What kind of honour is it?
Mr President, integrating the human rights of women throughout the United Nations system must start here in the Human Rights Council. No State should be permitted to hide behind tradition, culture or religion in order to justify any abuse of women’s human rights. This Council is the World’s primary institution charged with the promotion and protection of human rights, and has a sacred duty to fulfil. It must be possible here to freely exercise the right to freedom of expression in order to defend the human rights of all, including women, and to expose abuse, whatever the attempted justification.
Including women indeed; women most of all, since we’re the ones whose rights get snatched away and trampled in the dust by the religious bullies.
But of course Roy Brown wasn’t allowed to get away with it completely unopposed.
Later, a Pakistani delegate stopped Brown on the way to lunch to complain that he had “told only half of the truth” because honour killings were outlawed in Pakistan and that the police had arrested several people in connection with the two barbaric killings we had mentioned. Furthermore, the marriage of young girls was not on the increase in Saudi Arabia as we had claimed.
Too bad the Pakistani delegate is more worried about Roy Brown than about murders of women and child marriage in Pakistan.
Good for them!
I often think that the liberal multiculturalist po-mo opposition to human rights for women stems, not from any theoretical stance they might give lip-service to, but from an underlying assumption that women are really just the property of “their” men anyway and so judging a culture is interfering with the male right to control “his” women.
This would explain why we don’t get multiculturalist justifications for S. African apartheid or for rape as a war crime (because there it’s one group of men attacking other men’s women).
No, I think the psychology is more akin to blaming the victim of domestic abuse. “She could leave if she wants”, or “She must be getting something out of it”. People are misreading consent into the equation. It’s ignorant and heartless on both counts, and shows a lack of imagination. I suppose the situation for women in many societies is a sort of endemic domestic abuse. At least in the West we have laws and institutions designed to lessen the occurrence and the impact of domestic abuse, even though it still happens frequently.
I agree with Jenavir.
S. Africa was banned from the Olympics for 28 years because it did not allow all of its citizens to compete, yet Saudi Arabia is still welcome in spite of not allowing women on any of its teams. Can someone explain to me the difference?
I think the reason they don’t apply moral relativism to the likes of apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany is because postmodernists style themselves as leftists so they don’t want to be seen supporting such obviously right-wing causes.
The reason they think supporting countries like Iran is leftist is because they have a little short-cut for deciding who is on their side: if someone is hated by western conservatives then supporting them must be the type of thing leftists should do.
I’ve tried pointing out the inconsistency to them before, but they always come up with some sort of special pleading. Their favourite one is to start talking nonsense about how they personally disapprove of Iran or Nazi Germany, but that there is some other sort of disapproval that they don’t subscribe to. When pressed to clarify on this they just shrug their shoulders and “agree to disagree.” Then they forget all about it and go back to sticking up for Iran the next chance they get.
Jakob, I have never encountered a leftist who “supported” Iran (what does that mean, anyway?).
I have encountered plenty of leftists, of which I am one, who have fought the demonization of Iran in public discourse because we RIGHTLY don’t want western conservatives to bomb the place and slaughter the people–including the women whose human rights we’re trying to protect.
If by “sticking up for Iran” you mean “pointing out that Iran is a country that doesn’t pose a threat to us and in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws” then by all means, count me in as sticking up for Iran. Iranian human rights activists who criticize their own regime in the harshest terms and have been beaten/tortured/imprisoned for it are nonetheless leery of Western criticism insofar as it might lead to military intervention. See Shirin Ebadi, for example.
Jenavir, I meant the many people who sympathise with the Iranian theocracy. There are people who oppose a war with Iran for genuine reasons, but there are also those who have a knee-jerk tendency to sympathise with dictators like Ahmadinejad.
I don’t think you can deny that such people exist, and that they often falsely claim to be leftists.
“Iranian human rights activists who criticize their own regime in the harshest terms and have been beaten/tortured/imprisoned for it are nonetheless leery of Western criticism insofar as it might lead to military intervention.”
Not all of them. Not Maryam Namazie for example. She’s adamantly opposed to military intervention, of course, but she is equally adamant that that opposition must not lead to a muting of criticism. I know this well – she interviewed me once on her radio program, and I mentioned my worry that my own harsh criticisms could be co-opted by fans of bombing. She corrected me rather sharply, basically saying that one simply has to do both.
I think some of the po-mo relativists are more afraid of being labelled as ‘Western imperialists’ or ‘racists’. (I’ve come across this in popular historiography, too – it seems to boil down to ‘imperialism is wrong when Westerners do it, but when non-Westerners do it, it’s not imperialism, just expansion/unifying territories’.) When it comes to women’s and gay rights, they don’t want to be seen as “imposing Western values”. It’s actually moral cowardice. And to be fair, some of them do think again if you confront with the fact that what they are effectively saying is that women and gay people in non-Western cultures don’t deserve the same rights as their Western counterparts.
Ah. Thanks for qualifying, Jakob. I’m curious: can you name any leftists who sympathize with theocracy? There was the notorious example of Foucault’s comments on it, but I haven’t heard of others.
OB: I think Nazamie is quite right, one has to do both. I think Ebadi and others wouldn’t disagree–so long as both are actually done. From my reading, what she and others worry about is when the case against the Iranian regime drowns out (in public discourse) the equally important case against bombing the Iranian people.
but when non-Westerners do it, it’s not imperialism, just expansion/unifying territories’.
Yes, that’s a common error, especially in relation to Islam. “Islamic values” of the rigid sort are often spread by a conscious program of cultural imperialism. Yet for some reason that’s not real imperialism?
The West however does have a history of imperialism, a label it gave itself for a particular political era. The word “imperialism” now has negative connotations, which shows the West has mostly moved on from it (although it could be said the West still enjoys many economic advantages as a result of the imperialism of the past, as even a cursory glance of the field of international relations will reveal).
It’s especially manipulative to accuse the West of being imperialist in the present day when it has already owned up to itself and doesn’t shy away from its own history. It’s just a technique to censor criticism coming from the West, which is often effective because many in the West feel ashamed of the imperialism of days gone by and feel guilty about their resultant economic advantages.
Jenavir: I still think I may be on to something about a similarity between attitudes toward domestic abuse and Islamic women. There are people who would describe themselves as feminist and still fit in the cultural relativist box. I think they must perceive the women as choosing at for themselves. There are many Islamic women who passionately claim so. With all due respect, I think it perhaps a little simplistic to claim that the underlying assumption of po-mo multiculturalists is that men own “their” women.
Oops, that should read “choosing IT for themselves”.
Rose: one can be feminist and still have unexamined patriarchal assumptions. So it wouldn’t surprise me if some feminist multiculturalists did have the underlying assumption that, while beating a man is oppression, beating a woman is a “private” “cultural” matter that is inherently subjective/relative and is nobody’s business because it only concerns a man or group of men’s control of his/their property.
Still, I agree that you might be onto something with your consent theory. Like most intellectual trends, relativism probably doesn’t have just ONE grand underlying assumption. There are probably multiple such assumptions behind relativism, each of which is stronger or weaker depending on the person voicing the relativist ideas. So I don’t see your consent theory and my men-owning-women theory as necessarily in competition but rather as co-existing explanations.
Jenevir Serious question does it bother you that Iran seems hell bent on aquiring nuclear weapons?
It seems to me that International ANSWER is a hard leftist group that supports theocracies, though it is plainly an irrational choice driven by hatred of American hegemony.
Jenavir wrote:
>If by “sticking up for Iran” you mean “pointing out that Iran is a country that doesn’t pose a threat to us and in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws” then by all means, count me in as sticking up for Iran.< Just taking the “in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art…” Iranians are only free to create public art insofar as the ruling Mullahs et al allow. As for the rest of the phrase immediately above, the same could have been said about Nazi Germany.
http://iranliberty.org.uk/content/view/13/36/
a) in most countries there are very many factors limiting the individual’s freedom to create ‘public art’;
b) I thought the phrase “despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws” was a fairly evident qualifier;
c) even if the Iranian regime desires nuclear weapons, that is no reason to lump the population of the area under the label ‘Iran’ and assert that ‘they’ must be smacked down. Many of the smackees in such a scenario would be entirely innocent. This is not a video game.
d) unless that is, taking the Nazi Germany analogy further, one is entirely comfortable with what was done to Hamburg, Dresden, etc. If so, I pity you.
Dave, I don’t think anyone in this thread has advocated perpetrating atrocities on Iranian civilians. That’s a straw man.
If I said “France was opposed to the Iraq war” you wouldn’t take me to be saying that every French person was opposed.
The only reason I brought up Iran in the first place was because I thought it was a good example of a country that commits human rights violations which are defended by relativists. My point being that relativists are happy to defend Iran and others like it because they view them as “anti-western.”
Jenavir, they don’t sympathise with theocracy per se. Just those theocracies that are suitable anti-western.
Jakob, what makes you think I was talking to you?
Dave, whoever you were talking to it was still a straw man.
Jenavir, maybe you’re right. Perhaps there are some po-mo multiculturalist liberals who are actually misogynist unbeknownst to themselves. But I’m unconvinced there would be many. It’s possible though. I have been surprised in the past by sexist attitudes of people I thought would have had more of a clue.
Somewhere along the way this discussion has lost its way. The original purpose, from what I can see of OB’s note, is to take note of the fact that, at long last, someone is taking note of the fact that the UN has been using religion to bolster offences against human rights, rather than support the victims of such offences.
Iran is one of a number of nations where this happens. I think Jenavir’s account of life in Iran is hopelessly unrealistic, and whether Iranian women or oppressed minorities, like artists, intellectuals and journalists, would deprecate comments from people in the West is really irrelevant. The fact is that if the OIC gets its way with UN human rights institutions, this is going to affect all of us, so we all have a right to criticise what is going on, and we have a special duty to do criticise institutions within Islam which is trying to superimpose its completely unacceptable idea of the rights of religions onto the discourse about human rights.
Isn’t this what this discussion all about, or am I wrong? The discussion, from what I can tell, has never been about military intervention. However, if the OIC continues to make illegitimate claims about the rights of religion, and enforces religion in their own jurisdiction with the stringency and lack of concern for justice that is evident in so many parts of the Muslim world, there may at some point be a time when reasonable forms of intervention might be necessary in order to preserve justice for excluded people, and to preserve justice for ourselves.
Interpretations of human rights by members of the OIC are a great source of stress in the world today. It’s time they were marginalised and expected to live up to at least minimal standards of human rights, and if they can’t begin to do that, by providing the right of women to choose the course of their own lives, then they will continue to be a danger to all of us. In today’s world there isn’t much room for people to close the borders and claim that what they do within them is just an internal matter. People who are victims of abuse anywhere are our responsibility, and when the OIC is a forward as it is in trying to make its antediluvian social systems normative for the world, everyone has a right to say enout is enough.
That goes, pari passu, for people like the Pope as well, who has recently called on Christians (but especially roman catholics) to claim a larger voice in secular assemblies, a claim which is directly counter to the rights that secular jurisdictions have been established, after long religious conflict, to protect.
Dave wrote:
>in most countries there are very many factors limiting the individual’s freedom to create ‘public art’< So you wouldn’t distinguish between the Mullahs’ control of public cultural life in Iran and the situation in Western countries? >unless that is, taking the Nazi Germany analogy further, one is entirely comfortable with what was done to Hamburg, Dresden, etc. If so, I pity you.< You seem to have missed the point of what I wrote. Jenavir wrote that “If by ‘sticking up for Iran’ you mean “pointing out that Iran is a country that doesn’t pose a threat to us and in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws’ then by all means, count me in as sticking up for Iran.” I didn’t say that Iran was similar to Nazi Germany, nor that they had done things equivalent to what the Nazis did. I just pointed out that since in Germany under the Third Reich most people were “free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws”, so Jenavir’s writing that wasn’t necessarily saying anything particularly favourable about the Iranian state. So I fail to see the relevance of mentioning what was done to Hamburg, Dresden, etc. As to feeling “entirely comfortable” about what happened to these cities in WW2, where did that come from? Plenty of straw men here.
Richard: no, it doesn’t. Firstly because I don’t think Iran is “hell-bent” on acquiring nuclear weapons, and second, I don’t think Iran is any likelier to use nuclear weapons than France or Britain or the U.S., because while the Iranian government is not the greatest it’s also not suicidal or crazy.
Yes. But under the Third Reich, millions of people were being slaughtered, of which there is a conspicuous absence in Iran.
My point about people being free to pursue their happiness wasn’t just to say something good about the regime (although I think the freedom of most people to do these things, *combined* with the lack of mass slaughter and/or mass imprisonment, is an indication that the regime has its good points). My main point was that bombing Iran would be killing many people in the process of leading fulfilling lives, something that I think many Americans are actually ignorant of. Many Americans that I have talked to visualize all Middle Eastern (and, really, non-Western) countries as unmitigated hellholes where people can’t possibly be as attached to their lives as we are here because their lives are so horrible. And therefore it’s not such a terrible thing to kill a lot of them in the process of “liberating” the rest. I don’t know how pervasive this is in the rest of the Western world, but I have noticed far too much of it in the U.S.
Eric, how are my comments about Iran unrealistic? They are based on the opinions and observations of people who have fought for human rights within Iran, often at great personal risk, and who are more informed than anyone about exactly what is wrong with the regime.
I can’t speak for Dave, to whom this question was directed, but I certainly would distinguish between those things. Just like I’d distinguish between the restrictions on public cultural life in Iran and those in (for example) Saudi Arabia. Or China, to take a non-theocratic example. Degrees are important and this works in both directions when it comes to Iran.
Dave I am afraid you will have to pity me,I am comfortable with the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg,I would concede though that this was a very ugly form of warfare to be avoided if posible. Jenevir I dont think you can compare Iran(a despotic theocracy) with Britain and France both of which are stable democratic countries where the rule of law is respected. To my mind Britain and France are the sort of nations that make the world safer with their posesion of nuclear weapons, I am sure that could not be said if Iran were to aquire them?
Dave the reason I am comfortable with the bombing is because I dont think it is posible sixty plus years after the event to fairly judge the actions of the allies with regard to the bombing of these cities. We know the outcome of the war Churchill and F.D.R. did not and as they were reasonable men(by the standards of the time)I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. Would I aprove of that kind of carpet bombing of a city today No.
Jenavir writes:
>Yes. But under the Third Reich, millions of people were being slaughtered, of which there is a conspicuous absence in Iran.< In the 1930s Third Reich millions of people were not being slaughtered. The oppression of Jews and opponents of the regime was horrific, but the numbers actually killed was relatively small, certainly miniscule compared with the numbers dying in the Soviet Gulag during the same years. In the Iranian Islamic Republic: In 1979, with the establishment of an Islamic Republic, the persecutions [of the Baha’is]took a new direction, becoming an official government policy and being pursued in a systematic way. Since that year, more than 200 Bahá’ís have been executed or killed, hundreds more have been imprisoned, and tens of thousands have been deprived of jobs, pensions, businesses, and educational opportunities. All national Bahá’í administrative structures were banned by the government, and holy places, shrines, and cemeteries were confiscated, vandalized, or destroyed.[…] In recent years, Bahá’ís have been subject to revolving-door arrests and detentions calculated to sow terror among Iranian Bahá’ís. Some of the prisoners, for example, were held incommunicado, in unknown locations, while their families desperately searched for them. In addition, government agents conducted prolonged searches of many of their homes, confiscating documents, books, computers, copiers and other belongings… In June 1983, for example, the Iranian authorities arrested ten Bahá’í women and girls. The charge against them: teaching children’s classes on the Bahá’í Faith — the equivalent of Sunday school in the West. The women were subjected to intense physical and mental abuse in an effort to coerce them to recant their Faith — an option that is always pressed on Bahá’í prisoners. Yet, like most Bahá’ís who were arrested in Iran, they refused to deny their beliefs. As a result, they were executed. http://www.bahai.org/dir/worldwide/persecution
Allen surely that can only get worse when Iran get the nuclear weapons it so desperatly wants, because then it will not have to fear outside intervention?
Interesting lack of knowledge on the part of the Pakistani delegate.
Yesterday I e-mailed several senior Pakistani officials in response to an International Campaign Against Honour Killings report on a further three women alleged to have been buried alive in the Balochstan province, following an earlier incident in which five women are alleged to have been buried alive.
As I have messages back from two of these oficials saying their mailbox is full I take it they are well aware of the issue.
Well done Stuart, keep us posted.
Allen–yes, that’s horrible. I never said Iran was a warm fluffy human rights paradise. Still, though, nothing you’ve pointed out is even in the same universe as the Third Reich (or Stalin, or Rwanda, or even slavery in America) so my point still stands.
An amendment to my above posting somehow got lost. The sentence in question should have read:
So in what way is the treatment by the authorities in Iran of the B’hai that I cited above in a “different universe” from the authorities’ treatment of the Jews in the Third Reich in the 1930s (which is what we were actually talking about).
I must say, I don’t like this line of argument that: most/many/some people in X are free to pursue their lives therefore X has its good points. What happened to the good old idea that as long as one person is in chains I am not free? The claim or fact that most people in X are free to pursue their lives is compatible with the existence of horrendous cruelty and/or injustice and/or oppression and/or deprivation perpetrated against some people in X. This matters. The US is a good place to live for lots of people; this does not make it okay for the Bush admin to, say, torture prisoners at Guantanamo. That principle applies everywhere if it applies anywhere, and I say it applies everywhere. If we don’t buy into that I don’t see how we can complain about human rights abuses anywhere.
Stalin’s Gulags, slavery in America, so your point still stands? In the UK that’s technically called “moving the goalposts”. (See your original posting and my first reply).
Er, no. The goalposts are still where they are, where *you* put them: mass slaughter on the level of the Nazi Germany.
By mentioning slavery in America–an atrocity on a smaller order than Nazi Germany–I actually moved the goalposts closer to you, to make it easier for you to demonstrate the evils of the Iranisn regime.
So in what way is the treatment by the authorities in Iran of the B’hai that I cited above in a “different universe” from the authorities’ treatment of the Jews in the Third Reich?
Numbers of bodies. I’d consider that a huge difference!
OB: of course it matters. It’s nonetheless analytically worthwhile to draw a distinction between, say, the U.S. and China, as much as I abhor the U.S. government’s policies about torture and detention without trial. As far as Iran is concerned, I think people are prone to ranking it lower on the human-rights scale than it actually is. Criticizing human rights abuses in a global context involves making these kinds of distinctions. If we note that torture happens less often in Country X than in Country Y, it doesn’t mean torture is any *less evil* in X than in Y. Does that make sense to you?
Jenavir, yes, that makes sense to me. By the same token, people think (or in the case of officials, pretend to think) that the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is better than it is. (I don’t know how else to explain the words of whatever Labour government boffin it was who spoke of the ‘shared values’ between the UK and Saudi when the Saudi king paid his state visit a few months ago.) But on the other hand I think your passage about people free to pursue their lives had some rhetorical overtones that seemed to go beyond saying Iran isn’t the worst.
“Campaign Against Honour Killings report on a further three women alleged to have been buried alive in the Balochstan province,”
It is stomach – curdling stuff to think “they were allegedly abducted by Mr. Abdul Sattar Umrani–the younger brother of the provincial minister–and other thugs, including a head constable of police.”
It was not vicious enough of them – on a previous occasion – to bury, alive, five other innocent women, and young girls, that they had to repeat it once again.
When will it all end? Will these these officials be forever allowed, by the people to do exactly what they like – with the lives of their loved ones?
The people should rise up together and hold the monsters of these heinous crimes accountable.
“It is reported that the three women were also buried alive using the same tractor as in the case of the first five women” The mindless thugs are making a mockery of the people that they have total control of in their villages.
Jenavir writes:
> Er, no. The goalposts are still where they are, where *you* put them: mass slaughter on the level of the Nazi Germany.< No, Jenavir, I didn’t. *You* brought the up the mass slaughter on the level of Nazi Germany. I pointed out that there was no mass slaughter in Germany pre-WW2, i.e., during the period for which I wrote that your reason “sticking up for Iran” could equally have been said about Nazi Germany in the 1930s (I also pointed out the historical fact that during that time it was not true that “millions of people were being slaughtered”, and that on the contrary relatively few people were actually killed.)
So your response of “Numbers of bodies. I’d consider that a huge difference” (a response I had already pointed out above was irrelevant to my original point) does not answer my asking “So in what way is the treatment by the authorities in Iran of the B’hai that I cited above in a ‘different universe’ from the authorities’ treatment of the Jews in the Third Reich?”, explicitly spelling out that this referred to Germany “in the 1930s”.
The only way to clear this up is to see what you actually wrote and what I replied. You wrote early in this thread:
>If by “sticking up for Iran” you mean “pointing out that Iran is a country that doesn’t pose a threat to us and in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws” then by all means, count me in as sticking up for Iran.< I pointed out that the same could have been said about Nazi Germany during the 1930s, and in another posting clarified: “I didn’t say that Iran was similar to Nazi Germany, nor that they had done things equivalent to what the Nazis did. I just pointed out that since in Germany under the Third Reich [obviously in the 1930s as the following words made clear] most people were ‘free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc, despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws’, so Jenavir’s writing that wasn’t necessarily saying anything particularly favourable about the Iranian state.” So the the original exchange was in relation to your saying “then count me in as sticking up for Iran” on the grounds of an aspect of life in Iran that I pointed out could also have been said about Nazi Germany during the 1930s. That Iran hasn’t killed as many as Stalin’s USSR, or as Germany during the war, or committed atrocities on the scale of slavery, or that you didn’t say that Iran was “a warm fluffy human rights paradise”, is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
Allen, if you’re limiting your discussion of the “Third Reich” to Germany in the 1930s without considering what came later, then what is your point? Because if we are to look at the pre-WW2 period in isolation, then it’s actually not that bad compared to many other places and times in history. And so comparing it to Iran doesn’t obviate my point that Iran really isn’t among the worst human rights offenders, now or historically.
If your sole point was that it’s not particularly favorable to be “not that bad,” then it would seem that this:
isn’t true. Because if your sole point was that my comments about Iran didn’t indicate anything particularly favorable about the regime, then the fact that I wasn’t claiming it did indicate anything particularly favorable (i.e., wasn’t claiming that it was a human rights nirvana) is relevant.
OB: yes, people in America and Britain definitely play down Saudi Arabia’s massive human rights violations (often for the same geopolitical reasons that they play up Iran’s). I understand how the rhetoric I used may have come across as unduly positive, but I think I’ve clarified my meaning. Iran isn’t Sweden or even France or Britain; it’s also not Saudi Arabia or Jordan, and the sense of scale is important.
>Allen, if you’re limiting your discussion of the “Third Reich” to Germany in the 1930s without considering what came later, then what is your point?< I’m not “limiting” my discussion to anything but the circumstances that pertain in your original posting to which I responded. I’ll spell it out for the third time.
You wrote:
>If by “sticking up for Iran” you mean “pointing out that Iran is a country that doesn’t pose a threat to us and in which most people are free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc. despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws” then by all means, count me in as sticking up for Iran.< I responded by pointing out that it could also have been said about Nazi Germany in the 1930s that most people were free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc, despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws. My point was limited to the circumstances pertaining in Iran now, and the Third Reich in the 1930s. If you can’t see that what came later in Germany and the other things you mention are entirely irrelevant to this point, then no purpose can be served by discussing it further.
I responded by pointing out that it could also have been said about Nazi Germany in the 1930s that most people were free to pursue their happiness by working, getting educated, raising families, creating art, etc, despite some horribly brutal and oppressive laws.
Okay, sure, but if you’re serious about what came later in Germany being “entirely irrelevant,” then I’m not sure what the point of your analogy is. Sure, 1930s Germany allowed people to pursue their happiness in that way. So what?