Naviblog says... Nobel Prize winner needs to open her eyes

* In an article from UK newspaper the Independent, the 2003 Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi talks about "double standards", all the while making a mistake to what the word refers to. Although her fight for civil rights and for the rights of women in Iran is exemplary, she talks of double standards by talking about Iran less a nuclear danger as... Pakistan which is apparently "more fundamentalist" and "not elected". This is not the definition of double standards. Please pick up a dictionary and check it out. It means do as I say, not do as I do. I am right, you are wrong. I have the right, you have none.

The two parties in question here are on one hand "the West"/"Western World"/"International Community", interchangeably used to represent the rich boy club of G8 most wealthy nations of the world, and on the other, Iran. She tries to explain: "Look at France. Is the world worried about a country like France having nuclear weapons? No. Because France is a democracy" as opposed to "Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani Muslims are much more fundamentalist than Iranian Muslims, and Pervez Musharraf [the Pakistan President] did not come to power as a result of an election". So if you have an election, you are allowed to have nuclear weapons? If you are "France" you are "OK"? Hmm... somehow I think not. For a social-legal expert, this either a very naive or dangerously idealized view of democracy and the hard realities that lurk behind its thin veneer.

The only thing that really matters here is emancipation, independence, freedom from oppression. As the English tortured the Irish 50 years ago, and the Americans torture Iraqis today, no-one really gives a damn about elections and democracy. Sandino, Bolivar, Nasser, Mossadegh, Gandhi, all these people asked for is political independence, military security, control of resources, social and cultural freedom. The have-nots were denied all these by the International Community countries.

You want a solution? It's real simple. All International Community countries and World War II victors should implement the START and CTBT treaties, and implement a fissile material production cutoff. Only in this spirit can the Third Class World start to believe the relevance of the NPT treaty. If they fail in this regard, increasing geostrategic interest in US-Eastern Europe military alliances will lead to an Eastward shift of the Iron Curtain to the middle east, into a new Saffron Curtain, where the newly-born Shanghai Cooperation Organization will grow and militarize in response to renewed threats to energy security. As Hans Blix recently pointed out, in this case we will soon head into a new arms race, which means more money for military cronyism and propaganda politics, less security, prosperity and freedom for the rest of us.