Craving justice - Ganji

NY Daily News:

There are reports that jailed Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, in the fifth week of a hunger strike, is now hooked up to an IV tube in a Tehran hospital, whence he was taken this week. If that is true - and it is difficult to know what is true in Iran - it does not mean Ganji has given up. More likely, his captors are, for their own political reasons, making a last-ditch effort to save his life while he's too feeble to fight them. Yesterday, there were even suggestions of a forthcoming pardon. Would that a pardon were the result of intense world pressure. But, alas, the world seems largely unconcerned about the fate of one courageous man. READ MORE

Ganji, now 46 - and down to about 119 pounds, according to his wife - had been serving a six-year term for writing articles that linked government officials to the murders of dissidents. He was eventually permitted a medical leave, but then he committed the crime of branding the Iranian elections a sham staged by the mullahs. Calling for true democracy, he urged a boycott of the vote and was rearrested. He immediately started the hunger strike.

Last week, President Bush called for Ganji's immediate and unconditional release and asked "all supporters of human rights and freedom, and the United Nations, to take up Ganji's case and the overall human rights situation in Iran." Take it up, they have not, except for the European Union and such individuals of conscience as Natan Sharansky and Desmond Tutu, who recognize the difference between true human rights violations and the fictional atrocities that self-appointed guardians of the good so busily lay at America's feet.

Akbar Ganji has put a name to courage in Iran. Perhaps that is what the world community can't accept - so many of its members, led by the UN, having little acquaintance with the quality.