by Itai Reuveni
Just over two weeks
ago, there was a report about a Jewish woman in Iran who, for years, had
been harassed by her Muslim neighbors who demanded that she evacuate
her home to make room for a mosque. The woman was ultimately stabbed to
death, and her body dismembered.
About a month ago, an
Iranian human rights activist of Arab descent was tortured to death at a
notorious Iranian prison. Add to that the testimony of a senior
Revolutionary Guards officer who defected to the U.S., indicating that
every woman who is sentenced to death in Iran is first raped so that she
won't enter heaven a virgin.
These are just a
handful of examples out of thousands of human rights violations in Iran.
This raises a disturbing question: Where are the human rights
organizations? Where are the condemnation campaigns and calls for
boycotts? Where are the threats to take senior Iranian officials to the
International Court of Justice? Where are the enormous budgets?
Shouldn't there be lobbies crowding the halls of the U.N. and EU
institutions?
The concept of "human
rights" — founded on universal principles — has lost its moral
significance and has now become merely a tool utilized by
nongovernmental organizations as a means of obtaining political
objectives. This exploitation, compounded by the blatant disregard for
any facts that do not fall into line with the activists' views,
encourages nations like Iran to keep doing what they are doing. Human
rights organizations have been commandeered by a handful of extremists
who seek to advance a political ideology rather than protecting the
world's citizens, whether they are Iranian or Syrian, Palestinian or
Israeli.
Iran is usually
mentioned in the context of a security threat. The various organizations
are only reminded of Iran in the context of Israel. There are nearly no
campaigns for human rights in Iran — you can count the ones that do
exist on the fingers of one hand. And so Iran, where, according to its
president, there are no homosexuals or lesbians (and if there are, they
are hanged in the city square), and where acid is squirted on
protesters, and where men and women are raped in prison, and where the
national sports are soccer and stoning people, keeps on abusing human
rights. For their part, the human rights organizations argue that they
don't have the resources to take action within a closed society. Why
take a risk when you can protest in Bil'in in the morning and have a
beer in Tel Aviv that same afternoon?
These organizations
fail to realize that human rights are inextricably linked to the
strength of a society, even when said society exists under a sadistic
tyrannical regime. Many people may find this surprising, but there is a
strong, flourishing civil society in Iran, with a long, rich history of
organizing: from the 1890 Tobacco Protest to the struggles over the
constitution and the country's oil, through to the 1979 Islamic
Revolution all the way to the 2009 Iranian Election Protests and the
creation of the Iranian Green Movement. This is a country with a rich
social history and with a fascinating language and culture. But its
freedom-seeking citizens have been abandoned by the knights of human
rights, the knights who populate those organizations with the enormous
budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars and with worldwide
infrastructure and with ideologically motivated activists. These
organizations allocate a large portion of their resources to the
one-sided cheerleading squad for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in
complete disproportion to all the other human rights violations around
the world.
For example: Robert
Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, harshly criticized the
very organization he founded in a New York Times op-ed several years
ago. Bernstein criticized the organization for ignoring human rights
violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israeli bias and for
"issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who
wish to turn Israel into a pariah state." He wrote this op-ed after a
2009 fundraising event in Saudi Arabia, organized by Human Rights Watch,
in which anti-Israel rhetoric was used to raise money. That same year, a
senior organization official visited Libya and praised Moammar
Gadhafi's son, calling him a reformer and leader of the Libyan Spring.
Today, international
Human Rights Day, the human rights organizations need to do some soul
searching and really check whether the allocation of their resources
truly reflects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the
U.N. on Dec. 10, 1948). They need to ask themselves whether the
concentration of efforts to bash Israel and the disregard for violations
in other countries truly contributes to the human rights of any group,
or rather serves to alienate the public, to belittle the concept of
human rights and to encourage rights violations in places like Iran.
If we honestly care about human rights, we must liberate the concept from the hands of those who have tried to commandeer it.
Itai Reuveni is a researcher for NGO Monitor.
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3032
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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