NED fellow, Jahanbegloo, defends NED's Tibet project

I'm not surprised to see Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), coming out supporting the NED-funded and organized bogus Tibet protests and its fake leader, Dalai Lama. Are you?

Neith I am surprised that you can't find a single word of support or sympathy in Jahanbegloo's work for, say, Gazans who are living in the largest prison on the planet by the people Jahanbegloo never wants to anger. Or perhaps the universal rules of human dignity that Jahanbegloo praises, do not fully apply to anyone that the Israeli establishment doesn't agree with.

As the late Richard Rorty brilliantly explains, Europe and the U.S. have a very long history to define who is fully human so that those 'universal' rules could be applied to them.

The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.

To make our case, we anti-foundationalists point to unpleasant historical facts such as the following: The words of the Declaration were taken, by the supposedly democratic government of the US, to apply only to people of European origin. The American Founding Fathers applied them only to the immigrants who had come across the Atlantic to escape from the monarchical governments of Europe. The idea that native Americans – the Indian tribes who were the aboriginal inhabitants – had such rights was rarely taken seriously. Recalcitrant Indians were massacred.

Again, it was only a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence that the citizenry of the US began to take women's rights seriously – began to ask themselves whether American females were being given the same opportunities for the pursuit of happiness as were American males. It took almost a hundred years, and an enormously costly and cruel civil war, before black Americans were given the right not to be held as slaves. It took another hundred years before black Americans began to be treated as full-fledged citizens, entitled to all the same opportunities as whites.