Iranian president sparks ethical questions

Seton Hill University (SHU) welcomes several speakers each year to campus. Later this month we’ll play host to the writer Richard Rodriguez. While I’ve been here, we’ve heard from novelists, congressmen, and the producer of the offbeat documentary “Super-Size Me”. In the past the SHU community has heard from such diverse personalities as the Dalai Lama and humor writer Dave Barry, best known for his ongoing campaign to abolish the penny.

All of these people have one thing in common: they are all outstanding in their fields. We sell out all the seats in Cecilian Hall for our annual campus lecture because our guests have things to say that we really need to hear.

By Megan Ritter,

Senior Staff Writer

Seton Hill University (SHU) welcomes several speakers each year to campus. Later this month we’ll play host to the writer Richard Rodriguez. While I’ve been here, we’ve heard from novelists, congressmen, and the producer of the offbeat documentary “Super-Size Me”. In the past the SHU community has heard from such diverse personalities as the Dalai Lama and humor writer Dave Barry, best known for his ongoing campaign to abolish the penny.

All of these people have one thing in common: they are all outstanding in their fields. We sell out all the seats in Cecilian Hall for our annual campus lecture because our guests have things to say that we really need to hear.

Meanwhile, last week, Columbia University hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a weak attempt to protect his flank from a firestorm of criticism, the president of Columbia introduced Ahmadinejad by calling him a “petty and cruel tyrant.” That might have been putting it mildly. The Iranian government is a known sponsor of terrorism with no apparent regard for human rights. Ahmadinejad hosts entire conferences of Holocaust deniers, claiming that the destruction of six million Jews by Hitler’s Germany is an elaborate hoax cooked up by the state of Israel. He usually discusses this theory in the same breath that he calls for the annihilation of the state of Israel. His official government policy mandates the execution of homosexuals. Actually, according to Amnesty International, any dissident from the Iranian government risks torture and execution. The Canadian government lists presently Iran as one of the thirteen worst human rights violators in the world.

The only thing I find more troubling than the abuses that the Iranian government have rained on their own people is the sheer number of Americans who don’t seem to care. In the “New York Times’“ reporting of the event, “the anti-Ahmadinejad portion of the audience” looked to be about 70 percent of the attendees. Which means, we have to assume, that 30 percent of the audience was pro-Ahmadinejad? 30 percent of the audience welcomed the presence of a man who executes more than an hundred political prisoners a year? It’s interesting that the “New York Times” reported this statistic – on the same day that Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia, that paper’s editorial board took him out to lunch. The obvious problem with this is that it seems we’re in danger of becoming so open-minded that our brains fall out.

The larger issue at hand is that the world’s democracies have an unsettling record of cheerleading for the worst of brutal dictators, so long as we see them serving some of our aims. Once upon a time, when we were both at war with the Soviet Union, the United States made friends with Osama bin Laden. Once upon a time, when we liked Iraq better than we liked Iran, the United States provided Saddam Hussein with military advice and arms to fight the Iran-Iraq War. We might distrust Iran’s support for terrorism and abhor their history of human rights abuses, but they are one of the few stable presences in the Middle East, so we’re likely to leave them alone for as long as we can. The danger in this is that we are, in doing so, lending legitimacy that props up a government that ought not be propped up.

Shall we not forget that international politics affect us here at SHU, in 1988 a man supported by the Libyan government bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Among the dead were two SHU students, Elyse Saraceni and Beth Ann Johnson. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was tried for and convicted of the crime in 2001 and sentenced to twenty-seven years in a British prison. This summer, however, in one of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s last acts in office, Great Britain signed an oil contract with Libya in return for a prisoner exchange. al-Megrahi is the only Libyan national currently serving time in any British jail – and he will soon be back in Libya, where his terrorist activities twenty years ago were fully supported by the Libyan government. Libya wants this man back not to toss him into one of their own jails but to turn him free. Great Britain sought to serve her own interests – and now a man who committed a terrible crime – one that reached all the way to Greensburg, Pennsylvania – is soon to be free again. It’s important that we learn from this and from our own past mistakes.

It is important that what happened at Columbia University last week never happens again. The United States should not welcome brutal dictators to our universities any more than we should be helping to prop up their governments.