On Tuesday, Pax Christi held a “die-in” in protest of the Iraq War. I organized the independent and unaffiliated counter-protest.

To give you some background, the organization’s “die-in” participants lay out across the school’s grounds-holding the names of fallen Americans and Iraqis during the University lunch hour-as a representation of those who have died in the Iraq War and as a symbol for why U.S. action there must end. In particular, as implied by its actions and expressed on its Web site, why it must end immediately.

My colleagues and I were called “cowards” by a program coordinator backing the event because, according to her, we should be in Iraq if we support the war. (Though by that reasoning, she should be there protesting it.) Especially in the beginning, our demands that Americans support our troops and support Iraqi human rights fell deaf on the ears of those who opposed us, and at least one organizer called the Department of Public Safety to break up our demonstration of public dissent.

And dissent was absolutely justified: The Pax Christi event was wrong for many reasons. I’ll address only one of those reasons here.

According to Pax Christi’s Web site, one of the organization’s mission objectives is to support “universal human rights, both at home and abroad, through solidarity with oppressed and marginalized people struggling for dignity.” It is this point, among many others, that made the event especially distasteful, given the group’s purpose. While Pax Christi styles itself to be a human rights organization, it is apparently selective in whose rights it wants to protect.

How, for instance, could organizers unflinchingly dismiss that what they’d have the United States do-pull out immediately-would condemn millions of Iraqis to violence, death and little more than slavery? How will Iraq be any different than another high-profile killing field, the Sudan? I asked this of organizers. They did not indicate that there would be a difference.

How can they use the names of the dead, without their families’ consent, for their own political purposes, and yet willfully condemn to future placards the names of Iraqis slaughtered as a result of an American withdrawal? Again, they did not contest the point.

As I appreciate the intelligence of many war opponents and human rights advocates on the left, I cannot bring myself to label such behavior as “ignorant.”

It is much worse than that.

And that is the dirty little secret Pax Christi refuses to come to grips with: that its concern for human rights has devolved to being rhetorical at best, going only as far as its politics will take it and the public will believe.

Whether we should have invaded Iraq is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether we should stay there. We have our own security to consider, but as it stands, American troops are the only things keeping roving Sunni and Shiite death squads from butchering each others’ families.

As we indicated at our protest, one need only to look at Cambodia to see the consequences of a precipitous American withdrawal. After our departure from Vietnam, the Communist Khmer Rouge exacted a genocide against nearly two million Cambodians-a toll that most Americans cannot fully appreciate, nor would like to imagine. Nor, perhaps, even realize.

Yet this brutality has been almost entirely ignored by the anti-war movement-student and otherwise-as it bears on the situation in Iraq, even though it’s breathtakingly relevant. And it reaches to the highest echelons of our government.

Iraqi human rights? According to Speaker Pelosi, Iraqis need “to take responsibility for their own future”-and do so apparently within the next year-if they are to be deserving of them. As if human rights were conditional.

And Hillary Clinton? She’d keep some troops in Iraq, but as The New York Times reported, her forces “would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence-even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.” That’s abominable. Yet this is the leadership of the anti-war movement today.

This says nothing of our duties as a freedom-loving and compassionate nation. Is it not our duty to protect the defenseless where we can, especially when we’re already there?

As the cry goes out over the injustices perpetrated in Darfur and elsewhere, I have to wonder-does Pax Christi find human rights a convenience around which they can rally, only when actual steps toward making a difference are sufficiently remote?

We condemned countless innocents to death when we left Vietnam. Would the left have us do that again?

But I guess the term “human rights” means something different than what the name implies. “Human rights” only exist for the privileged few who have the good fortune of birth to evoke them in a country where they won’t be murdered because they’re an educated woman or a child playing in a market. “Human rights” are for those that can articulate those rights, not for those whose mouths are swollen and beaten for demanding them. “Human rights” are not, in fact, rights at all. They are a political vehicle of domestic politics and little more than a mouthpiece and rallying cry for those that already have them, and obscenely more.

I hope those who find solidarity in their mutual, self-affirming and overwhelmingly inert belief in the importance of human rights are happy with their choice. May history and their peers be less kind in their assessments.

Patrick Ishmael is a student at SLU’s School of Law and the editor of TheNewsBuckit.com.