College Freedom Forum, Boston

The Human Rights Foundation has just convened a highly successful College Freedom Forum in Boston, a formidable evening presenting inspiring and compelling witnesses to our hostile current international environment for human rights.

The speakers provided a wonderful juxtaposition between the cautiously optimistic scholarly context provided by Steven Pinker; the unbelievable courage of Abdalaziz Alhamza in the face of ISIS death squads; the galvanizing presence of Leyla Hussein, who is highlighting female genital mutilation as a global human rights issue; the candor and good humor of Enes Kanter in the face of persecution by Erdogan’s regime in Turkey (luckily, since he was traded to Portland, I will not need to have any rooting interest in the Knicks!); the incredible performance, resilience, and moral courage of Wuilly Arteaga; and Ti-Anna Wang’s ordeal as the daughter of a Chinese prisoner of conscience.

Our intent was to create this program as a consortium of universities and colleges in Greater Boston. Of the 275 people who attended the three hour event, most students from over twenty universities and colleges, including Harvard, Northeastern, Boston University, Boston College, Wellesley, Tufts, and Emerson.

Eliza Ennis, Abdalaziz Alhamza, Amitai Abouzaglo

The Forum was co-sponsored by the International Relations Council of Harvard University, with the invaluable help of their wonderful President Eliza Ennis. Without her intervention, we would not have been able to secure Harvard’s Science Center as our venue, and our audience would have been quite diminished. The International Relations Council will act as the liaison of the Human Rights Foundation at Harvard, and will be responsible for selecting each successive generation of Harvard Oslo Scholars.

I was delighted to see Amitai, who last year was selected to be the first Oslo Scholar from Harvard. I am excited to see the development of his Embodying Peace in Israel-Palestine initiative.

Steven Pinker, Jianli Yang

It was wonderful to reconnect with Jianli Yang, a Chinese dissident who began his activist career at Tiananmen Square, and founder of the Citizen Power Initiatives for China. I keynoted his conference on constitutional issues and minority rights in China at the Weston Theological Center, and worked to help secure his release in 2007 when he was a prisoner of conscience in solitary confinement in China for his nonviolent labor rights activism.

Abdalaziz Alhamza, Amitai Abouzaglo, Jerome Krumenacker

Wuilly Arteaga

Seminar on Behalf of Jamal Khashoggi and Shahidul Alam

I spoke today on behalf of Jamal Khashoggi and Shahidul Alam, with Ambassador William Milam, who has served as US Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh, for the Bangladesh Progressive Alliance of North America and Amnesty International, in an event at Harvard entitled “Implications on Human Rights and Democracy in the Age of Targeting of Media and Journalists.” My remarks touched more broadly on the fate of global journalists in a world now debased even more by the rise of Trumpian fake news, and on the avenues available to us to combat this.

This event was co-sponsored by Harvard’s undergraduate International Relations Council, whom I advise, and introduced by its President, Eliza Rebellion Ennis.

I had met Jamal Khashoggi at events organized by the Human Rights Foundation, the last being at 2018’s Oslo Freedom Forum, where I sat in on a late night conversation on an effort to increase the impact the Arab Tyrant Manual, an “independent online publishing platform focused on freedom, human rights and the fight against all forms of authoritarianism globally.”

That our government seeks to avoid really confronting the atrocity of his murder hurts in a more personal way than anything Trump has done heretofore.

The continued imprisonment of Shahidul Alam, with whom I serve on the Advisory Board of VII Photo Foundation, is now seemingly totally lost and obscured in the news cycle here. In a Dhaka jail since his abduction in early August, he has repeatedly been denied bail by the High Court, and continues to be slandered as a “traitor” by Bangladesh’s ruling party.