One issue that should be put on the table was displayed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week in New York: Iran's religious minorities.

Iran's deplorable record on human rights is often treated as separate from the nuclear issue. It's not. If Iran's government can't be trusted to treat its own citizens with basic dignity, how can it be trusted with nuclear technology?

Mr. Ahmadinejad's theatrics involved including five religious minority parliamentarians in his entourage to the UN General Assembly, this week. This act shows how eager Tehran is to be accepted back into the community of nations. Thus, the human rights card could be considerable leverage for Western powers in coming weeks.

When he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23, Ahmadinejad professed concern for "justice, freedom, and human rights." He apparently thought his five props would help him project a tolerant, peace-loving face. It was a stiff performance.

...

Apart from the four heritage religious minorities (Jews, Armenian Christians, Assyrian-Chaldean Christians, and Zoroastrians) that are allotted parliamentary seats, there are other groups who have even fewer rights. Bahais, treated as heretics from Islam, have no constitutional protections. They can be robbed and murdered with impunity since Iranian law declares that their blood is mobah or can be spilt. Major Bahai shrines have been demolished and the people can assemble only in secrecy.

...

If Ahmadinejad's regime meets obligations to its fellow Iranians, then it is more likely to fulfill agreements with the international community. Transparency and well-being, rather than secrecy and aggression – as reflected yet again by the recently revealed nuclear facility – are necessary in Iran's national and international affairs.

Ultimately, when free to express their beliefs and ideas, Iran's people will be the best guarantors of their nation's fidelity in world affairs.

In this article, Jamsheed K Chosky and Nina Shea neatly highlight the hypocrisy of Ahmadinejad's public performance in New York. It also highlights the confusion amongst Western governments about how to deal with the challenges that Iran poses.

Naturally everyone is concerned about the possibility that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons, but, as Chosky and Shea point out, this cannot be regarded as somehow separate from Iran's appalling human rights record and its egregious treatment of religious and other minorities, including the Baha'is.

The 64th session of the UN General Assembly offers the world's governments the opportunity to voice their condemnation of Iran's calculated disregard for international human rights covenants to which it is a party and which it has never repudiated.

This is a matter of principle. I know that "realpolitik" and principle are not comfortable bedfellows, but if the international community remains silent on Iran's truly appalling treatment of the Baha'is and other minorities, who are, after all, Iranian citizens, this will be tantamount to complicity with these abuses.

Do read the rest of the Christian Science Monitor article.

Frank Furedi Getting God to do their dirty work In seeking to use religion to force people to change their eco-unfriendly behaviour, greens are debasing both religious belief and scientific truth.

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We live in world where the cynical manipulation of people’s fears and anxieties often overrides informed public debate. Principles and beliefs seem to have become negotiable commodities, and all too often the search for truth gives way to doing ‘whatever works’. In recent decades religious figures have, at various times, embraced the authority of science, therapy and the environment as a way of communicating their messages. Indeed, the old statement ‘our faith demands…’ has increasingly given way to the claim that ‘the research shows…’. If Christian fundamentalists can reinvent their dogma in the language of ‘creationist science’, how long before atheist scientists seek to justify their moral crusade in the language of religion?

Well, Lord May, president of the British Science Association, has risen to the occasion with his call last week to mobilise religion as part of the crusade against global warming. May said that mainstream religions should play a key role in convincing people to become more aware of environmental issues and to change their behaviour in order to ‘save the planet’. By making this opportunist demand for the effective rehabilitation of God, an atheist moral entrepreneur has shown that it is possible to debase both religion and science at the same time.

Was Michael Crichton right to characterise environmentalism as the religion of choice for urban atheists?

And is Frank Furedi right in his claim that Lord May is debasing both religion and scientist simultaneously in his call to mobilize religion as part of the crusade against global warming?

I think one can make the argument that both Crichton and Furedi are right. If so, people like May are idolaters. They have elevated their own understanding to the position that God occupies in monotheistic religions and they are trying to coopt a simplified "God" to take part in a kind of moral blackmail to push people to adopt their version of "environmentalism"

Another example of this kind of mindset is the increasing tendency by the government in the UK to see religion as a tool of policy. God wants you to adhere to this or that government agenda is the message.

But religion is sui generis. The Baha'i understanding is that God's will is expressed through the Revelation brought by the Manifestation of God, "the All-Knowing Physician", for the age in which we live.

Baha'u'llah says, "Every age hath its own problem... The remedy the world needeth in its present day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in..."

One of those needs may be to find ways of mitigating the effects of climate change (whether human-caused or not), but it is not for "moral entrepreneurs" like Lord May to abandon their atheist principles and to try to use religion to serve their particular ends.

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PolicyWatch #1580

Quds Day in Iran: Velvet Revolution Trumps Nuclear Negotiations

By Mehdi Khalaji and Patrick Clawson
September 17, 2009

While the United States is concentrating on the G-20 summit and the October 1 meeting with the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Iranian attention has been focused on the potentially destabilizing protests planned for September 18, Quds Day. This critical difference of agenda -- with Iran focused more on its domestic turmoil than on simmering international issues -- will be a major complicating factor in negotiations between the international community and Iran in the coming weeks.

Background

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has promoted the last Friday of Ramadan as "Quds Day" (Jerusalem Day), a celebration of solidarity with Palestinian rejectionism and of protest against the United States and Israel. Quds Day has become symbolic of the Islamic Republic's effort to present itself as the leader of the world Muslim community in rejecting what it perceives as Western and Israeli plots against Islam.

This year, Quds Day presents the Iranian government with a serious dilemma: allowing hundreds of thousands of Iranians to protest on the street offers the opposition an opportunity to air its slogans. As Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's grandson Hassan Khomeini said on September 16, "Quds Day is international; it is not exclusive to Quds. It is a day for the oppressed to resist against the oppressors." The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has issued statements blaming "the Zionist regime" for plotting to bring people to the streets on Quds Day to "deviate people's move against" Israel. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been prevented from leading prayers in Tehran on Quds Day. The earlier hope, perhaps, was that Rafsanjani would only discuss foreign affairs, showing the unity among Iran's leaders on these issues, but that seems to have become too risky for the regime. Already, Iran's conservatives have calculated that the people might protest against them rather than against Israel and the West -- a development that would expose the hardliners' empty claims of popular support.

How delicate is Iran's domestic political situation? Will the regime's stability be threatened by popular demonstrations on "Quds Day"?

This analysis from the Washington Institute unpacks some of the complexities of Iran's domestic politics and its relationship with the West.

Worth a read.

EBBF the European Baha`i Business Forum (www.ebbf.org) - Business People Across 70 Countries - Announces the Launch of Anti-bribery and Anti-corruption Knowledge Centre

Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:30am EDT

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Jean Pierre Méan Works with the European Baha`i Business Forum to Build
Knowledge Centre Focused on Combating Corruption
GENEVA--(Business Wire)--
EBBF (www.ebbf.org) the European Baha`i Business Forum announces the launch of
its ninth Knowledge Centre, dedicated to combating the issue of bribery and
corruption. Created in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Méan, EBBF member and Vice
President of Transparency International Switzerland, the global civil society
organization fighting corruption. 

With the amount of bribes paid each year exceeding the GDP of all countries
except the six largest and currently less than 5% of corruption cases being
criminally prosecuted, corruption continues to cause significant harm to people
and economies across the globe. 

Entitled `On corruption and bribery - fighting to restore trust` - the new EBBF
Knowledge Centre begins with an introduction to and definition of corruption.
Followed by a well defined structure communicating: the extent of corruption;
the geographical and sectorial spread; the causes; ways and means; consequences;
spiritual aspects; and the legislative instruments and business initiatives to
combat corruption. 

Featured in the Knowledge Centre is the 2008 Corruption Perception Index issued
annually since 1999 by Transparency International, measuring the perceived
levels of public-sector corruption in 180 countries on a scale from zero to ten.

The European Baha'i Business Forum is becoming a significant player in business ethics - and not only in Europe.

Corruption leaches energy and money from economies worldwide. Clearly good legal frameworks need to be in place to deal with corruption, but those who are on the make can always get around laws or set them aside - often by paying bribes.

Law is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The only way to stop corruption in the long run is individual transformation that includes internalizing virtues such as honesty, trustworthiness and, underpinning everything, a deeply rooted apprehension of the responsibility that each of us has for all.

Humanity is one family and we should find the very thought of stealing from others - corruption is theft, make no mistake - as repulsive as stealing from our nearest and dearest.

Iran, the ambiguous, and myself

But never before had I felt that ambiguous role Iran has played in my life more acutely than this summer, as the relationship between Iran, the ambiguous, and myself took another turn.

By Amin Ghadimi

Published Sunday 13 September 2009 09:41pm EST.

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As I sat there on the bullet train, whizzing by yet another nondescript Japanese city in the endless concrete jungle between Osaka and Tokyo, with all those conflicting signs of prosperity and symptoms of malaise outside my window, I couldn’t escape the irony, the excruciating awkwardness of what the news ticker at the front of the car told me. What it said was simple: with a lexical poker face, with the driest, most boringly journalistic stoicism, it announced the preliminary results of the presidential election in Iran. And what it told was different: it told the story of me, and the story of my mother and of her mother and of all the pain and joy and tears and hope that being a refugee entails.

But I can’t complain. Even if it was tough for my parents and grandparents as they settled permanently in Japan, I have all the benefits of being what they call a “third culture kid.” It’s a term that I disdain: as if we were protists, they’ve lumped all of us who don’t fit neatly in one “where are you from” category into a mush of miscellany. But it’s who I proudly am.

I was touched by these poetic reflections by an Iranian whose family have lived in Japan for three generations on his relationships with the enigmas of Japan and with his ancestral homeland, seen from a distance.

The blog format has devolved. Once a simple gateway to self-publishing, today the blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry tablogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone. To understand how it happened, it helps to see what changed when blogging moved from a pastime to a cottage industry — the same point, for me, when writing and reading blogs stopped being fun.

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

I have to admit I've spouted this kind of stuff about "creating content" when asked to advise or train would-be bloggers.

However, the blogs I really enjoy reading are not the result of "content creation" but of real writing - expressive, emotional, thought-provoking.

So I'm not sure that we should abandon blogging as a practice. Or should we?