Rev. Danny Fisher

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), an important voice for Tibetan freedom, died today at the age of 80. He had served 14 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, he twice escaped from a forced labor camp in Szob during the Nazi occupation of his country. The second time, he was sheltered by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. After the Soviet army liberated Hungary, he discovered that his parents and most of his family had been killed during the occupation.

The only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, Rep. Lantos was chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was also co-chairman and founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a group dedicated to raising awareness about human rights violations around the world.

Rep. Lantos was a tireless supporter of the Tibetan independence movement and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His contributions are too numerous to count, so I’ll point you to one of the most recent: his speech in San Francisco for the 2007 Tibetan Uprising Day. He also joined Richard Gere and Robert A.F. Thurman in talking about his friendship with and admiration for His Holiness as part of A&E Biography’s 1997 documentary Dalai Lama: Soul of Tibet. In addition, Rep. Lantos was the driving force behind the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to His Holiness last year. When the House of Representatives ultimately voted to give His Holiness the honor, he said:

In his quiet but persistent way, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has devoted his life to asserting the Tibetan people’s rights, lifting their spirits and upholding their dignity. By his humble personal example, through his prolific writings and in his addresses to audiences in every corner of the earth, the Dalai Lama has provided exceptional service to humankind. Such a vast contribution to the betterment of our world deserves special recognition and support. After nearly three decades of friendship with His Holiness, I am deeply honored and proud to have rallied my colleagues to award him the Congressional Gold Medal. We can now look forward to the day when he once again meets with members of Congress–this time to stand before us all to receive this unique and well-earned honor.

Definitely a hawk, Rep. Lantos was an early and major supporter (and later a critic) of the invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post writes in their obituary:

For years, he sided with Republican neoconservatives who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral imperative or national interest is at stake.

In 2002, he supported the congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq and played a decisive role to gain Democratic support for the measure.

On the House floor at the time, he noted his own past as a Nazi-resistance fighter. “Had the United States and its allies confronted Hitler earlier, had we acted sooner to stymie his evil designs, the 51 million lives needlessly lost during that war could have been saved,” he said. “Just as leaders and diplomats who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938 stand humiliated before history, so will we if we appease Saddam Hussein today.”

But after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Lantos became increasingly critical about the direction of the war and called for large withdrawals of American troops. He also held more than a dozen hearings on the situation.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that Rep. Lantos was a believer in and practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience: along with Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Jim Moran (D-VA), and John Olver (D-MA), he was arrested in 2006 in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C., for protesting the Sudanese government’s role in carrying out genocide in the Darfur region of the country.