Friday, October 23, 2009

Again No Mention of the Baha'is by The New York Times

In an editorial in today's New York Times entitled "More Iranian Injustice" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/opinion/24sat2.html), the NYT's editorial board notes the following outrages:

The imprisonment of journalist Maziar Bahari for five months before being freed this week.

The sentencing of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with a doctorate from Columbia University, to 15 years in prison for working with George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

An attack on Friday upon opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, at a media fair.

Post-election detention of many Iranians without charges and the sentencing of four protesters to death.

The holding of three American hikers, seized along the Iran-Iraq border, since July 31.

The disappearance of Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent, since 2007.


The editorial concludes:

"Iran may sit at the negotiating table with the United States and other world powers, but it will never earn the respect it craves if it continues these kinds of human rights abuses."

Is that all? Why is there no word about the brutal persecution of Iran's Baha'is, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, and the 17-month imprisonment of the Baha'is' community leaders without charges? The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed a bipartisan resolution, H.Res. 175, authored by U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), condemning the persecution of Iran's Bahá’í community, demanding the immediate release of more than a dozen Baha’ís currently imprisoned in Iran, and calling for Iranian compliance with the International Covenants on Human Rights, but there is no mention of this resolution by The New York Times' editorial board.

As noted in an earlier blog entry (http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2009/10/is-new-york-times-ignoring-persecution.html), it is high time for The New York Times to address the issue of Iran's Baha'is on its editorial page and to counter Roger Cohen's claims that Iran is "not totalitarian" and that "Iran makes rational decisions." Today's editorial is not enough.

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