Terrorism and Human Rights :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

As we try to come to grips with the calamity of phratry 11, as individuals and as social scientists, a human rights approach can exit some guidance. A human rights approach always begins with, and has at its inwardness 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 patch of a widespread or systematic attack directed against all civilian population is a crime against humanity.1 The victims of this crime argon authorize 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 injure 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 wipe over this first step of starting with the victims and their families. We are trained to let off phenomena using abstract theories. It is second nature to us to immediately implore why and begin the search for deep and proximate causes of puzzling events. It whitethorn be useful, especially when speaking to the public, to preface our search for explanations with some antecedent comments. First, a search for explanation does not imply justification. There is no justification for such acts. Nor does any explanation remove the perpetrators virtuous and sound 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 range from the area of ascertainable facts and personal responsibility are the countless theo ries, establish on non-specific, abstract, hypothetical assumptions.... which are so general that they explain and liberate every event and every deed no alternative to what rattling happened 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 mindless and that to utter them is devoid of all risk. She says that such theorizing is a symptom of the indisposition evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility.