Why are 'human rights' activists obsessed with Israel?
Many of you may wonder why 'human rights' activists seem to have a constant obsession with Israel when there are so many worse human rights violators all over the world. Sudan, Rwanda, Iran, Libya and others are ignored while the 'Human Rights Council' spends all its time criticizing Israel. I would have just chocked it up to anti-Semitism, but Charles Jacobs has a different theory. Why Israel and not Sudan, is Singled OutOf course, that doesn't explain why the 'human rights community' is much more interested in Israel than it is in NATO troops in the former Yugoslavia, and it may not even explain why the 'human rights community' isn't more interested in Russian troops in Georgia or Chechnya, but it's a start.
by Charles Jacobs
Boston Globe, October 5, 2002
...
The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are like “us.”
“Not in my name” is the worthy response of moral people. South African whites could not be allowed to represent “us.” But when we see evil done by “others,” we tend to shy away. Though we claim to have a single standard for all human conduct, we don’t. We fear the charge of hypocrisy: We Westerners after all, had slaves. We napalmed Vietnam. We live on Native American land. Who are we to judge “others?” And so we don’t stand for all of humanity.
The biggest victims of this complex are not the Jews who are obsessively criticized but the victims of genocide, enslavement, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing who are murderously ignored: the Christian slaves of Sudan, the Muslim slaves of Mauritania, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt.
Seeking expiation instead of universal justice means ignoring the sufferings of these victims of non-Western aggression and making relatively more of the suffering of those caught in confrontation with people like “us.” If the Israelis are being “profiled” because they are like “us,” the slaves of Sudan are ignored because their masters’ behavior has nothing to do with us.
In the United States it is not predominantly anti-Semitism that causes the human rights community to single Israel out for criticism. It is rather our failure to apply to all nations the standards to which we hold ourselves. The effect, as Summers correctly said, is anti-Semitic. But it is also the abandonment of those around the world in the worst of circumstances whose oppressions we find beside the point.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:10 PM
3 Comments:
Its the Jews. They have had a hold over the Western conscience for the past 2,000 years and their survival has infuriated those in every age who though the Jews would finally disappear in their time. As long as the Jews are around, there will continue to be those who hate them.
That's as simple an explanation of the world's obsession with Israel as one can get that's closest to the truth. Even if no one wants to admit it.
I believe it is an additional factor.
Charles Jacobs is right in all that he said, but on top of all that, there is a form of Holocaust guilt.
Western Europe and the United States did little to help the Jews of the Holocaust. As such, there is an obsessive need to 'prove' Jews are the new Nazis, to thereby alleviate themselves from guilt.
It is toxic to combine all this together, but when you combine post-modernism with Holocaust guilt, you get the obsessive focus on Israel.
How does that explain Obama and many blacks in general?
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