Ms. Ahmed, of Human Rights Watch, provides essential context and shocking details that should illuminate our view of the current war against Gaza.
Tag: Human Rights
Current Affairs Magazine: “Biden Couldn’t Care Less About Human Rights”
Nathan J. Robinson has an excellent piece in the online magazine Current Affairs detailing the utter disregard, indeed distain, with which President Joe Biden treats matters of human rights in international affairs.
Biden has filled his administration with neo-conservatives who push American imperialism above every other consideration. How foreign governments treat their own people, including their dissidents — most especially their dissidents — matters not one whit to this Biden administration.
He has proven his gross disinterest time and again.
Check out Robinson’s article filled with more than enough evidence to indict Biden as one of the most hard-hearted, inhumane presidents of all time.
Below is an excerpt:
. . . The pattern is consistent. Biden believes that U.S. global power matters far more than freedom and democracy (emphasis mine). As a result, he has totally ignored the pleas of human rights activists to exert even mild pressure on authoritarian regimes.
Consider the case of Egypt. Earlier this month, the U.S. “approved $235 million in military aid for Egypt that it had withheld for the past two years because of the country’s repressive policies.” The details of the policy are ugly. That money was legally only supposed to be provided to Egypt if it met basic conditions of human rights. Eleven members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Biden imploring him to withhold the aid, citing Egypt’s jailing of “journalists, peaceful civil society activists, human rights defenders and political figures.” Biden ignored the plea and waived the legal requirement that Egypt respect basic human rights in order to receive this aid. The New York Times says the administration concluded that “national security interests outweigh congressionally mandated benchmarks for Egyptian progress on human rights.” Of course, nobody ever says how our “national security” is served by giving Egypt hundreds of millions of dollars without imposing any of the human rights requirements that Congress had demanded. Egypt has certainly learned the lesson that it need not make any human rights concessions to the U.S., because the money will keep flowing regardless. . .
Read the entire article here.
Inventing the Novel and Human Rights: What Happens When the Image of God Reads Compelling Fiction
Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?
Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?
What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.
So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?
Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.
It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.
Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.
One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.
An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.
Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read
for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.
Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):
(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?
. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, 
readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.
Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.
I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.
But, then, maybe we are already there…