If you want the press to notice, you MUST criticize Bush....

Amir Taheri looks at a true campaigner for human rights - but the advice is simple...if you want to get noticed by the press, criticize America and criticize Bush.

Together with several colleagues, I had been trying for months to persuade the Western media to take an interest in Ganji, a former Khomeinist revolutionary who is now campaigning for human rights and democracy. But we never got anywhere because of one small hitch: President Bush had spoken publicly in support of Ganji and called for his immediate release.

And that, as far as a good part of the Western media is concerned, amounts to a kiss of death. How could newspapers that portray Bush as the world's biggest "violator of human rights" endorse his call in favor of Ganji?

To overcome that difficulty, some of Ganji's friends had tried to persuade him to make a few anti-American, more specifically anti-Bush, pronouncements so that the Western media could adopt him as a "hero-martyr." Two years ago, similar advice had been given to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was made to understand one stark fact of contemporary life: You will not be accepted as a champion of human rights unless you attack the United States.

Ebadi had accepted the advice and used her address during the prize ceremony in Oslo to launch a bitter attack on the United States as the arch-violator of human rights. To the surprise of many Iranians, she had eulogized the 400 or so alleged terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay, but made no mention of the thousands of political prisoners, including some of her own friends and clients, who languish in mullah-run prisons throughout Iran.

Would Ganji adopt a similar tactic in order to get media attention in the West? The answer came last January and it was a firm no.

The result was that Ganji, probably the most outspoken and courageous prisoner of conscience in the Islamic Republic today, became a non-person for the Western media. Even efforts by the group Reporters Without Frontiers, and the International Press Institute, among other organizations of journalists, failed to change attitudes towards Ganji.

Hundreds of editorials have been published in major Western publications in sympathy with the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. But, to my knowledge, there has been none in support of Ganji or the thousands of political prisoners held by the mullahs.