On December 12, 2015, Professor Chibli Mallat published an op-ed in The Arab Weekly titled, “Human rights are not a suicide pact.”
Read the complete op-ed in The Arab Weekly »
Beirut – On the annual celebration of Human Rights Day, its worst possible nemesis is steadily displacing it. It is called terrorism, more accurately state terrorism. And here we must take a firm stand on language: Terrorism and counterterrorism mean exactly the same thing.
Lest we forget, ‘”terror” was born in the French revolution as state politics. On September 5, 1793, terror was declared à l’ordre du jour officially, at the roster of the French National Convention.
The reasons then are similar to the reasons now: By using violence to challenge peace and order in the state, those who opposed the French government lured it into becoming an increasingly fierce terrorist machine using counter-violence to eradicate them.
More than 200 years later, the pattern remains the same. The state (represented by the executive) sheds the rule of law and grows oblivious to human rights. A terrorist state does one thing: its government removes or waters down hard-won human rights.