Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.
Two years ago Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., was arrested for trespassing outside the Sudanese Embassy as he was protesting the genocide in Darfur. His arrest was not a publicity stunt. It was an example of Lantos’ tireless efforts as a human rights activist.
Lantos died Monday after a battle with esophageal cancer. He was 80.
He lived an extraordinary life. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Hungary in 1928, Lantos said he aged quickly, becoming an old man as a teenager under the Nazis. His mother and most of his family were killed in the Holocaust. Lantos fought with the Nazi resistance movement and twice escaped from Nazi labor camps before finding refuge in a safe house set up by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
After World War II, he emigrated to the United States.
He called himself “an American by choice,” but he never forgot people in peril around the globe. Lantos earned a doctorate in economics and became a university professor, an expert on international affairs and a well-known human rights activist. In 1980 he beat an incumbent congressman to represent a district stretching south of San Francisco in the Bay Area.
In Congress he fought for human rights issues and pointed to problems around the globe, including in Darfur, Myanmar and China. In his fight, he didn’t mince words.
For example, after he assumed chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year, he brought executives of the Internet giant Yahoo to a hearing and asked them to explain why they turned over the name of a dissident to Chinese authorities. After hearing no good explanation, he told them: “Morally, you are pygmies.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice fittingly called Lantos “a true American hero.”
“He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one’s freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand for spreading freedom and prosperity to others,” she said.
Indeed. Lantos was a rare individual, a passionate crusader for the oppressed. He was a champion of people whose voices usually aren’t heard in this country. He will be missed not just here, but around the world.
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