RIP Tom Lantos
Tom Lantos– the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the US Congress– has died at the age of 80.
As I noted here in 2006, Lantos was one of five members of Congress arrested outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington while protesting the genocide in Darfur.
Lantos was also among the members of Congress who denounced US internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft for cooperating with Chinese government efforts to control cyber dissent.
At a Congressional hearing last November, Lantos angrily took Yahoo executives to task for the company’s role in ratting out dissident journalist Shi Tao to Chinese authorities.
“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Lantos told Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, and Michael J. Callahan, the general counsel.
Comments
| 12 February 2008, 8:57 pm |
I’ve found my thr-i-i-lls o-o-n the Tirana hills.
| 13 February 2008, 1:56 am |
Seems to me he was more on the side of the angels than against. Good.
Anyone who backs Taiwan and stands up to the ruthless dictators in China is good in my book (British “Olympian” (actually crawling in the mud) Association please note).
| 13 February 2008, 7:07 am |
Standing up to both the Chinese government and Yahoo as a legislator representing Silicon Valley took guts.
Locally he’s remembered warmly as having helped with small good things like open space projects too.
| 13 February 2008, 6:49 pm |
RIP, a brave and good man.
| 14 February 2008, 3:31 pm |
RIP.
Incidentally, regarding ‘For the Record’, isn’t it strange how many people will bring up the ‘incubators’ story as if to indicate that there was nothing untoward about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or about the behaviour of Iraqi occupation forces from August 1990-March 1991? It’s almost as if they’re trying to make excuses for aggression and crimes against humanity, IMHO.
| 14 February 2008, 4:27 pm |
The incubator story is brought up to show that Lantos was a lying warmonger. Just the sort of scumbag to be a hero to the Hoare family.
| 14 February 2008, 4:37 pm |
Really, ‘resistor’, so one bogus story outweighs the invasion and annexation of a sovereign state – contrary to all principles of international law – and the many documented cases of torture and killing that took place under Iraqi occupation. Were those all lies as well? You piece of shit.
| 14 February 2008, 4:46 pm |
In any case, this rebuttal provides as good a response to ‘resistor’s smears as anything else:
‘Given the countless cases of verified Iraqi human rights violations, including torture and murder, before, during and since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it was hardly necessary for any government or any public relations firm to manufacture false stories. There were so many appalling accounts, all sickeningly true, that it would have been totally unnecessary and counterproductive to invent atrocities.’
Some people need to be reminded that Saddam was the real ‘war monger’ of 1990-1991, and that the war to defeat him and liberate Kuwait was fully justified. In fact, the only really immoral act the USA and Britain committed was to fail to support the Iraqi people when they tried to overthrow Saddam in March 1991. We’d have saved Iraq and the wider world a lot of trouble had we done so.
Sweet home Alabamia?