Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Jacobs makes some good points here. Objectively, there's no reason the USA and Israel should command as much attention as they get from Amnesty, but that's just it. There appear to be no objective standards. Amnesty’s deep flaw (in full)
In the early 1990s, I discovered that slavery still exists in Sudan and Mauritania. I also discovered that Amnesty (and Human Rights Watch) had detailed reports on this slave trade yet had launched no substantial campaign to rescue blacks owned by Arab masters.
Slaves are prisoners too. In 1995, I went to Amnesty’s national convention and launched a drive to add slavery to Amnesty’s mandate. A majority was persuaded and a resolution was forwarded to the international office in London – which in turn asked for more time to “study the issue†and then did nothing for more than a decade.
If Africans were being enslaved in Germany or Norway, we all know Amnesty would launch a massive emancipation campaign. But for blacks in Arab North Africa, the best Amnesty could do was an occasional report.
How could Amnesty abandon hundreds of thousands of black slaves, and why does it focus disproportionately on Western governments? Three core reasons:
No Priorities: If you don’t have standards, you can’t prioritize. Amnesty controls a precious resource: human rights moral outrage. But it doesn’t have a proper strategy for appropriately deploying that limited energy. Imagine Amnesty as an emergency room doctor doing triage: frenetically fretting over America’s sprained ankles, while Libya and Sudanese slaves lie dying in the waiting room.
Far-Left Agenda: Amnesty does have high standards for Western democracies and prioritizes criticizing the U.S. Browse the past few years’ email alerts from Amnesty USA. Most protest American policies. Outraged e-mail appeals about Bush Administration policies may help its funding, but as the Washington Post observed, Amnesty has “lost its bearings.â€
What truly animates Amnesty is improving or scolding Western conduct, not protecting the world’s most abused. It is these – the millions who suffer under dictators and Islamists around the world– who are the victims of Amnesty’s flawed agenda. Until Amnesty appropriately focuses its limited energy and resources on the world’s worst offenders, it will continue to corrupt the cause of human rights.
Perhaps Mr. Bility could persuade Amnesty to make this essential reform.
Michael Ignatieff, in his book “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry†looks at the depreciation of the term “human rightsâ€:
“Global human rights consciousness, moreover, does not necessarily imply that the groups defending human rights actually believe the same things. Many of these NGO’s espouse the universalist language of human rights but actually use it to defend highly particularist causes: the rights of particular national groups or minorities or classes or persons… The problem is that particularism conflicts with universalism at the point at which one’s commitment to a group leads one to countenance human rights violations towards another group.â€
Ignatieff is claiming here that a noble term which was supposed to uphold an ideal of universal justice, the kind that safeguards the equity and inviolability of all human beings, has been devalued by the likes of Amnesty and HRW to the point where it is nearly worthless. The cynicism of politicizing an ethical principle can only lead to legitimized exceptionalism, which means quite simply discrimination. And the crime of discrimination in the case cited by Charles Jacobs is two-edged: Discriminating against the victims of the neglected causes for whom no redress is available through their own systems of justice, and discriminating against those Amnesty does choose to shame disproportionately in its reports.
I no longer take these organizations to work for human rights, but only for selective groups within the human race deemed worthy of helping. Hassan Bility's successful deliverance from jail can always be flaunted by these organizations by way of deflecting criticism from their profound partisanship. But for each Bility, there are thousands of men and women languishing in jails for crimes they have never committed, for transgressing some social taboo like adultery or homosexuality. There are young girls whose genitals are mutilated, there are "honour" killings sanctioned by governments, etc etc . We all know what the list is.
Amnesty's concentration on the West's human rights abuses objectively promotes human rights abuses in other countries. This is elementary logic. The organization has only a limited amount of resources, which it chooses to invest in scrutinizing the least abusive and most transparent administrations. If they are not working relentlessly to relieve the misery and suffering of the truly oppressed, they are effectively against them.
Why do they choose these priorities? Maybe because it is so much easier, and much more comfortable to work in a Western country with running water, uninterrupted supply of electiricity, law and order?
The Left and far-Left agenda, using Jacobs' categories, is the most decisive quality evidenced by AI and similarly aligned orgs. The "no priorities" and "no standards" problems are a result of that far more basic problem, a problem which can be broadly conceived along Gramscian lines, even if we are now long in the wake of those primary, "long march through the institutions" initiatives. Iow, there are priorities and there are standards, but they are priorities and standards that are consonant with decidedly Leftist ideological conceptions, assumptions and dispositions.
A comparison contrasting AI's agendas vis-a-vis North Korea and the U.S. is perhaps even more telling of the problem Jacobs is addressing.
As long as the Gramscian and now late-Gramscian Left remained comfortable and cossetted within the West's safety nets - their social/political structures and economic vitality - such stark incongruities could generally go unnoticed, certainly so to the casual observer but to others as well who thrive on moral outrage but who fail to plumb some issues and problems more deeply. (Which is not to suggest throwing out the baby with the bath water.) But the post-9/11 atmosphere, where all viewpoints and assumptions and institutions have been shaken at foundational levels, has exposed those pre-existing incongruities for all the world to see. Even if that assummes it chooses to see in the first place.