"Fear arises when society lacks freedom and democracy," 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi said.
Ebadi, the first Iranian to win a Nobel Peace Prize, was an eleventh-hour addition to the 2006 Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium's program. She addressed a packed Cabot auditorium in Farsi the Friday night of Feb. 24. Banafsheh Keynoush translated.
Ebadi said that governments, even if democratically elected, do not have the freedom to violate citizens' human rights.
"Governments do not gain legitimacy ... through the number of votes they receive," she said. "[They] do not have the right to take away the legitimate rights of their people."
She used Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini as examples of leaders who were voted into power but were frequent violators of basic human rights.
According to Ebadi, some Middle Eastern governments installed and backed by the United States have not enjoyed legitimacy among their own people. Ebadi said that legitimacy is created only when "human rights, regulations and laws" are combined with democracy.
Ebadi went on to discuss the power of media censorship and how the media can propagate fear among members of a population.
She used the example of the anthrax-filled letters mailed to various media organizations in the weeks following Sept. 11, which spawned countless public images of people in chemical-resistant masks rooting through mail for future threats.
"These images were so exaggerated that it created fear within society," she said, calling the proliferation of such images an attempt to "mobilize public opinion for war."
At the time, Ebadi noticed friends in the U.S. examining their mail fearfully. "When I asked them what they were afraid of, [they responded], 'Don't you watch television?'"
Ebadi also blamed the media for reporting Muslim criminals as "Islamic terrorists," while reporting non-Muslim criminals simply as criminals. She called such reporting an attempt to make people accept the "clash of civilizations," a phrase coined by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington to illustrate a modern fundamental conflict between Eastern Islamic and Western secular societies.
"[People's] wrongful acts relate to them, not their religion," she said.
Ebadi then turned her focus to the attacks and attackers of Sept. 11. "Those are groups who have misused the name of Islam," she said.
She sympathized with the families of victims, but questioned whether the attacks would have occurred in the first place if the U.S. had not financed the Taliban to defend against the Soviet Union in 1980s Afghanistan.
She followed the translation of this statement with a pause, then said that she hopes her "fellow researchers [will] look more deeply into questions such as these."
She also referred to U.S. support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, and said that her fellow countrymen still suffer from the effects of chemical weapons used in that conflict.
"It was Europe and the U.S. that provided [Iraq] with those weapons," she said. Assisting dictatorships "is like holding the gun to ourselves."
In terms of Islam's compatibility with democracy, Ebadi said she believes that democratization in the Middle East is feasible.
"Islam is open to various interpretations," she said, emphasizing that problems with Middle Eastern governments are primarily political and not directly related to the interpretation of any religion.
Ebadi concluded her address with the hope that the media will "not create fear unnecessarily."
"Muslims lived peacefully for centuries with Christians and Jews. We can be friends, let us not be afraid of each other," she said, insisting that fear focused on Islam "has no basis."
Five cadets from the West Point Military Academy and five midshipmen from the U.S. Naval Academy attended the symposium as official guests. These students and their faculty advisers had mixed reactions to Ebadi's speech, but generally admired her efforts and courage.
They each emphasized that their comments were only representative of their personal opinions, and not of the U.S. military
Dr. Thomas Stockton, faculty adviser to the West Point cadets, said that Ebadi "represents the humanistic strain of Islam that most of us aren't exposed to" and that is often not portrayed by mainstream media.
Her speech was welcome, he said, in light of the enduring impact of the of 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis on many Americans' current views of Iran.
At the same time, such views on Iran may not have been completely understood by people who did not live in America during the crisis, suggested Stockton.
"We need to understand the nature of her country, and she needs to understand the nature of ours," Stockton said.
West Point cadet Chris Ustler hopes that people will listen to both sides of the issues that Ebadi discussed, but agreed with much of what she said.
"It's always terrorism, terrorism, terrorism," he said. "It creates an atmosphere that if we don't do something right away, the world will end."
He said government propagation of the fear of terrorism in the U.S. can be compared to widespread fear in Syria and Lebanon that the West threatens Islam.
U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Anthony Perez admired Ebadi's "courage to stand up for her beliefs," but said that her arguments were "not always fair," in pinning the United States as the center of many ongoing international conflicts.
According to Perez, the media had the right to portray the anthrax threat in the way they did because it presented a risk to their own operations.
Ebadi currently lectures at Tehran University in Iran. As an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist - and the first female judge in Iran's history - she advocated peaceful and democratic strategies to bring basic human rights to those on the margins of Iranian society.
Former EPIIC student Negar Razavi and current EPIIC student Meena Bhasin, both seniors who worked on the Tufts Iran Dialogue Initiative in 2004, presented Ebadi with the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, an award granted each year by the Institute for Global Leadership that honors strong commitment to democracy and global citizenship worldwide.
