In a pretty sickening post in Comment is Free, Stephen Kinzer, a former journalist, is decrying human rights organizations for being—get this—imperialists. (Via Hot Air.) Why? Because we insist there is a universal definition of human rights. And because this is a “Western” opinion.
Human Rights Watch is hardly the only offender. There are a host of others, ranging from Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders to the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard and the pitifully misled “anti-genocide” movement. All promote an absolutist view of human rights permeated by modern western ideas that westerners mistakenly call “universal”. In some cases, their work, far from saving lives, actually causes more death, more repression, more brutality and an absolute weakening of human rights.
Note the bolded sentence. Kinzer delineates that theory, using Darfur as his example. It is the most despicable argument I have ever heard.
The actions of human rights do-gooders is craziest in Darfur, where they show themselves not only dangerously naive but also unwilling to learn lessons from their past misjudgments. By their well-intentioned activism, they have given murderous rebel militias – not only in Darfur but around the world – the idea that even if they have no hope of military victory, they can mobilise useful idiots around the world to take up their cause, and thereby win in the court of public opinion what they cannot win on the battlefield. The best way to do this is to provoke massacres by the other side, which Darfur rebels have dome[sic] quite successfully and remorselessly.
Got it? The massacres are no longer the fault of those who are murdering people by the thousands. They are on the heads of the “rebels” who are causing their enemies to slaughter them—all so that they can attract human rights activists to their cause and get what they want. The Islamic angle? Non-existent. The mass rapes and murders of black Africans by Arabs? Inconsequential. The entire problem in Darfur can be placed on the backs of those causing the Janjaweed to rape and murder.
This is a man of no morals whatsoever. Comment is free, all right, and his opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
And then there’s this:
For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place.
Can we please stop pretending that there is any such thing as an objective media? At the very least, can we stop pretending that only Fox New holds a bias?
Of course not. The narrative is written by—that’s right—the biased media, of which this tool used to be a part.
This is unfortunately not a novel approach, Meryl. William Shawcross wrote a book about the Cambodia and this pretty much is what he said: 1. The Khmer Rouge were really bad guys; 2. We fought against them and tried to stop them; so 3. Out of rage and frustration they murdered a couple of million compatriots. It was our fault for resisting them in the first place.
Shawcross, to his credit, has had some reconsiderations. I wonder if there is any evidence outside of Kinzer’s fevered mind that the Darfurians are intentionally trying to provoke massacres in order to gain sympathy.
The most charitable assessment of this is that he’s a moral imbecile.
My prediction – by the end of this decade, Saudi Arabia and a number of other Arab and African nations will have re-legalized slavery (in fact if not in name), and done it with the UN’s blessing. That’s where the moral imbecility of human rights organizations is leading.
The Sudan did that a long time ago, in the 1980s, during the war with the South Sudan. Most of the world ignored it.
I think the logic is that every minute spent criticizing the genocidal savages who run the Sudan is a minute taken away from the far more important work of demonizing Israel.