Amnesia Internacional

Magnífico artículo en el Jewish Advocate. Lo transcribo todo porque no tiene desperdicio.

Amnesty’s dirty little secret
By Charles Jacobs - Friday August 1 2008

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are attacking Israel for acting in self-defense against Hezbollah, accusing her of “war crimes” and “indiscriminate bombardment” in Lebanon. These groups have a long, documented record of disproportionately picking on the Jewish state, so these latest condemnations cannot surprise us. However, Jews will not understand this reflexive anti-Israel attitude unless they step back and examine today’s broad human rights agenda, which is blind to the world’s most oppressed people.

In 1993 I realized that human rights groups are not actually working for universal human rights. I read in the Economist that black women and children could be bought or sold for $15 dollars in Sudan and Mauritania. I called Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to see if they knew. They knew. They sent me their reports on the issue. Guardians of “human rights” knew that tens of thousands of blacks were being enslaved, yet they were not making a fuss. Why? Apart from guarding life itself, what is more central and sacred to human rights champions than guarding personal liberty – the freedom from being “owned” by another person?

So I went to Amnesty’s national convention and proposed that Amnesty International include emancipation of today’s slaves – numbering 27 million, mostly in the Third World – in their mandate. After a long floor debate, I lost.

Amnesty International won’t fight hard against Arab enslavement of blacks because their unstated, subconscious principles downplay non-Western crimes.

The human rights community consists mostly of decent middle-class white people who, when they see – or think they see – evil done by Westerners like themselves, who feel impelled to act. Think apartheid South Africa, Kosovo, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo.

But when these same folks see evil done by non-Westerners, they choke. It’s prejudiced, they feel, to criticize non-Westerners, and they live in dread of being labeled racist, or worse, “Islamophobic.”

Rather than bringing universal justice to those whose very lives depend on them, human rights groups are narcissistically expiating Western guilt. In the Muslim world there are millions of blacks, women, gays, apostates, atheists, labor leaders, freedom fighters and racial and religious minorities who live without basic human rights and who desperately need help from the human rights community. Yet Amnesty and others ignore non-Western totalitarianism so that they can define themselves in opposition to Western sins – imperialism, colonialism and racism.

White guilt – not anti-Semitism – explains the disproportionate attacks on Israel. Human rights groups frame Israelis as “white, Western, colonialists,” and Palestinians as “indigenous, dark-skinned, and poor.”

It is horribly wrong for “rights” activists to project their white guilt onto Israel, but that may not be the worst crime. In order to pound Israel (and America), Amnesty and other groups must look away, and stay out of the path of non-Western despots, who then oppress millions with impunity. Amnesty’s sin is against those they have abandoned in order to, they think, make themselves clean.