blow up a passenger plane in midair.
The publication at this date seems timed precisely to intrude on the anniversary of the attacks in New York and Washington. The text consists of an interview by CNN’s Becky Anderson with a British human rights lawyer, Peter Herbert, who had spoken with Reid. Yet Herbert’s conversation with Reid took place four years ago, so there was nothing new or timely in Herbert’s comments. Nor did Herbert play any role in Reid’s defense: just another lawyer trying to get in on the act. Presumably CNN made the intentional editorial decision to publish Herbert’s exoneration of Reid on the eve of 9/11. As the saying goes, one can’t argue about taste.
Exoneration? Herbert does in fact report that Reid had clear political intentions:
He didn’t regard himself as evil, he regarded what he was about to do as being a necessity and in a great cause which was to bring the world and especially America’s attention to the injustices being suffered by Muslims in different parts of the world. He mentioned specifically Bosnia, he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan
Why Bosnia? Had not the West fought on the side of Muslims there? But what do facts matter in this context.
Reid’s declaration at his trial, in fact, was explicit on his political goals, and it was reprinted in Telos (issue 129).
Yet the CNN journalist and the human rights lawyer cooperate quickly to turn this into a very different matter: not Reid as political actor, attempting (and luckily failing) to carry out a terrorist attack, but poor Richard Reid as victim of society. . . .
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 9, 2006
“Sudan’s president, Omar Al-Bashir, has vowed to fight off UN troops himself, and warned that Sudan would take on international soldiers ‘as Hizbullah beat Israeli forces.'”
—Rob Crilly, reporting for the Christian Science Monitor
The genocide in Darfur is a tragedy of enormous proportions. At the same time it raises fundamental questions about the very character of world opinion and international organizations. The whole world is watching—and just watches. The one international institution established in response to genocide and constitutively committed to human rights—to rights that humans can claim as humans, and not as citizens of particular states—the United Nations, has shown itself to be troublesomely incapable of acting, even in the most dire of circumstances.
At its core, the UN is hampered by a conflict between the ideal commitment to universal values (human rights) and the real obligation to the sovereignty of nation states, no matter how heinous. Perhaps the answer is simply sad realism: the UN is not a panacea, it cannot alleviate suffering generally, but it can ameliorate conditions marginally. The way for the UN to succeed is to lower the expectations. That line of thought is, however, quite grim for the victims of genocide.
If the killing proceeds in Darfur and no strong international force is introduced to halt it—because the UN processes prevent such a force—the UN will lose whatever remaining credibility it may still have, and with it a bevy of internationalist principles and beliefs. If the UN cannot succeed here, then its mission, truly, becomes marginal, and not universal. Its inability to realize ideals in the world is an object lesson in the limitations of ideals.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, September 9, 2006 As of this writing, news reports of Mohammed Khatami’s presentations are beginning to circulate. Not surprisingly, he refrains from spouting the standard “Death to America” slogans that his Iranian regime has popularized. Instead he recycles his very own standard theme of a “dialogue of civilizations,” an intentional alternative to the Huntington thesis of a clash between them. Yet the evidence is mounting that the much touted dialogism of the alleged reformist is actually a transparent effort to pursue the clash. Khatami’s invitation to conversation never displays a genuine openness to the purported interlocutor; every gesture of engagement is coupled immediately to a retraction. He cedes no ground.
Nor does he show respect for his host. The trauma that still looms over US-Iranian relations remains the 1979 hostage taking in Teheran. To open a dialogue, Khatami might have startled his critics and won a moral high ground through an unqualified apology to the nation for the mistreatment of the embassy personnel. Indeed he had an opportunity for an event of historic proportions by arranging—as his first stop—a meeting with survivors of that drama to ask them personally for forgiveness. That might have opened a new era.
Instead, as the Washington Post reports, Khatami only expressed regret—much less than an apology—but then made matters worse by offering an excuse:
As for the 1979 hostage crisis, when student radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans for 444 days, Khatami said, “I regret the hostage crisis . . . and I sympathize with the hostages and their families for their loss and their hurt but this was (also) a revolutionary reaction to half a century of the U.S. taking Iran hostage.”
His personal sympathy is noteworthy, but as former President he could have expressed much more and offered transformative symbolism. Instead he in effect justifies the suffering of the hostages as part of a “revolutionary” ethics that apparently excuses, in Khatami’s views, mistreatment and brutality. Exactly what kind of “dialogue” could the hostages have with their captors, such as Khatami’s own successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, September 8, 2006 As the debate over the invitation to former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School continues, it is useful to contemplate specific aspects of his record. Because Mohammed Khatami was outflanked on his right by other extremists, he has sometimes appeared as a moderate. Because he has published books and taught at a university, he has been lauded as an intellectual. Yet his government led a brutal crackdown on university students in 1999, and his credentials as a reformer are dubious indeed. His visit to the US, seeking a “dialogue of cultures,” takes place in the context of an emerging campaign against “secular and liberal” faculty of the Iranian universities. Some pieces of the puzzle:
In an account of the status on “Women in Iran—A Look at President Khatami’s First Year in Office,” by Donna M. Hughes in Z Magazine, of October 1998, one reads:
Some analysts have said that the election of Mohammed Khatami to the position of President was due to the votes of women. Khatami’s strongest distinction seems to be that he was not the hard-line government’s favorite candidate. His election was no doubt a vote against the hard-liners. His upset election has garnered him the label of “moderate,” and raised expectations of people inside and outside of Iran.
Khatami has been in office one year now. Is he a moderate? Has the status of women markedly improved in Iran since his election?
There is a widely held view that Khatami supports the rights of women, but his statements and appointments don’t validate that view. Prior to his election Khatami said, “One of the West’s most serious mistakes was the emancipation of women, which led to the disintegration of families. Staying at home does not mean marginalization. Being a housewife does not prevent a woman from having a role in the destiny of her people. We should not think that social activity means working outside the home. Housekeeping is among one of the most important jobs.” (emphasis added)
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, September 7, 2006 Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami will be speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School on Sunday, September 10. The timing of the talk is particularly embarrassing: Iran has recently accelerated its purge of liberal and secular elements from its universities, as recently discussed here. To make matters worse, the topic of Khatami’s address is the “Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence.” The title reads like a parody of Iranian policy.
The situation in Iran is dire:
“Earlier this year, Iran retired dozens of liberal university professors and teachers. And last November, Ahmadinejad’s administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country’s oldest university in Tehran amid protests by students over the appointment.”
It is sorry that Harvard would give a platform to a representative of a dictatorial regime currently crushing its own academic world. That this takes place the day before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks testifies to a particular callousness.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, September 6, 2006 The process by which the Nazis rapidly removed potential regime opponents from the universities and the civil service came to be known as Gleichschaltung. Sometimes translated as “coordination,” the term is much harsher: all concerned are made the same, arranged in a single order, forced into uniformity. All that is different is made identical, and that which is non-identical is eradicated
The Associate Press now reports that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has called for a purge of secular and liberal faculty from the universities. In fact, precisely such a purge of liberals and leftists took place in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979—which makes it even more curious that parts of the western left somehow still look to Iran as a positive anti-imperialist force—but some reformist elements have later reemerged. The current call for renewed attacks on intellectuals indicates an effort to amplify the regime’s extremist position. It surely shatters any hope that the recent release from prison of critical intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo (discussed here on August 31) would initiate a liberalization.
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