As many of you will recall, about this time last year I made a trip to New York to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, and I wrote about my experience in the Daily Free Press (A view on bigotry, from the Columbia green, Sept. 25, 2007, p. 3). Yesterday, I made a similar pilgrimage to New York — this time, to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies and the positions of the Iranian government along with thousands of other human rights activists outside the United Nations.

There were human rights activists from all backgrounds at the rally, from holocaust survivors to Evangelical Christian groups. Religious and political organizations of all kinds came out to express their outrage with the Iranian government. Most inspiring were the groups of Iranian citizens who escaped from Ahmadinejad’s tyrannical regime, and stood out in the hot New York sun across from the United Nations to speak out on behalf of their loved ones in Iran who are not allowed the freedoms to speak out for themselves.

Boston University’s own professor Elie Wiesel spoke beautifully on the need for the international community to condemn the Iranian government in the strongest terms. Renowned human rights activist Natan Sharansky spoke about the optimism citizens of the USSR felt in the 1970s when they learned that citizens in America were advocating for them and assured the activists in New York that their display of solidarity would not go unnoticed by the Iranian people.

And then the crowd shouted as one: “Stop Iran now!”

I was mortified. “stop Iran now” is not the kind of slogan that will empower the Iranian people to tear themselves free from the tyranny of the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad. “Stop Iran now” is not the kind of slogan that will express to Iranians who ache for freedom that the human rights community is behind them. “Stop Iran now” is not the kind of slogan that will bring about the change so desperately needed in the region to ensure that the situation does not become more violent than it already is.

Instead, I would urge all human rights activists to focus on the real goal of removing President Ahmadinejad from office. I would urge them to yell “free Iran now” on every sidewalk, in every park and in every place where one person says to another that the humanity of the Iranian people isn’t worth getting excited for. Let the activists yell “free Iran now” on every campus where students ignore the human rights violations of a despot like Ahmadinejad, to focus on less important issues, like getting a date for Saturday night. Let them yell “free Iran now” wherever a Republican and a Democrat debate together about partisan politics and ignore the desperation of human beings on the other side of the globe who are unable to vote for their preferred candidate, because he or she is not “Muslim enough.”

As horrible a man as Ahmadinejad is, it would be a tragedy if the human rights community focused solely on his evils and lost sight of the real victims-the Iranian people.