Op-Ed
Human Rights and Wrongs
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What are the greatest human rights concerns in the world today? If you listen to the international human rights movement, and their college-campus allies, such as Amnesty International and the National Lawyer’s Guild, you would think that the death penalty in the United States, Israel’s efforts to defeat Palestinian terrorists and the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay constituted the worst of the world’s atrocities.
This set of priorities displays a curious blindness towards true human rights abuses and an unfortunate political bias. All too often, the human rights lobby sets its goals based on its own political desires rather than on the needs of victims.
The National Lawyer’s Guild has on their website the report of their 2003 delegation to North Korea. This report comments that North Korea’s “lack of a death penalty was seen by the delegation as a sign of a civilized nation.” To praise the world’s most brutal operator of death camps for not admitting to have the death penalty is obscene. The NLG is implying that North Korea is a more civilized place than California because California has the judicial death penalty, whereas North Korea starves hundreds of thousands of political prisoners to death without formal trial. The NLG report also expresses approval for North Korea’s “system of direct democracy,” and questions whether “there is in fact more participatory democracy than in the American federal system.”
I do not know whether the NLG’s members are really so stupid, or whether they are knowing apologists for the most absolute despotism the world has seen since the pharaohs.
While the NLG is an unusually pathological example, there are many other useful idiots in the human rights lobby, who would rather denounce the United States than condemn the true horrors in the world today. “Korea” appears on the home pages of neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch. “Guantanamo,” in contrast, appears eight times. Guantanamo holds a few hundred prisoners, all of whom are believed to be enemy combatants who took up arms against the United States — surely grounds for holding them until the end of hostilities.
In contrast, North Korea is virtually a concentration camp with borders. Those who escape to the comparative prosperity and freedom of China are often sent back to be tortured. Condemnation of China for this has been muted, with only a few Christian human rights groups speaking up. It seems as though the mainstream human rights lobby picks its campaigns based on a desire to criticize the West rather than on the scale of the human rights violation in question.
This softness on North Korea is one example of a broader tendency of some on the American left to treat anti-Americanism as a permit for tyranny. Hugo Chavez, strongman presidente of Venezuela, recently acquired the power to rule by decree. He has made clear that he will use this power to crush all media and organizations opposed to his rule. These are ominous developments, and will set civil society in Venezuela back immeasurably. And yet, he has not been subject to any noticeable condemnation by those who are so quick to denounce every perceived weakening of democracy in nations friendly to the U.S.
The United States is not the only favored target of the international “human rights” movement, and the problem extends beyond American non-governmental organizations. Israel, too, has come in for grotesquely disproportionate condemnation, and from no less a moral authority than the United Nations.
The U.N. Human Rights Council has an obsession with Israel, and has condemned it several times in the last year. No other country — not one — has been condemned in that time. This, against a backdrop of genocide in Sudan, stoning of homosexuals in Iran and the deliberate starvation of tens of thousands in Zimbabwe. These denunciations dishonor their issuers more than they do their target. It is unfortunate that the international human rights lobby has stood idly by while the world’s premier international human rights body has been turned into a mill for thinly veiled anti-Semitic propaganda, turning out denunciations of the Jewish state concerning actions for which no other has been denounced.
Perhaps the most extreme example of how “human rights” has become a propaganda tool is the opposition to the Iraq War on supposed human-rights grounds. Iraqi terrorists are blowing up mosques, schools, hospitals and market-places, butchering civilians by the hundreds, on a daily basis. It is unlikely that they are doing so as a way of protesting the presence of American troops in Iraq. It is even less plausible that, if the U.S. leaves Iraq, that Sunni suicide bombers will suddenly rip off their vests and hold hands with the members of Shi’ite death squads in a festival of tolerance. There is no good human-rights case for U.S. withdrawal. Indeed, almost every government in the Middle East, including the freely elected government of Iraq, has asserted that an American retreat will greatly worsen the situation.
It is revealing that those who are most vehement in demanding that America stop genocide in Darfur are uninterested in forestalling ethnic conflict in Iraq, where an American army is on the spot and has a reasonable prospect of doing the job. Evidently, ethnic slaughter is less of a problem if America and George Bush would get the credit for stopping it.
Working for human rights, it seems, has sunk from a noble calling to merely another brand of left-wing, anti-American agitation. As a result, the very term “human rights” has become debased by its association with a willfully biased anti-Americanism. If the human rights lobby wants to be taken seriously, it will have to cleanse itself of this taint of narrow partisanship. Human rights are too important to be used as a partisan ploy.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.
"the world’s premier
"the world’s premier international human rights body has been turned into a mill for thinly veiled anti-Semitic propaganda, turning out denunciations of the Jewish state concerning actions for which no other has been denounced."
The old UN Commission on Human Rights was dissolved and reformed into the current entity because of the exact same things that the UNCHR is doing now--bashing Israel and ignoring what the actual Council members are doing. Some of the members of this esteemed council include China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba. I think we definitely want these guys policing human rights around the world.
About time!
About time somtime pointed out how this veil of human rights is nothing but Anti-American agitation. I have been saying this on campus for a while now and no one is willing to listen to me. I'm glad The Sun finally decided to give the other side of this issue some ink for once. It's a shame to read The Sun everyday and always here the same old Anti-American articles. Thank you.
Human rights and radical politics -- see www.ngo-monitor.org
NGO Monitor and Prof. Gerald Steinberg have done a good job of documenting the exploitation of universal human rights rhetoric to promote private ideologies of the radical variety. They demonstrate that most Amensty and Human Rights Watch reports are based on phony "evidence" by "eyewitnesses" and carefully selected journalists. See www.ngo-monitor.org
"It seems as though the
"It seems as though the mainstream human rights lobby picks its campaigns based on a desire to criticize the West rather than on the scale of the human rights violation in question."
I imagine that the potential of a campaign plays a considerable role in deciding whether or not to advocate for it. The avenue of convincing a Western country to apply diplomatic pressure to (often undemocratic, stubborn, and political institutionally weak) countries that commit more aggregious human rights violations seems much less direct than that of advocating against violations happening in your own country.
Indeed, a good American may find it more important to eliminate violations in her own country due to her having a more compelling duty to improve the country in which she has such strong political and social ties.
Moreover, she may see it as an almost necessary first step towards ending human rights abuses elsewhere, because any successful approach a Western country could take to curb such abuse requires at least an appearance of moral legitimacy in the world. Don't you agree?
The charge of anti-Semitism- an argument against the mere prioritzation on the human rights agenda is not nearly strong enough for an indictment on anti-Semitism. To determine whether or not the attention to Israel is baseless, harrassing, and even potentially racist, you have to at least begin by answering the question: does Israel commit human rights abuses or does it not?
I mean, you might be onto something about the priorities of the human rights agenda. As for the support of the human rights community of countries like North Korea and China- I think that's simply factually incorrect if you take a reasonable representative sample of individuals and groups involved in the cause.
And just because the worst abuses aren't at the top of their agendas does not mean that they aren't doing meaningful work, work that perhaps is more likely to be successful than stating the obvious about countries where we have little influence.