Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The Existential Threat of "Human Rights"

There are those Jews (Irwin Cotler, Bernie Farber among others) who are convinced that the "human rights" mishegas will, you should pardon the expression, save our bacon. Caroline Glick, on the other hand, explains why it won't; why the "human rights" regime (that is, the perversion of human rights that has taken hold in our time) is in fact paving the road to our doom (h/t Closet Conservative):
AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.
These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.
The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.
The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace.
Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat.
Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them...
Dear Prime Minister Harper: "Human rights" are bad for Jews and other living peoples. Please do what you can to kill our "human rights" apparatus, along with that insane (and insanely costly) "human rights" mausoleum (which strives at nothing less than being a key player in the global "human rights" regime)--and please do it a.s.a.p. Thanks.

1 comment:

crj said...

Thank-you for putting up this clarification. My late father who was Welsh and was a teenager during the 1930's in England always told me how absolutely shocked he was when the nation of Beethoven, Goethe, Schliemann, Leibniz, Einstein - the flower of intellectualism he respected as much as his own British heritage - descended into Nazism. Being a Gentile, I feel greatly hamstrung in this debate over the value of "Human Rights" institutions (The UN, Universal Human Rights Declaration, International Court of Justice etc.) that so clearly have accomplished little in stemming the tide of "official" antisemitism over 40 years and are now Jews their worst enemy. Yet I have to suffer these Jewish Groups who continue to promote the HRC fiascoes and even insist they do not go far enough - without being called a racist! For me it comes down to making people realize you can't legislate good behavior or common sense.