Just a short post today, as moving back into my dorm and restarting classes has been quite the day-ful.

Recent events have left significant attention on Iran’s nuclear program– questions of whether the nation will soon have access to, as it were, weapons of mass destruction, and who would be at risk if they did, are not uncommon in newsrooms across the globe. And yet, there seems to be an underlying assumption about the nature of totalitarianism– particularly that of Muslim rulers– in these conversations that I think should be challenged.

There’s an idea that floats throughout discussions of Iran: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a lunatic, an irrational megalomaniac with the social ethics of The Joker. Now megalomaniac he may be– his totalitarian regime is responsible for a plethora of human rights abuses, corruptions, and suppressions across his state.

And yet, he’s not ignorant of the rest of the world. The second he gets his fingers on a functional nuclear launch red button won’t be the second he directs a warhead towards Israel, or the United States. The backlash from such an action would be utterly untenable– a wall of missiles directed Iran’s way in response. I think it an absurd thing to say this has never crossed the man’s mind.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of the Islamic Republic of Iran

This idea, though, that the ramifications of aggression are entirely ignored by dictators like Ahmadinejad, seems to me to stem from an exceptionality of horror placed on the religion of Islam. People in the mindset of, to use a quite prominent example, Sam Harris, who would claim that the religion expresses a particular sort of evil that warrants our Western attention, seem to take a leap from the extraordinary differences in language and culture between this side of the Atlantic and the Middle East to the notion that they therefore are essentially incapable of making rational, or moral, decisions themselves. However different we, as peoples, may be, should not characterize either of us as inherently anti-human, or irrational.

Ahmadinejad is himself a Shia Muslim, an engineer by trade whose rise to power in Iran has been subject to significant, and I would certainly consider well-deserved, criticism and investigation. I don’t mean to endorse him or his policies in any way, nor do I think the horrors that crop up under many instances of Sharia Law are defensible– I think human rights, particularly in Iran, ought to command humanity’s absolute attention. But to do that, we have to be clear, honest, and accurate in our characterizations of those who would violate those rights, lest we find ourselves entirely self-centered when real, actionable issues in the world are blown out of view.

Walker Bristol is an undergraduate studying religion and linguistics at Tufts University, and the Community Organizer and Interfaith Representative for the Tufts Freethought Society. Originally from North Carolina, Walker was raised in a largely Quaker community before exploring several Christian traditions throughout high school and ultimately becoming a secular humanist at age 15. Walker serves as the chair of the Committee to Establish a Humanist Chaplaincy at Tufts, and has worked as a student intern at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. Along with fellow Tufts Freethought board member Lauren Rose, Walker hosts the internet radio show FreethoughtCast. In addition to being involved in secular student activism, Walker is a hobbyist musician, ballroom dancer, and far-too-avid science-fiction fan. He tweets nonsense @GodlessWalker.