Tag: Amnesty International

Human Rights for Enemies Only? Amnesty International, Iran, and the Blind Spots of “Democracy Now!”

I was listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! the other morning. The segment concerned Amnesty International and its latest report on the worldwide increase in capital punishment. According to Amnesty, the sharp rise in executions was driven largely by Iran.

Fair enough. Executions are terrible. State repression is terrible. No civilized person should celebrate either one.

But as I listened, I kept waiting for the larger context. It never came.

Instead, the report and discussion unfolded in the familiar language Western audiences have heard for decades: Iran represses dissent. Iran crushes protests. Iran executes opponents. So does North Korea, Vietnam, and other official enemies of American empire. End of story.

But it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. Fact is: none of this is happening in a vacuum.

Mossad & CIA

There was no mention that the demonstrations in question emerged in the middle of a long-running U.S.-Israeli campaign to destabilize Iran. No mention that the CIA and Mossad have openly and repeatedly funded, armed, trained, and encouraged opposition movements inside the country. No mention that Iran has lived under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, cyberwarfare, and threats of invasion for decades.

And perhaps most glaringly, there was no acknowledgment that the numbers executed by Iran pale beside the numbers slaughtered by Israel and the United States in Gaza and throughout the Middle East. Those numbers represent executions as well — mostly innocent children, their mothers, and grandparents.

That omission matters.

I say this as someone who deeply admires Amy Goodman. For years Democracy Now has been one of the few programs in U.S. media willing to challenge empire, question official narratives, and expose Washington’s lies. Which is exactly why this kind of reporting is so disappointing when it happens.

Because independent journalism is supposed to complicate the picture — not flatten it into another morality play where the official enemies of the United States appear uniquely evil while Western violence fades into the background like wallpaper.

Let me be clear. I’m not arguing that Iran is innocent. It plainly is not. Like every government under siege, it has become increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. Many Iranian protesters are undoubtedly sincere people with genuine grievances about corruption, restrictions on freedom, economic suffering, and political repression.

But it is childish — or dishonest — to pretend that foreign intelligence agencies have not been actively working to exploit those grievances.

Washington has done this for generations. Iran itself is one of the clearest examples. In 1953 the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government under Mohammad Mosaddegh because he dared nationalize Iranian oil. Ever since, Iran has been treated as a target for destabilization and regime change.

The United States openly funds opposition groups and propaganda outlets aimed at Tehran. Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists. Economic sanctions have crippled ordinary people. American politicians routinely threaten military action.

So when protests erupt inside Iran, are we really supposed to imagine the CIA and Mossad simply sit on the sidelines wishing everyone well?

Come on.

Recognizing that reality does not mean every protester is a foreign agent. That would be absurd. It simply means understanding how imperial power works.

Amnesty International

And that brings us to Amnesty International itself.

Amnesty has done courageous and important work over the years. Its reports on torture, disappearances, political prisoners, and state violence have often exposed crimes the mainstream media preferred to ignore. Amnesty has criticized the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel as well.

But organizations like Amnesty also have blind spots.

Too often they examine countries in isolation from the global systems of power surrounding them. An execution in Iran becomes a moral outrage standing entirely on its own. But sanctions that destroy healthcare systems? Economic warfare? Proxy wars? Assassinations? Coups? Occupations? Those realities somehow become background noise.

The violence of official enemies is individualized and dramatized. The violence of empire is bureaucratized and normalized. When Iran executes dissidents, headlines scream about barbarism. When Israel blows apart apartment buildings full of children with U.S.-supplied weapons, we hear about “security concerns,” “complexity,” and Israel’s “right to defend itself.” That double standard has become so normal we barely notice it anymore.

And yet the numbers tell the story. Yes, Iran’s executions are horrifying. But compare them to the scale of killing carried out by Israel in Gaza with full American support. Compare them to the deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Compare them to the million-plus dead from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One reason the Global South increasingly distrusts Western human rights rhetoric is precisely because of this inconsistency.

The Politics of Human Rights

Human rights matter intensely when the accused government opposes Washington.

They become strangely negotiable when the crimes are committed by allies.

That doesn’t mean Amnesty is part of some sinister conspiracy. I don’t believe that. But institutions absorb the assumptions of the societies in which they operate. And Western institutions — even liberal and progressive ones — often unconsciously treat U.S. power as the invisible center around which everything else revolves.

So Iran’s repression is highlighted. America’s role in creating the crisis is minimized.
Israel’s vastly larger violence is compartmentalized into a separate conversation.
And audiences are left with the impression that the chief danger to humanity comes from the designated enemies of the empire.

Meanwhile the empire itself disappears from view. That is why context matters so much.

A country under permanent siege behaves differently from a country at peace. Again, that does not justify repression. But it explains some of it.

The United States itself cracked down viciously during wartime. It jailed dissidents, spied on citizens, censored speech, and criminalized opposition during both world wars and after 9/11. Imagine how Washington would react if China or Russia were funding and arming internal American protest movements while openly calling for regime change.

We don’t have to imagine, actually. We already know.

Conclusion

The larger problem here is not simply hypocrisy. It’s the way selective outrage helps prepare public opinion for intervention. Partial truths become propaganda because they omit the forces producing the crisis in the first place.

And that’s why I found the Democracy Now segment so troubling.

Not because it criticized Iran.

But because it criticized Iran in a way that quietly erased empire.

When the Government Turns Criminal: Edward Snowden and the Good Samaritan (Sunday Homily)

Snowden

Readings for 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: DT. 30: 10-14; Ps. 69: 14, 17, 30-31, 34, 36-37; Col. 1: 15-20; Lk. 10: 25-37. http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/071413.cfm

In his recent book about the parables of Jesus (The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus), John Dominic Crossan poses the question: What happens to your world when the “best” people act badly and only the “worst” do what is right?

That scenario seems to be playing itself out in the case of Edward Snowden.

Snowden, you recall, is the NSA contractor and CIA employee who last month disclosed a vast secret program of U.S. government spying on its own citizens and on individuals, corporations, and governments throughout the world.

The program (Prism by name) seems to violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Snowden made his disclosures three months after James Clapper, the Director of U.S. intelligence had denied its existence in testimony (under oath) before the Senate Committee overseeing the U.S. intelligence program. Snowden’s disclosures also followed hot on the heels of President Obama’s publically expressed concern that China was illegally spying on the U.S. in exactly the same way (though on a smaller scale) that the U.S. turns out to have been spying on China and its own allies.

For his troubles in exposing such lies, hypocrisy, and violations of the Constitution, Snowden himself has been designated a spy, traitor, and enemy of the United States – categories applied to its worst enemies. As a pariah in his own country, he has fled the United States and sought asylum in various countries including China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Snowden (and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International) alleges that if extradited to the U.S. he is unlikely to receive a fair trial, but instead to be tortured and indefinitely imprisoned like other whistleblowers such as Bradley Manning.

All of the countries just mentioned have histories less-than-friendly to U.S. interests, which they have each described as criminally imperialistic. Other “good” countries such as France and Germany have (under great pressure from the United States) refused Snowden asylum.

Meanwhile, James Clapper has not been charged with perjury, and President Obama has managed to deflect attention away from constitutional violations to the search for the fugitive Snowden.

In other words, the Snowden Affair presents us with a “Spy,” “Traitor,” and “Terrorist Sympathizer” obeying his conscience in his exposure of government crime. He has done the right thing. Meanwhile, the President of the United States, himself a constitutional lawyer, has been caught violating the Constitution, and the Director of Intelligence has been exposed as a perjurer. And on top of that, friendly countries often lauded by the United States as models of democracy refuse to respect International Law governing asylum seekers. Only the “bad countries” are willing to honor that law.

In this situation, the question Crossan posed earlier finds uncomfortable relevance: “What happens to your world if a story records that your “best” people act badly and only your “worst” person acts well?”

As I said, Crossan asks that question in the section of his book commenting on “The Good Samaritan” which is the focus of the gospel selection in today’s Liturgy of the Word.

The parable, of course, is very familiar. Almost all of us know it nearly by heart. Typically sermons find its point in simply calling us to be “follow the Samaritan’s example, treat everyone as your neighbor, and help those you find in trouble.”

That’s a good point, of course. But Jesus’ own intention went beyond simply providing an example of a good neighbor. More profoundly, it focused on the hypocrisy of “the good” and the virtues of designated enemies. As such, the story calls us to transcend those socially prescribed categories and look at actions rather than words of both the “good” and “bad.”

More specifically, the hero of Jesus’ story is a Samaritan. According hero status to such a person would be unthinkable for Jesus’ listeners. After all, Samaritans were social outcasts belonging to a group of renegade Jews who (by Jesus’ time) had been separated from the Jewish community for nearly 1000 years. They had also polluted the Jewish bloodline by intermarrying with the country’s Assyrian conquerors about 700 years earlier.

Jews considered Samaritans “unclean;” they were traitors, enemy-sympathizers, heretics and even atheists. They rejected Jewish understandings of Yahweh and the Temple worship that went along with it.

And yet in the story, Jesus finds the Samaritan to be more worthy, more pleasing in God’s eyes than the priest or Levite. That’s because the Samaritan’s actions speak much louder than the word “Samaritan” would allow. He is compassionate; so Jesus approves.

In the meantime, the priest and the Levite lack compassion. Their actions condemn them.

They say that slightly more than 50% of the American people think Edward Snowden is a traitor and spy. And this despite the fact that his accusers have advanced no evidence to that effect – and despite polls that indicate a solid majority believing that the government’s surveillance program is objectionable if not clearly unconstitutional.

Today’s parable invites us to reconsider – not just Snowden, but our very understanding of the world and its categories of “good” and “evil.”

Perhaps we’re looking for the real criminals, traitors, spies, and terrorists in exactly the wrong places.