With all due respect to Martti Ahtisaari, who has played an outstanding role over the years in mediating conflicts, I cannot believe that he was the best choice for the Nobel Peace Prize, especially given the speculation that the Nobel Committee was considering giving it to Hu Jia and/or other Chinese activists.
Honoring another European bureaucrat-politician at a time when China’s human rights activists labor in anonymity, largely forgotten around the world (or worse, willfully ignored in order to appease the ChiComs) is both a travesty and a farce.
I once heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that upon learning that he had been nominated for the Peace prize, Vaclav Havel urged the committee to consider instead a then-little-known human rights and democracy activist from the other side of the world. The result was the awarding of the Prize in 1991 to Aung San Suu Kyi, an act that has helped maintain public awareness of and support for the cause of human rights and democracy in Burma.
It is a shame that Mr. Ahtisaari did not do the same when he was nominated.
Take a moment to watch this clip. It’s from an Obama town hall appearance yesterday in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
At first glance, it seems pretty good. He says that “there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution.” He gets in a good shot in about the need to catch the terrorists before you worry about what to do with them. And he has a great line at the end: “Don’t mock the constitution. Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up.”
Those are all good points. The problem is that along the way, he violates two fundamental rules of messaging:
1. Don’t use your opponent’s talking points to frame your arguments. Obama did that on three occasions:
“Senator Obama is less interested in protecting people from terrorism than he is in reading them their rights.”
“You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, when in fact it might be Barack, the guy running for president.”
“The reason you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism.”
When you do this, you reinforce people’s preconceptions about you. If folks are already inclined to worry about whether you’re the right guy, then what they’re going to hear is that Obama is soft on terrorism, has a Muslim name, and is interested in protecting the bad guys.
2. Don’t try to convince people with facts. Obama spends over a minute explaining the concept of habeas corpus. He sounded like a professor. Most people don’t have any idea what the words “habeus corpus” mean. But they do understand the underlying principle: that sometimes, our government makes mistakes, and we need rules to protect innocent people from being thrown in jail indefinitely. They’ll understand that much more readily than talking about how this right goes back to before we were a country.
So what should have Obama said? How about something like this:
You know, all of us want to be treated fairly. You could say that’s the basic idea behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: do unto others as you would have them do onto you. In this country, we give people the chance to be heard. We promise them that they won’t be tortured. We say to them that they have the right to prove that they are innocent of the charges against them, and that they don’t have to incriminate themselves.
These are our core values. These are incredible gifts that the founding fathers gave to us. And these are the very things that our opponents are now mocking. How dare John McCain and Sarah Palin suggest that what was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin isn’t good enough for us.
Other than our familes, our freedoms are the most precious thing we have . They are what made this country great. They are the promise that all men and women are created equal, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and, as you said so beautifully, ma’am, that we are the sweet land of liberty.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, just like George Bush and Dick Cheney, want you to believe that our security is more important than our freedoms. What you know and what I know — and what McCain and Palin and Bush and Cheney certainly should know is that we cannot have security without freedom. We cannot have justice without freedom. We cannot be America without our freedoms.
Those who suggest otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.
They should be ashamed for resorting to torture, for doing the very same things that John McCain himself suffered in Vietnam. They should be ashamed for letting places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, instead of places like Farmington Hills and Peoria define who we are. They should be ashamed for allowing waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that we used to think only happened in places like Zimbabwe and Burma and Cuba. They should be ashamed of themselves for believing that it’s all okay because the President can do anything he wants anytime he wants.
That’s not my America. That’s not your America. That’s not George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s or FDR’s or JFK’s or Ronald Reagan’s America. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say the President can do anything he or she wants. Nowhere. That’s not Martin Luther King’s or Susan B. Anthony’s or Bobby Kennedy’s America. That’s George Bush’s America.
It’s time we reclaim our heritage of freedom, our role as that shining city on the hill. It’s time we say “not on our watch,” not here, not in Guantanamo, not anywhere.
It’s time that we say to Bush and Cheney and McCain and Palin and anyone else who supports them, we’re taking America back. We’re taking America back to what it stands for. We’re going to make America great again. We’re going to be the America that respects people’s rights, that honors our core values, that draws so many people around the world to our shores.
Let’s start showing the world why we’re better than our enemies. Let’s honor our founding fathers by returning to the values that make America America.
That would knock McCain and Palin on their butts. It would force them to explain why they support the very torture techniques that John McCain himself endured. It would make them explain why they aren’t un-American. It would require them to argue that they don’t want to destroy the Constitution or shred the Bill of Rights. Tar them with every sin of the Bush Administration, and do it in a way that will leave them no space to reply except by repeating your arguments.
That, after all, is exactly what they’re doing to the Democrats.
So for crying out loud, Senator Obama, stop defending yourself and start attacking them. It’s the only way you win.
P.S. To my colleagues in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, this goes double for you. Stop caring about how many times Sarah Palin lied about the bridge to nowhere and start talking about why Obama and Biden are the right choice. Stop parsing every lie that McCain and Palin tell and start talking about what their Administration would do to the country. And if you can’t, then shut the hell up.
As I’ve noted in my two previous posts, I’m both a fan and a critic of the United Nations. But if there’s one thing the United Nations does really really really badly, it’s human rights.
It wasn’t always this way. Thanks in part to the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, the early years of the United Nations adopted both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Over the next several decades, a number of other important treaties followed, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture, and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, among others.
Lately, however, not so much. The UN Commission on Human Rights became so disreputable — by doing things like electing Libya as chair and failing to take action on Rwanda — that the UN decided to abolish it and replace it with a new body that would address many of its shortcomings.
During the 2005 UN Millennium Summit, the General Assembly agreed to the creation of a new Human Rights Council, supposedly putting into place safeguards that would prevent similar problems in the future. Sadly, the United States chose not to play a central role in the negotiations over how the Council would be constituted or how it organizes itself. Thank you, John Bolton, you self-righteous paleocon jerk.
(Full disclosure: Steve Clemons, Scott Paul (both of the Washington Note), Don Kraus (my successor as CEO of Citizens for Global Solutions) and I organized the successful opposition to the Bolton nomination.)
(And for the UN wonks out there, yes I know I’m oversimplifying this timeline. But please keep in mind that I’m not writing for you.)
So there we were, a new start, a new opportunity to do serious human rights work.
Whoopsie.
Sigh.
Today we have a body that in many ways is worse than its predecessor. There are a lot of issues that the Council should be looking at these days — Darfur, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Burma, Pakistan, and Iraq, to name just a few. Instead, the it has spent almost all of its time on one issue: Israel.
The reasons for this have to do not with human rights in that country –- which, to be clear, should be looked at, as should human rights issues in every country. Rather it’s the product of those who currently sit on the Council. Dictatorships make up over half the Council’s membership. They have spotlighted Israel to deflect attention from the human rights abusers within their own ranks, as well as to stick it to the West (and, to be clear, Israel).
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration continues to refuse to engage the Council, deciding not to stand for election and even failing to send an Ambassador to Council meetings. Of course that’s assuming it could even get elected to the Council, given its own human rights record. Either way, its actions have only encouraged the misbehavior and discouraged those who would stand up to such nonsense.
And then, late last week, we have the latest outrage:
A former spokesman for Cuba’s foreign ministry was appointed this week to head the United Nations Human Rights Council’s advisory committee. Radio Rebelde says Miguel Alfonso Martinez, is president of the Cuban Society of International Law, was appointed this Monday to head the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.
Oy vey. Oh wait — saying that might get me investigated by the Council.
This isn’t the first bad appointment either. Richard Falk, a Princeton professor who has compared Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip to Nazi Germany, is the Council’s Special Rapporteur on. . . wait for it. . .Israel. And Jean Ziegler, who once helped Muammar Qaddafi establish a peace prize named after the dictator and who has praised, among others, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro, was elected to the Council’s Advisory Committee.
The Council has more than a bad joke. It’s a black eye for the UN and and embarrassment to the entire world. Furthermore, it has become a convenient whipping boy for the paleocons here in the United States.
Myanmar’s junta arrested 48 activists on Friday for a protest march marking 20 years since the army crushed an “8-8-88″ democracy uprising with the loss of an estimated 3,000 lives, an opposition official said.
So at almost the very moment that the Chinese chose to start the Controlympics, the artists formerly known as SLORC decided to revisit the crackdown of twenty years ago.
Isn’t that what the ChiComs would call auspicious?
Maybe not.
Don’t worry. I’m sure that Laura Bush is on the case.
I know I’m a little behind on this, but I just read in the papertubes that Dubya gave a speech about human rights in China . And that the ChiComs are not happy about it.
My first instinct was to applaud him for speaking out. After his appearance before the foreign press last week, during which he set a new personal record for inanity, obsequiousness, and malapropisms, I was sure that he would be so busy begging Hu “Is Lying Now” Jintao not to liquidate China’s dollar holdings that he wouldn’t dare talk about human rights or democracy. So reports that he did, and that the Chinese got mad as a result, came as a pleasant surprise.
The first thing I noticed was that he gave it in Thailand. Not at the Embassy dedication in Beijing, not during his visit to the Olympics, but in Bangkok. He might as well have given it in Timbuktu.
The second I noticed was that he does not mention human rights in China until the twenty-sixth paragraph — out of twenty-nine total. It comes only after he’s praised the Chinese for their economic achievements, highlighted their role in the six-party talks on North Korea, begged them not to foreclose on our economy, and reiterated America’s belief in a “one China” policy.
It also comes after he wishes the Queen of Thailand a happy birthday, praises the economic achievments of Thailand and other countries in the region, invokes the threat of terrorism, discusses North Korea, and gives a shout out to his wife for her work on Burma. (That’s right, of all the people working on Burma in this world, he chose to praise Laura.)
The actual criticism takes up two paragraphs of twenty-nine. They look almost like an afterthought. And they include the following sentence:
Change in China will arrive on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and its own traditions.
I just ran that little gem through the Diplospeak Translator, and this is what came out:
DIPLOSPEAK TRANSLATOR: We’re not really serious about this, but Congress and those whiny human rights organizations back home will kick my butt for the rest of my term if I don’t pretend to care. Please please please please don’t be mad at me.
What nonsense. And the ChiComs got in a lather over this? Here’s what the Foreign Ministry said in response:
Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang admonished Bush, saying “We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues.” He also said the Chinese government is dedicated to promoting basic rights, and that “Chinese citizens have freedom of religion.These are indisputable facts.”
This isn’t foreign policy. It’s Chinese Opera. I don’t know which I find more distressing.
The fact that the White House is spinning this as courage;
The fact that the Chinese have gotten their collective Communist capitalist noses out of joint for such innocuous language; or
That the Western media bought the whole thing as a real controversy.
The games have started, Bush will forget about his admonition, the Chinese will welcome him, and everyone will enjoy the spectacle and the athleticism. Nothing else will happen.
There’s a term my summer camp friends used to have for such hypocrisy: Reindeer Games, which we defined as pretending to care about something when you really didn’t give a damn what happened. I think that pretty much summarizes the situation here. All posturing, no content.
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