From Hariri to Taseer The international community cannot stay silent The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed on the 10th of December of 1948 by the United Nations is rightly seen as a landmark on humankind development. Like several other international initiatives of that time, the Declaration found its roots on the strong will of the World democratic leaders to insure that the horrors of the holocaust would never be repeated, a will that was however soon to be confronted with massmurder of gigantic proportions. In the past 62 years, these crimes against humanity, and many others of not so gigantic proportions that was not possible to silence or still, that are only partially known and acknowledged, are evidence to all of us of how the Declaration intentions remain far from being fulfilled. Class, ethnic, ethno-religious and ever more purely religious cleansing, massmurder or targeted murder have been ever present, but very seldom have they been tolerated when sufficiently publicised. A qualified exception deserves here to be made on the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the very well documented mass cleansing of political dissenters went unpunished and gave rise, as yet, to no international action, and furthermore did not prevent an influential sector of the Western intelligentsia to discover in this murderer regime the birth of a supposed new type of democracy. The Islamic Republic is also to be taken in due consideration for at least three cumulative reasons: (1) it is in the vanguard of the effort to deny the holocaust, and therefore to void of significance the Declaration; (2) it has the most open and obvious penal code prescribing the murder for whoever disagrees with the rulers and in particular under the legal figure of Mohareb1; and (3) it is established in a big and developed country. The stepping up of Iran’s aggressive intentions through its nuclear plan stopped finally the generalised complacency with the nature of the theocratic rule, but has yet to convince the international community of how the Theocracy aims and the Universal Declaration are inherently incompatible. The present year of 2011, however, marks the beginning of a new challenge to the Universal Declaration, the challenge of the international tacit recognition of the right to murder. The murder of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon in 2005, Rafik Hariri, was the catalyser for the Cedars Revolution in this country, and led to United Nations resolutions nominating a Special Tribunal for Lebanon, demanding the withdrawal of foreign armed forces as well as the disarmament of foreign armed internal armed groups. The UN resolutions were however only partially implemented – Hezbollah considerably reinforced its weapons and its internal and external aggression activity – as the energy and commitment of the international community towards the
that is, those who fight against God, and since they are supposed to rule in the name of God, this means “those who confront the theocratic authorities”; 1