Human Rights: Capital Offender [on Haleh Esfandiari]

Haleh Esfandiari, 67-year-old Iranian American who has been held in Tehran since Dec. 30, was charged this week with being tied to a plot to topple the Iranian government.

Unless she’s managed to live a spectacular double life, the charges against the life-long academic -- she’s director of Middle Eastern programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars -- are simply trumped up, either as a desperate effort to stifle free intellectual discourse or as part of an ill-conceived game of hardball with the U.S. Still, in Iran, such “ideological crimes” are considered a capital offense, and in a country that nearly doubled its rate of executions last year, this is cause for alarm.

High-profile names on both sides of the world are speaking out in Esfandiari’s defense. “These actions are deplorable in themselves, and also are a gift to Western hard-liners who are trying to organize support for military action against Iran,” said Noam Chomsky. “The intolerable treatment of this highly respected scholar and human rights activist severely undermines the efforts of those who are seeking peace, justice and freedom in the region and the world.” In Iran, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has taken the lead in Esfandiari’s defense. “I’ve known her for many years, and I know she is innocent,” said Ebadi, who spoke to the P-I Editorial Board last year about U.Ss-Iran relations. It’s not unusual for the Iranian government to respond to pressure from the international community in such matters, and because of that, we can’t turn our eyes away from Esfandiari’s plight. Hers is a situation that serves only to highlight the recent -- and cyclical -- hard-liner crackdowns in Iran (CNN reported another such arrest on Wednesday, that of Kian Tajbakhsh, a 45-year-old Iranian American academic and consultant). They need to know that the world is watching.

See more on this Topic
George Washington University’s Failure to Remove MESA from Its Middle East Studies Program Shows a Continued Tolerance for the Promotion of Terrorism
One Columbia Professor Touted in a Federal Grant Application Gave a Talk Called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy’