Obama administration makes a mockery of human rights

If hyper-inflation applied to political philosophy, “human rights,” like Deutsch Marks in the early Weimar Republic, would be piled into wheelbarrows by the billions for a loaf of bread.  The latest profligate printing of “human rights” currency is the Obama administration’s American self-assessment submitted to the UN Council on Human Rights.

A brief digression.  The UN Council on Human Rights is the successor organization to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).  In 2003, America openly fought against Libya’s chairmanship of UNCHR.  That was when actual “human rights” still mattered.

In 2004, the US ambassador walked out of the UNCHR, after the admission of Sudan, which was then busy with genocide — systematic slaughter of actual human beings — in Darfur.  With that gesture, the United States honored actual “human rights,” the rights that belong to flesh-and-blood human beings suffering actual torments.  In 2004, the United States could still speak of “human rights” concretely.  It could still dignify the concept with reference to real people.

The UNCHR had no credibility as an actual human rights organization.  It was dissolved.  We did not join the UNCHR’s replacement in 2006, the new U.N. Council on Human Rights, because the credibility of actual “human rights” still mattered.  But last year, the Obama administration joined.  Is the successor organization more credible?  Noah Pollak writes:

“The Council remains as it ever was: a body composed of some of the worst human rights abusers in the world, devoted to attacking Western democracies, demonizing Israel, covering up the abuses of authoritarian regimes, and undermining the pursuit of human rights. The only difference today is that America’s name is being lent to this effort.”

Pollak cites an example:  “When the Syrian representative claimed that Israeli children ‘sing merrily as they go to school,’ and I quote, ‘With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood,’ the U.S. representative made no protest.”  This is the dialogue we dignify and that American tax dollars subsidize.

And now we have officially assessed ourselves, as required by the protocols of the U.N. Council on Human Rights.  And we have said to the international community: President Obama has been a paragon of human rights promotion.  In every area — race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, labor, home ownership, Native American rights — President Obama has acted nobly.

(On religion, the only mention of human rights solicitude is on behalf of Muslims, though FBI Hate Crime statistics show the following about the 1,732 hate crimes in 2008, the last year for which figures are available — hate crimes against Muslims: 7.5%; hate crimes against Christians, combining Catholics and Protestants: 8.7%; hate crimes against Jews: 66.1%.)