The moral blindness of the 'human rights' industry

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
16 February '10

With this, Melanie Phillips has placed her finger squarely on the noticeable disparity of expected standards between Israel and the rest of the world. Click here for the full article. Y.

When pondering the extraordinary obsession with Israel by the ‘human rights’ industry and the way in which it ignores real human rights abuses in the third world, I always recall the conversation I had in the early ‘80s with senior colleagues at the Guardian (where I worked in another life). When I wondered at the double standard which caused the paper to go to town with front page splashes, leading articles and outraged opinion columns whenever Israel killed a handful of Palestinians, but relegated major atrocities such as Syria’s massacre of tens of thousands of Islamic militants over the course of a few days to a few paragraphs buried on the foreign pages and then totally ignored such events, I was told that of course there was a double standard.

Since countries of the third world did not subscribe to western cultural norms of respect for human life, they said, we in the west could not judge such countries’ behaviour by those norms. To do so would be an act of cultural imperialism. But since Israel did subscribe to those norms, it was accordingly judged by them; indeed, they added, since the Jews claimed superior standards to the rest of humanity, they needed to be judged by higher standards than those applied to the rest of the human race.

Leaving to one side the specific prejudice thus voiced towards the Jews, what this amounted to was that, according to this ‘progressive’ cultural relativism, the people of the third world did not have the same right to life and liberty as those in the west. In my book, that’s racism pure and simple. And that’s what we are hearing in the silence of the ‘human rights’ industry over the Congo.