by David Frum
Mario Tama / Getty Images
Would you accept a human rights award named after this guy?
Vancouver is about as far as you can get from the Middle East without bumping into penguins.
Yet this month, students at the University of British Columbia are getting a little taste of Hamas thuggery right on their own campus.
All UBC students pay a small fee to support student activities. One of the groups receiving the money has proposed donating $700 to a new Gaza flotilla: an attempt to deliver aid directly to Hamas (widely recognized as a terrorist group), bypassing Israeli inspections.
The UBC student group that oversees student funds did the responsible thing, and put a temporary stop to the Hamas donation, pending a vote by the full student council.
The pro-Hamas students have reacted with a campaign of abuse and intimidation against the student who made the responsible decision, UBC Alma Mater Society president Bijan Ahmadian. Ahmadian tweeted on Thursday: “Shaken from the physical intimidation by the SPHR President at my office today. Had to call security to remove him.” SPHR is the acronym for “Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights, a UBC student group.
It might seem upside down that people who purport to speak for “human rights” should engage in physical intimidation. Or that they should try to use student-activity money to subsidize acts of terrorism half a world away.
But this is all part of what British writer Melanie Phillips calls “the world turned upside down” of Middle East politics.
Another example of this inversion: On Friday, the Libyan government announced that it would award this year’s “Moammar Gaddafi prize for human rights” to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Previous winners include Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. So far, so funny.
Here’s where the story gets less funny. On Wednesday, Erdogan was in Lebanon, where he issued a stinging denunciation of human-rights abuses by, yes of course, Israel.
“We will go on to raise our voice against those massacring innocent people and children. We will call a killer a killer when needed.”
If Erdogan were serious about his commitment to “call a killer a killer,” it would make for an interesting acceptance speech when he arrives in Libya next week to collect his prize: The most notorious killing of recent times in Lebanon was that of businessman and politician Rafiq Hariri, murdered by a car bomb on Feb. 14, 2005.
Hariri’s murder is presumed by everyone in Lebanon to be the work of Syria and Hezbollah. But it seems we no longer have to presume. On Nov. 22, CBC News’ Neil McDonald broadcast a damning report on the signals intelligence collected in Lebanon: interceptions of cellular and other traffic that provide overwhelming evidence of Hezbollah’s direct culpability for the crime.
The UN investigators in Lebanon have spent half a decade conniving in the suppression of this evidence. But time is running out: A new international tribunal is scheduled to report next year.
On his visit to Lebanon, Erdogan was asked about the imminent findings. Here’s what this eminent champion of human rights — this bold speaker of unwelcome truths — had to say, according to al Jazeera: “Erdogan, during a speech in northern Lebanon, said that if Hezbollah were found guilty of the Hariri assassination, it would impact the entire region.” Therefore, “he suggested that the [investigating] tribunal delay releasing its findings for another year.”
In the Middle East, the phrase “human rights” seems almost invariably to mean the opposite. The phrase is used to condone dictatorship in Libya, assassination in Lebanon, and terrorism in the Palestinian territories. The one country in the region most concerned to uphold and vindicate human rights, Israel, is the country uniquely targeted in the name of human rights.
From the office of the Turkish prime minister — to the organizers of the UN’s Durban III conference — to the student goons who had to be escorted away by UBC cops, terrorism and its apologists come everywhere wrapped in the ooze of hypocrisy.
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