THE "STRUGGLE" FOR "HUMAN" "RIGHTS"

The thorny 'truth' about human rights (Rosie DiManno, The Toronto Star, May 28th, 2005)

Traditionally, quotation marks have been reserved for, obviously, quotations. But somewhere along the line, those double-shift commas took on a new meaning. They are the typographical equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

Indeed, the designation has become so ubiquitous that people actually make little semaphoring gestures using the first two digits of each hand to symbolically bracket a fragment of conversation, as if to say, well, as if.

It speaks volumes that Amnesty International, in its 308-page annual report for 2005 — formally released on Wednesday — cannot bring itself to mention terrorism or the war on terrorism without hanging cautionary quotation marks around those words.

This unsubtle, mocking gesture — a hyper-neutrality — suggests terrorism is not a quantifiable fact in our lives and that the war on terrorism is somehow a duplicitous objective, perhaps a conspiracy hatched in the Pentagon rather than a global response to a legitimate threat already unleashed in widespread atrocities, from 9/11 to the bombings in Madrid and Bali.

Terrorism is thornier to define these days than necessary. The United Nations has grappled with it. In its narrowest interpretation, a consensus exists that terrorism is intentional violence against civilians (noncombatants), intended to intimidate or instill fear.

But Amnesty International, once a respected advocate for the human rights of political prisoners around the world, has been so deeply compromised by the relativist exculpation for slaughter and abuse that it can, without a hint of shame, and in the same paragraph, segue from the Sudan to the United States, from the colossal brutality in the Darfur region to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The Sudan and the U.S. are two countries mentioned most notably by the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, in her forward to the report.
There are 153 countries canvassed in the Amnesty tome, including the most reprehensible of totalitarian regimes.

Yet the brunt of the editorial scourge — in the passages most widely cited in news reports — is reserved for America, not just for its rightly condemned mistreatment of suspected terrorists, including the abhorrent torture that was inflicted on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but for generically and systematically "thumbing its nose at the rule of law and human rights." Such alleged disdain for the rule of law and the preeminence of human rights has, Amnesty contends, provided a green light for tyrants around the world, who need only to cloak their abuse of power within the rubric of the war on terror. As if dictators ever needed the thumbs-up from Washington to oppress their own populations.

This amoral equivalency would put the U.S. on a par with, oh, Haiti and North Korea.

You know you must be doing something very right when you beat out Israel.