 Copyright 2005 – The Examiner |
When in the early 90’s Dr. Charles Jacobs began his abolitionist efforts, he realized that human rights groups were not actually working for universal human rights. Despite knowing that black women and children could be bought or sold for $15 in Sudan and Mauritania neither Human Rights Watch nor Amnesty International were making a fuss. While a small and dedicated group of abolitionists fought slave-owners and slaving nations the large, well funded human rights organizations sat on the sidelines.
Dr. Jacobs spent the next decade trying to understand why this was the case.
Dr. Jacobs hypothesizes that the reason is what he calls a “human rights complex.” Western rights groups consist mainly of decent white people who are motivated to fight evil committed by people who are like themselves. Think Apartheid in South Africa, Kosovo, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo.
But when these same folks see evil done by non-Westerners, they choke. It’s prejudiced, they feel, to criticize non-Westerners, and they live in dread of being labeled racist, or worse, “Islamophobic.”
On this page we will explore Dr. Jacobs’s hypothesis and related issues.
Please click on the title to read the article.
Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out?
By Charles Jacobs
The Boston Globe
10/05/02
Amnesty’s Dirty Little Secret
By Charles Jacobs
The Jewish Advocate
08/09/06
Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
By Robert Bernstein
The New York Times
10/19/09
Why Are the United States and Israel at the Top of Human Rights Hit Lists?
By James Ron & Howard Ramos
Foreign Policy
11/03/09
How Multiculturalism Destroys Human Rights
By Valentina Colombo
Hudson Institute
05/12/10