Human-Rights Bodies Corrupt Human Rights To Vilify Israel Defending Israel against politicized human-rights attacks is vital to preserving both human rights’ integrity and America’s founding principles. By Peter Berkowitz
https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/29/human-rights-bodies-corrupt-human-rights-to-vilify-israel/
The United States has a special interest in safeguarding the integrity of human rights because America is founded on the rights inherent in all persons, and the nation’s political traditions revolve around them. Ordinary Americans as well as Washington policymakers, therefore, should condemn prominent human-rights organizations’ abuse of human rights to defame Israel and to legitimate jihadists’ efforts to destroy the Jewish state. Correcting the record about the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy and the Islamist forces sworn to its elimination is crucial to restoring the good name of human rights.
The Declaration of Independence holds that it is self-evidently true that human beings are endowed with “unalienable rights” – the 18th-century term for human rights. The Constitution aims to secure them. Much of the nation’s history revolves around the struggle to ensure that all Americans enjoy the rights that are theirs in virtue of their humanity. While the Constitution does not grant government a roving mandate to protect human rights around the world, it does invigorate the nation’s interest in serving as a beacon of freedom for those who suffer under authoritarian regimes and in cooperating with countries that share America’s understanding of the dignity of the person.
Dictatorships reject human rights, which place individual freedom ahead of dictators’ ambitions and decrees. Dictatorships’ aversion to human rights is as characteristic of the Iranian Ayatollahs’ Islamist theocracy as it is of Putin’s imperial Russia and of the Chinese Communist Party’s synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and traditional Chinese nationalism.
In the 21st century, powerful human-rights organizations have played into dictators’ hands by politicizing human rights. While persisting in affirming human-rights’ universality, these organizations equate them with a tendentious version of the progressive agenda. They wield human rights as a propaganda tool, inflating the claims of favored groups and disparaging the claims of the disfavored. The politicization of human rights sends the pernicious message to those who differ with the progressive left’s political priorities that human rights are a sham and should be expelled from respectable political discourse.
Nowhere do human-rights organizations more crudely politicize human rights than in the case of Israel.
The problem begins with the United Nations’ betrayal of its principles. The preamble to the UN Charter proclaims “faith in fundamental human rights,” and Article 1 asserts “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Yet in 1975, the UN General Assembly disgraced itself by adopting Resolution 3379, which states that Zionism – the national movement of the Jewish people – “is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86 revoked Resolution 3379, but the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, reaffirmed the equation of Zionism with racism. More recently, the United Nations Human Rights Council gives wildly disproportionate time and energy to denouncing Israel: The UNHRC dedicates a permanent agenda item at each session only to Israel; it passes numerous condemnatory resolutions of Israel every year while ignoring egregious human-rights violations in many other countries; and it devotes more special sessions and commissions of inquiry to Israel than to any other country.
In recent years, the dogma of settler colonialism has intensified human rights organizations’ enmity toward Israel. According to this university-manufactured theory, Israel’s establishment subordinated and displaced indigenous peoples of the Middle East. And with the support of the United States – allegedly the world’s largest and most insidious settler-colonialist power, having stolen a continent-spanning territory from its rightful native-American owners – the Jewish state supposedly persists in oppressing Palestinians. Never mind that the Jewish people’s claim on their ancestral homeland goes back around three thousand years, more than 1,500 years before the 7th-century birth of Islam.
In addition to decrying Israel’s existence, the settler-colonialism dogma fuels beliefs at odds with human rights’ universality and the dignity of persons. Those resisting Israel, in the settler-colonialism view, have the right to use any and all means to reclaim their land. And, maintain subscribers to the settler-colonialism creed, Israel’s exercise of the most elemental of human rights, the right of self-defense, violates its enemies’ rights to perpetrate atrocities against the Jewish state.
In “The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World,” Michael Powell, an Atlantic staff writer, provides numerous examples of how leading human-rights organizations – including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch – corrupt human rights to vilify Israel.
In 2024, the U.K. chapter of Amnesty International – the world’s largest human-rights organization – went out of its way to promote a Palestinian demonstration in London commemorating the one-year anniversary of Iran-backed Hamas’ slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and kidnapping of approximately 250, mostly civilians. On the occasion, Amnesty International featured on its website a pro-Palestinian video indicating that Israel’s establishment in 1948 justified Hamas’ massacre in 2023.
This “marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations,” writes Powell. “Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is ‘independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.’” At its 1961 founding, “Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War,” according to Powell. “The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders.”
Now, however, prestigious human-rights organizations do the polarizing. “As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staï¬?ers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations,” Powell explains. “Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate – a regressive, racist ethnic ‘Western’ state in an Arab sea.”
Dr. Rasha Khoury illustrates human-rights organizations’ subordination to ideology. Born and raised in East Jerusalem, Khoury, president of the board of Doctors Without Borders USA, asserted on the organization’s digital bulletin board just over a month after the Hamas massacre that she and her colleagues “must decolonize our minds.” To overlook Israel’s “unhinged bombardment and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza” was “to aï¬?rm the colonizer’s world view, one rooted in white supremacist logic.”
Danielle Haas served as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch from 2010 to 2023. She maintains that HRW, too, has abandoned human rights for partisanship. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” she told Powell.
The issue, however, is not a certain slippage, the intrusion of bias into the defense of human rights. Rather, human-rights organizations exploit their power and expertise to propagate extreme political positions masquerading as human-rights imperatives. “Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all accused Israel of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide,” states Powell. “Some human-rights leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
These human-rights organizations’ attacks on Israel tend to suppress such basic international laws of war principles as the prohibition on combatants’ embedding themselves within their own urban areas to use civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields. The organizations also ignore that these reprehensible tactics give Hamas presumptive moral and legal responsibility for the collateral death and destruction that result from Israel’s exercising its right of self-defense – this involves minimizing harm to civilians and civilian objects – to eliminate threats to its territorial integrity and political sovereignty.
“A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization” – to whom Powell granted anonymity “to avoid further alienating former colleagues” – acknowledged that “Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets. Yet, stressed the former senior human-rights figure, “if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”
At a 2022 Washington luncheon, Amnesty International USA Director Paul O’Brien bluntly stated, “We are opposed to the idea – and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate – that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people.” O’Brien eventually “expressed regret for his remarks” and withdrew his opposition to the very existence of the nation-state of the Jewish people. His error, it seems, was to accidentally or ill-advisedly share his organization’s extreme anti-Israel views.
Critics of Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch must not be blinded by indignation.
The propensity of influential human-rights organizations to justify or gloss over Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 massacre and unlawful and immoral use of Gaza’s civilian population as human shields while denying the Jewish state’s right to defend itself discredits the organizations. It does not discredit human rights.
By safeguarding human rights’ good name against those who would turn them into a license to defame Israel and promote jihad against the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy, the United States vindicates the principles on which American freedom rests.
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