Sitting in heavy traffic on Route 76 yesterday, I had the compounded misfortune of hearing Deepak Chopra’s Wellness Radio, broadcast on Sirius. Chopra, a millionaire many times over, admonished us all to rid ourselves of personal demons, the kind that tell us money is important. But what struck me most was a guest appearance by Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute.
Granoff, based in Philly as it happens, is an “international peace activist.” He has a penchant for mumbo-jumbo like “disarmament begins with the self.” Like me, he abhors the cowboy unilateralism and belligerence of U.S. foreign policy under Bush. On Chopra’s program he declared that three documents — the UN charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — are the pillars on which any progress for our civilization must rest. Again, I fully agree. Granoff went on to call for nuclear disarmament and to decry the West’s threatening nuclear posture in the post-Cold War world. (I do not have a transcript handy.)
Chopra interjected with a good question: But what hope is there? Isn’t the trend in the other direction, with states like Iran and North Korea inching toward nuclear weapons? Granoff’s tone changed remarkably — from clear and unflinching moral condemnation of the West, to mushy-headed apologetics for the dictatorial regimes that Chopra mentioned. With Iran, he said, the issue is really whether states have the right to develop peaceful nuclear technology. And North Korea, he averred, needs to be welcomed back to the international community and given a security guarantee.
Granoff seemed to suggest that these authoritarian states bear none of the blame for the current situation. His forgiving, carefully neutral tone was in stark contrast to his previously stated concern for the human rights treaties and principles listed above. About the West’s violations of such treaties and principles, Granoff was dogged and loquacious. He was silent, however, about North Korea’s surreal, tyrannical repression of its citizens, not to mention its proliferation of conventional weapons around the globe — something that ought to concern a peace activist very much. Granoff also declined to mention, much less condemn, recent Iranian boasting about its thousands of centrifuges and its ongoing plans to enrich uranium, in defiance of the very United Nations that Granoff held so sacred at the beginning of the hour. And of course, not a word about Iran’s human rights record. We’re talking about a regime that regards the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as so much Kleenex, whose current president is a Holocaust denier who has openly made common cause with European and American neo-Nazis. Opposing this sort of thing doesn’t factor into today’s “peace activism,” apparently.
Granoff is right to oppose the Bush administration worldview, and to warn against the absolute folly of any possible military strike against Iran. But these positions have led him to soft-pedal his take on the regimes arrayed against the U.S. — regimes that merit condemnation, in the strongest terms, according to every criterion that Granoff himself articulates.
Aside from the one interjection, Deepak Chopra barely challenged Granoff at all. “Healing the collective consciousness” is all fine and good, but when it comes to political issues as grave as this, Chopra’s program is worse than useless.
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