Roxana Saberi to the Athenaeum Wednesday evening. Ms. Saberi was captured by the thuggish Iranian regime and kept in captivity for 100 days.
As she detailed the gross human rights violations for religious minorities and women, I immediately remembered the soft-spoken, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who came to speak last semester. But aside from their beauty, there isn't much they share. While Ms. Ali believes in the importance of ideas, Ms. Saberi sits behind the vague generalities of "diversity" and "human rights" without really probing these ideas.
I asked a rather impolitic question about what it was like being a beauty queen from North Dakota. (Apparently, Ms. Saberi went around talking about the importance of cultural diversity -- multiculturalism hasn't reached those to the north yet, obviously.)
We got Ms. Saberi talking after that story, despite the efforts of a few of the guys at the table to talk politics rather than about her experiences. Gentlemen, you don't immediately introduce politics into a dinner conversation. Rather, it's best to start with flattery. A tip to the wise from he who hath erred in the past. But I digress.
I have a video copy of Ms. Saberi's talk, but as I am respecting the wishes of the Athenaeum, apparently acting through Saberi's wishes, and not putting it online. I can, of course, send you a copy, should you want it and will be reprinting some of the quotations from it here or elsewhere.
Much of the talk was lackluster, with Ms. Saberi refusing to actually make any significant points other than the usual pabulum we hear from the media. For an interesting take on what's actually going on in Iran, here's
a great article I recommend.
After he talk, Professor Ward Elliott pointed out something that I had only tangentially noticed. All of the songs that Ms. Saberi played and many of the signs were in English. It's almost as if they were trying to make an appeal to America. Naturally, this appeal went unremarked.
But one of the statements that most bothered me that Ms. Saberi made was in regards to whether or not she wanted the government to be secular or religious. To this she replied, that
"Whatever the people of Iran want is what I want them to have." Such thinking makes democracy, which is but a procedure to safeguard man's natural rights, an empty principle. What that kind of statement lends itself to is the kind of "democracy" Iran already is -- where 51% percent enslaves the other 49%.
