The disappearance of human rights and the advent of Palestinism
venerdì 9 ottobre 2009 English 0 commenti
Fiamma Nirenstein’s intervention during the round table on “Human Rights and responsibilities of the West” at the International Conference “New Transatlantic Relations”, of the Magna Carta FoundationToday, human rights policies in the world are indeed characterized by schizophrenia. On the one hand, these policies are dealt with an extreme, refined and detailed sensitivity if they target certain social and political groups or rather themes related to our society. On the other hand, instead, dealing with international scenarios, they are faced with increasing indifference. It is an experimental and primitive approach that needs to be better defined, which I hope we will be able to do during our discussion.
Certainly, in the past, the United States made an effort to close the sensitivity gap in the field of human rights: the political rationale of foreign policy - and its problems which I do not want to discuss here – was based on the idea that the oppression of people was directly relevant for domestic policy and that – as written by Natan Sharansky – every human being desires freedom and the right to freedom. This was a natural expansion of the American life style, according to which the rule of law had to be implemented within the historically negotiated boundaries of the religious and linguistic agreement.
Instead, Europe has treated human rights as a kind of doctrinal code of 170 pages, with oppressive rules dictating a post-modern “non discrimination” ethics that is actually jeopardizing local identities. By emphasizing abstract values – with all their strings attached – it has established “human rights” provisions for any detail. These abstract and very strict principles indeed precede the rights of the primary community and are also disconnected from a de facto situation. I will make some examples later. However, think of the wrong opinions on the Italian immigration policy. But, in particular, think of the inability, for example, to give value to the freedom of the Iranian people, while such value is attached to the freedom of Roma people to go to school, even though their society rejects this option because they prefer to use their children for other purposes. I am referring to the discussion on the burqa and to the women who want to wear it, thus ignoring its many meanings such as oppression or challenge to civil liberties; I mention the harsh ban on smoking; the defense of the right of a Swedish paper to write that the Jews do kill Palestinians to take their organs; the prohibition of showing the cross in some schools or of preparing the Christmas tree; the clear ban on humor cartoons on Islam; the restraint to publicly denounce some non native habits such as polygamy or female genital mutilation. Therefore, there is great confusion on human rights in Europe. They are confused with a proud sense of intimidation. And a clear sign has always been sent from the United States to Europe, a historical indication on the terms of integration, on the link between democracy and the Jewish-Christian tradition.
Today, the gap that existed in the past between us and the USA is shrinking; there is clear evidence of this trend: the State Department does not emphasize the theme of human rights for the Chinese and does not democratically criticize the Islamic autocratic regimes; it has just stopped allocating federal funds to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center - the main non profit organization documenting the human rights violations in Iran – and it has adopted timid positions vis-à-vis Jerusalem (I would like to recall instead Clinton’s position who warned Arafat against the denial of the Jewish origin of Jerusalem). In this way the USA is no longer giving Europe its constant call for freedom.
Moreover, the human rights policies launched after the war with the United Nations have been experiencing an unprecedented crisis. The U.N. has not even the slightest need for attaining freedom, the abstract aspiration for democracy and equality. The United States and its allies have failed to rapidly win the recent wars against terrorism – which were actually clashes of civilization. They also have had difficulties (and I do not call them defeats) in exporting democracy. All this has led to an increasing and unexpected hostility in the so called developing or non-allied world after the fall of the Soviet Union; the Islamic world, even the groups that have been traditionally more inclined to dialogue, has been ideologically fascinated by jihadism against the old Western enemy. A movement which promises victory and a winning life-style based on identity, after seven hundred years of oppression.
Europe is invaded by migrant populations for whom human rights are in their infancy with respect to our achievements in terms of protection of weak subjects (fist of all women) and of civil rights. And Europe has shown its surprise and fear with almost all-out overindulgence. Of course, the populations, the Islamists and the tribal cultures that have obtained an unprecedented standing and an ideological dignity with respect to last century, have turned all this into a political banner used on the international stage with determination. In the meantime, the U.N. has become increasingly characterized by a larger membership and by immediate anti-Western majorities that were before under the USSR umbrella. Today they are under the umbrella of Islam and totalitarianism. I am not only speaking of the horror in seeing the U.N. podium invaded by people like Chavez who "smell a rat because the American demon is around" or like Ahmadinejad who preaches the extermination of the Jews and brags about justice in the world while he is suffocating his opposition. Or like Gadaffi who invites – and rightly so - to transfer the UN in the Southern hemisphere of the planet. It is puzzling to see Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann from Nicaragua, president of the last General Assembly, hugging Ahmadinejad, after he finished talking about the end in the near future of the Zionist regime; or like Sweden, which holds now the Presidency of the European Union, that remained in the hall while the Iranian President, during his speech at the opening of the 64 General Assembly, was talking about the Jewish conspiracy dominating the world, because it didn't consider that he had gone beyond any red line predetermined by the bright mind of the European Union.
I would not like to sound too iconoclastic, but in these last few days, the President of the United States has not found the time to receive the Dalai Lama – the first time that the White House has cancelled this visit in 18 years – because he is preparing an important meeting with President Hu Jintao at the end of the month. And the U.S. President’s approach is marking a fundamental change with respect to the theme we are discussing: his strange obeisance vis-à-vis the Saudi King, in view of his authentic and deeply-felt extended hand policy toward civilizations that have no notion of democracy and an intimate and historical link to a religion that is now attacking the West everywhere in the world. In sum, he is showing a propensity (maybe unconscious) to transform the acquisition of human rights – in the way we view them – into a completely secondary issue. Bush would have never rejected a meeting with the Dalai Lama visiting Washington. Certainly Obama knows that, in the light of this event, his meeting with Chavez and several Arab dictators sounds more impressive. Indeed, George W. Bush awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal – the highest honor for a civilian in the United States of America, defining the Tibetan spiritual guide a "universal symbol of peace and tolerance", notwithstanding the protests of the Chinese authorities.
In June 2007, I personally saw George Bush in Prague when he met dissidents from all the Countries in the world where human rights are violated including Russia, Libya, and China, i.e. countries that are undoubtedly and strategically relevant on the global scenario. Whatever the opinion on the overall results of the Bush Administration, it is true that it always respected any culture that had an aspiration to freedom, by identifying its viable aspect. An interesting way of looking for syncretism with Islam, for example, or with the Eastern or African cultures. The very idea of syncretism is linked to survival: two cultures come in contact and become intermingled to live together; today instead, the condition of coexistence with respect to tolerance is completely declining. For example, the Islamic Courts do not respect the human rights we have achieved and therefore do not have any principle of integration or coexistence. However, we in Europe have accepted them in silence and have also taken in practices such as polygamy, female genital mutilation, the burqa. Or we have de facto rehabilitated horrible habits that our societies had already banned decades ago such as honor killing or suicides (induced): i.e. all issues related to immigration that are indeed excluding our idea of human rights.
The issue of human rights - that seemed to be solved after the horrors of the Second World War – has become extremely topical. And this is a fundamental point: the death sentence to human rights was mainly given by the misunderstood Palestinian issue and the birth of what I call “Palestinism”. The UN has transformed the rejection by the Arab people – supported first by particular interests and then by international jihadismo, mainly fed by Iran - into a humanitarian issue. And this has been a lethal blow. The U.N. has attached an enormous attention to this issue – which can only be related to the typical third-worldism of the cold war on the one hand, and on the other to an invincible historical antipathy towards the State of Israel, as the state of the Jewish nation. This approach has had a paradoxical pattern. It has hammered the Western mind to death and has destroyed any possibility to actually fight for human rights.
The UN has found the time to devote one third of the security Council resolutions to condemning Israel; it invented the unlikely formula according to which Zionism is equal to racism, in 1975, only three years after the massacre at the Munich Olympic games; it managed to transform an international conference against racism – the Durban conference of 2001 – in a racist conference against Israel and the Jews. Here Castro, Arafat, Mugabe but also all the official organizations were talking about a new apartheid, only and exclusively citing Israel as the main violator of human rights on earth. This year, in April, the UN tried to repeat this experiment in Geneva with the “Durban Review Conference”, but this time, many countries protested before and the decision by Italy to withdraw was instrumental. Moreover it has launched the Goldstone investigation Commission – endorsed by the Human Rights Council – on the Gaza conflict. The conclusions of this Commission have set a dangerous precedent that the international institutions do not seem to realize: depriving Israel of its right to defend itself, establishing that it needs to surrender to systematic terrorism that hits and uses civilians as human shields, it is actually fostering terrorism around the whole world.
Indeed, on September 29, the Human Rights Council discussed the Goldstone report and allowed the major perpetrators of human rights abuses such as Yemen, Venezuela, Libya, Iran, Cuba, Pakistan and Sudan to talk about “Israeli genocide” against the Palestinians.
The constant victimization of the Palestinians, the exclusive role given to Palestinian refugees and their descendents – institutionalized with the creation of the UNRWA in 1949, i.e. the only UN agency dealing with a specific group of refugees, while all the others are within the framework of the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) – has contributed to fostering this “sectoral” approach to the refugees problem that is indeed a global issue.
The organizations responsible for the protection of human rights are run by people whose countries abhor the very idea of human rights. It will suffice to think that the preparation of the conference against racism known as “Durban 2” has been assigned to countries such as Iran, Cuba, Pakistan, serial violators of human rights.
We do not want to imagine the protests that would have been organized if Israel had been proposed at the presidency of the General Assembly. And yet nobody has raised any doubt as to the presidency of Libya with Ali Treki, who will run the 64th General Assembly inaugurated on September 23.
Recently, a further demise of the international institutions was averted when the Egyptian Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, was not elected as Chairman of the main world organization dealing with culture. It would have been ridiculous to see the UNESCO led by a subject who repeatedly pronounced anti-Semitic and anti-Western statements and who uses censorship in his country for those who are not in line with his Government.
Of the ten special sessions held so far by the UN General Assembly, 6 were devoted to the Middle-East. The tenth – opened 12 years ago under the request of Qatar – has practically become a permanent Commission on the rights of the Palestinians (it is called: “Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory”). The extremely serious issue justifying this ten-year long discussion is the construction of the Har Homà district by Israel, in East Jerusalem. Clearly no suggestion has been made to stop this existential debate or at least to put it aside in order to talk about the irregularities during the elections in Iran and about the ensuing crackdown, just to mention one of the most sensitive subjects that, last summer, outraged the public opinion around the world.
In 2008, 28 resolutions were issued on Israel by the UN agencies – of which 6 by the Human Rights Council alone –, while only 4 concerned Burma, just to make an example. In general, throughout 2008, Israel was the country condemned with the highest number of human rights violations: 120 documents of different kinds were drafted on this country followed, at a great distance, by Sudan (47 files), the Democratic Republic of Congo (37), Burma (32) and SURPRISE! SURPRISE! By the United States of America (27). Not even one resolution was adopted on Zimbabwe, that in the period between March and July 2008, was harshly criticized because of the presidential election that provoked clashes, arrests and a still unknown number of victims.
2009 will not change this tradition: so far, 96 official documents of various kinds have been drafted on Israel. Sudan: 46; Burma: 32; Iran: 23, and no resolution against this country notwithstanding the riots that have been taking place since June.
Over the last few years, there have been indeed huge violations of human rights in the world. And they have been exacerbated by the growing religious clashes. The Darfur genocide perpetrated by Janjaweed and supported by the Omar Al-Bashir Government in Sudan: the UN has not yet issued any condemnation at the news – arrived also extremely late because of the lack of journalists in those forgotten areas – according to which 7 Christians had been crucified by the infiltrates of the Lord’s Resistance Army from Uganda last August; we have no idea of what really happened in the Swat Valley in the operations conducted by the Pakistani Government to stem the Talebans and which caused the evacuation of more than 1 million people: the UN decided that it was not necessary to examine the collateral damage of the war against terrorism in this case; in the case of the violent crackdown on the Uiguri during a rally last July in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in China, the UN limited its reaction to a statement by the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, with the following wording "alarmed over the high death toll”, stressing the “extraordinarily high number of people to be killed and injured in less than a day of rioting”; in its annual report, the “Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” stated that “Beijing must provide greater protection to the different ethnic groups”; the tragic practice of using child soldiers - 300 thousand of them are estimated to fight in various parts of the world – most of whom are below 15 years of age; the people persecuted by the Iranian regime, tortured and hanged for political, religious reasons and because of sexual discrimination; the violent harassment of the Fatah members by Hamas, that kills them without a trial together with people from other groups against their regime…
It is fantastic that the resolutions of the International Tribunal on the security fence have not taken terrorism into consideration. And that today, the Goldstone Commission has not considered that its response to the events is totally detached from a reality in which human rights are violated first by the aggressors, i.e. Hamas.
All this has remained without an answer. The international illusion that “if the Palestinians had a state...” has seemed to be a panacea for the aggressions perpetrated by Iran, by the Talebans and by the Islamists in general, the olive branch in exchange for consensus.
The Palestinian issue has first deranged Europe, thus setting the stage for a change in the very concept of human rights, as I said at the beginning. Indeed they are – and I am also speaking on behalf of the United States – the ontological bond, the lifeblood on the basis of which we have to build the inter-Atlantic relations.
Notwithstanding September 11, the USA does not know the fear creeping around the European cities. And Europe does not know – or does not recognize – the meaning of a war against terrorism to bring the world back onto the road to civilization. And instead of making an effort to foster our mutual and indispensable understanding, we are, in fact, trying to eliminate our anxiety with a selective policy that is creating estrangement and detachment from our glorious history of human rights.
Fiamma Nirenstein
Deputy Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Italian Chamber of Deputies
* Translated into English by Silvia Pallottino