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 Russian 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 staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations,” Powell explains. “Critical theories of
