“People do dumb things when they are afraid, we all do,” said William Schulz during his presentation last Friday, making yet another successful dramatic pause during his speech, allowing the audience to think over the meaning of his ideas.

The returning Oberlin alumnus, class ’71, and an executive Director of Amnesty International U.S.A. used the opportunity given to him by the 100th birthday of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine and the Alumni Weekend to present his book Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights in front of Oberlin students, faculty and more than 200 Oberlin alumni.

Schulz not only presented his new book in the full West Lecture Hall auditorium, but also delivered to the audience the views he supports in the publication and also the reasoning behind them.

“The right words at the right time can be a question of life and death,” he said at the beginning of the event, explaining the role of Amnesty International worldwide. Further in his speech, as he was constantly quoting the book in front of him, Schulz began building on a very much thesis-antithesis argument in order to reach his final point.

“When I was in high school I became acquainted with a religious movement that called itself Moral Rearmament,” he continued to explain how the contact with this particular movement made him think about the limits of absolutes.

“For example,” he said, “if every one of us has the right to be protected of terrorism and in order to do that the government suspends some of the other rights that we are given, then is this considered a necessary evil?”

Schulz referred to a story that came out in newspapers soon after Sept. 11 about Cheik Melanine ould-Belai, the 21 year old son of a Mauritanian dip detained for more than a month constantly moved from place to place without even being told what he was held for.

The same thing happened to hundreds of Muslims who have been detained without explanation. When ould-Belai was finally released he said that he used to like the United States and wanted to learn English, but all that was wiped away by the trauma of his experience.

“Are we safer by humiliating and alienating foreigners, who had previously good disposition to our country?” Schulz asked.

In his opinion the more successful tactics would be not to stand up against “bullies”, but to win on your side the parties who are still undecided. In his view, the U.S. cannot win the war on terror on its own but must convince Muslim allies to help us.

“War on terror is not a war on Islam but a war for freedom and human rights,” he said.

“Human rights emerge from the common misery of human kind. They teach that every one of our bodies will perish; they teach us to be temperate in our triumph, to treat our triumph as if it was our funeral,” he said, leaving the audience in complete silence.

In addition to grave sentiments like these, Schulz’s speech was also peppered with easy-going humor. This is true of his book, Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights as well

“Oberlin College,” he writes in one of the last chapters, “from which I graduated, was by no means a football giant. One afternoon, when we trailed Ohio Wesleyan by some forty-three points, the cheerleading squad led the Oberlin minions in chanting, “You may lead by forty-three, but we have higher SAT’s.”

While Schulz sees much misfortune in the world his outlook is ultimately optimistic.

“What the world most admires about the US is the vision of a free society that respects emigrants. Betray that and you betray the most important grounds we have for our moral vision,” he said, as he was finishing the event.

He shared with his audience his program for the weekend, which was going to take him to Sudan and the humanitarian crisis which political experts have already called one of the worst ones the world has ever seen.

Before he left, though, he mentioned again how happy he was to be back on campus.

“Oberlin students always ask the most sophisticated and well informed questions of all the college campuses I have been on,” Schulz said.