Terrorism and Human Rights :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

  Ã‚   As we try to come to grips with the tragedy of September 11, as individuals and as social scientists, a human rights approach can provide some guidance. A human rights approach always begins with, and has at its center a concern with individual victims of rights abuses. We turn first to the victims of the September 11 attack and their families and friends. The enormity of the loss of life, and the premeditated nature of the attacks on September 11th justifies calling them a crime against humanity. Murder, when "committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population" is a crime against humanity.1 The victims of this crime are entitled not only to our deepest sympathy, but also to justice, either in our courts or in an international tribunal.    I try to start understanding the tragedy of September 11th through the stories of the people who have lost their lives, in New York, Washington, D.C. or in Afghanistan. Yes, there are differences, but the pain each family feels at the loss of its loved one, and its desire for justice are as deep as victims of rights abuses feel throughout the world.    Often we skip over this first step of starting with the victims and their families. We are trained to explain phenomena using abstract theories. It is second nature to us to immediately ask "why" and begin the search for deep and proximate causes of puzzling events. It may be useful, especially when speaking to the public, to preface our search for explanations with some prior comments. First, a search for explanation does not imply justification. There is no justification for such acts. Nor does any explanation remove the perpetrators' moral and legal responsibility for these criminal acts. Hannah Arendt was concerned about exactly such a point in the last pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote: "Another such escape from the area of ascertainable facts and personal responsibility are the countless theories, based on non-specific, abstract, hypothetical assumptions.... which are so general that they explain and justify every event and every deed: no alternative to what actually ha ppened is even considered and no person could have acted differently from the way he did act..... All these cliches have in common that they make judgment superfluous and that to utter them is devoid of all risk." She says that such theorizing is a symptom of "the reluctance evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility.