Thursday, July 02, 2009

Hypocrisy in the West : the Iran Elections

Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | July 02, 2009

THE missing actor in the tragic and gruesome story of Iran since the stolen election of June 12 has been the Western human rights lobby. Where is it?

What has happened in Iran is one of the pivotal events of our time. Tens of millions of Iranians voted against their demented President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the corrupt, clerical misrule he represents. No one seriously doubts the electoral fraud.
With 40 million paper ballots to count, the Iranian authorities announced the result of the election two hours after polls closed.
Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi and the other opposition candidates were not allowed to scrutinise the counting. The margin of Ahmadinejad's alleged victory - 11 million votes - was patently absurd. The final touch: the alleged margin was almost identical across most parts of the country, despite huge regional and ethnic differences.
The point is this was not meant to be a convincing fraud. It was a brazen, supremely arrogant exercise in brute power. The votes, in effect, were not counted at all. The process showed the absolute contempt in which the regime holds elections. It demonstrated the dictator's most important asset: the will to power.
Since then the Iranian dictatorship has behaved with remarkable savagery. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the stolen election and to vent their frustration at the medieval dictatorship they are forced to endure.
For the first few days the regime let them protest.
Then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned them to get off the streets. What has followed has been one of the most brutal crackdowns on democratic sentiment in recent years.
The regime acknowledges the deaths of 17 protesters. At least 40 Iranian journalists have been imprisoned. CNN, early in the business, reported 150 protesters had died in a single day.
The hated Basij militia, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard, has savagely beaten hundreds of demonstrators. It has also stabbed, shot and clubbed to death many people.
The image of the beautiful young Neda Agha Soltan as she lay dying after being shot at a demonstration, almost certainly by Basij militiamen, for a moment transfixed the world. Mousavi has described the rulers of Iran as "proponents of a petrified, Taliban-style Islam".
Despite the regime's successful if crude reassertion of basic power, this is a vulnerable time for Ahmadinejad and his cohorts. It is not only that there is popular revolt and division within the clerics. There is also now a flowering international Shia debate about whether clerics should play a direct role in politics. Inside Iran, power has flowed away from Khamenei and the other clerics and towards Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard.
But an ideologically based dictatorship is often at its weakest when it has to resort to crude military rule.
This was the case when Poland declared martial law in 1981. It was then in plain sight for the world to behold: a military dictatorship, pure and simple. The flimsy rags of ideological purpose that global communism had conferred on the Polish government were stripped away. The Polish regime then, like the Iranian regime today, was to be seen in George Orwell's terms as simply a boot treading on a human face, over and over again.
This is the undeniable story of Iran. So where are the Western demonstrators?
Apart from ethnic Iranians, there has hardly been a single demonstration in any Western capital in support of the Iranian democrats.
Yet isn't there a class, in Australia and in the rest of the West, of people deeply concerned about human rights? The class that Robert Manne and Judith Brett call the moral middle class? Weren't there thousands of demonstrators against the World Trade Organisation and G20 meetings in Australia because the global economy allegedly repressed the rights of poor people?
What about the groups explicitly dedicated to human rights? In the twilight struggle against the communist empire, human rights groups played an honourable and at times indispensable role in gaining freedom for the likes of Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and countless others.
It was a tremendous consolation to these dissidents when a US president, or indeed a humble human rights group, campaigned on their behalf.
Recently I interviewed David Menashri, one of the great authorities in the world on Iran. He was born in Iran and studied for his PhD there. Now he is a professor at Tel Aviv University. He is in no sense a military hawk on Iran. He asked this simple question: "Can't the West exercise its moral muscles? What a gesture it would be if all the European nations, and Australia, temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Iran in protest at what is happening there."
The truth is the language and practice of human rights advocacy in the West has become completely corrupted by the postmodern ideologies of the contemporary Left. In this parallel universe all crimes are a subset of imperialism and the only true villains are the US, Israel and, for us, Australia.
When Frank Brennan commented that the Victorian human rights charter had been ineffective in its own terms and had little to do with human rights, but had become "a device for the delivery of a soft Left sectarian agenda", he was, perhaps somewhat unconsciously, making a broader point about the debasement and collapse of authentic human rights advocacy in the West.
Where are you on Iran, Louise Adler, happy to accuse Israel of war crimes without the slightest evidence, but apparently unstirred by the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in Iran?
What have you got to say, Antony Loewenstein, stupidly and inaccurately labeling Israel an apartheid state and approvingly quoted in the Iranian official media, but listless on your blog in the face of the Iranian repression?
What about The Age's cartoonist Michael Leunig, who once drew a cartoon so morally obtuse, stupid and offensive that it was happily accepted by an Iranian newspaper in a competition for cartoons that would offend Jews (the cartoon was submitted without Leunig's knowledge), but who is apparently unmoved to draw an image in sympathy with young Iranian democrats?
The conclusion must be that many Western human rights organisations, and many of the most self-congratulatory and morally vain posturers, are not interested in human rights at all. They are interested in advancing a soft Left sectarian agenda.

3 comments:

euen teh said...

Hear hear... good article.

Jeremy N said...

Nothing new there... Amnesty international and the like would much rather pick on easy targets that don't fight back, such as Australia and our imagined "racist" laws.

Jelissa Mei said...

Oh, there are lots of human rights lobbyists out there - just look at Twitter. But wait, did they really do anything else other than tweet?