Angry New Yorker

Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man

"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly." - Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783

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Thursday, January 13, 2005
 
NGO Moonbat of the Day Award Goes to... Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch, an NGO that's unaccountable, that bears no responsibility for accomplishing anything, but which has an infinite capacity for carping and complaining. Today these once stalwart watchdogs decided to, like many in the NGO moonbat minions, again portray U.S. as the problem and not the solution.

Of course, the BBC (about as left as it gets in the U.K.) immediate runs with the story -- with a frontpage webstory entitled, U.S. 'erodes' global human rights, with only those so tiny ' ' marks around erodes to indicate that, hey, gentle reader, this isn't absolute fact, but merely one moonbat's opinion. The BBC leads off with the statement that:

Human Rights Watch says the US can no longer claim to defend human rights abroad if it practises abuses itself.

Oh, boo hoo. The U.S. defend more rights around the world, with more results, with more freaking people alive and well because of us than ANYONE else. Period. And frankly, it's tripe like this report that boldens our enemies by releasing the gray corroding fog of moral relativism into the air.
HRW's vapidity is self-evident when you compare our actions on the world scale with other countries statements AND actions. To paraphrase GhostBusters, when the crap hits the fan, who you gonna call? The answer is inevitably the United States. You can call the U.N.; go ahead - but you'd better have eight years to spare while they go through their keystone cop routine and try to get organized. You can call the E.U. -- and if you need trade sanctions, they're capable. Need anything else, especially half-way around the world and Jacques and Gerhard can't really do much for. China? Puleez. India? Ahem? Any Arab tinpot despot?

Download PDF - ISBN 1564323315 January 2005

Dear well-meaning friends at the HRW: you aren't helping. It's a very scary world out there, and lands in the middle of nowhere, where the rule of law means little more than a slogan, like "quality is job one", don't need people like Mr. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, whose bio, here, indicates he should really know better, to actually compare the effects of a real genocide in Darfur to Abu Ghraib, by spouting such drivel as:

"The U.S. government’s use of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq poses a different kind of challenge: not because the scale of the abuse is as large as Darfur, but because the abuser is so powerful. When most governments breach international human rights and humanitarian law, they commit a violation. The breach is condemned or prosecuted, but the rule remains firm. Yet when a government as dominant and influential as the United States openly defies that law and seeks to justify its defiance, it also undermines the law itself and invites others to do the same. The U.S. government’s deliberate and continuing use of “coercive interrogation”— its acceptance and deployment of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment—has had this insidious effect, well beyond the consequences of an ordinary abuser. That unlawful conduct has also undermined Washington’s much-needed credibility as a proponent of human rights and a leader of the campaign against terrorism. In the midst of a seeming epidemic of suicide bombings, beheadings, and other attacks on civilians and noncombatants—all affronts to the most basic human rights
values—Washington’s weakened moral authority is felt acutely." [full item available here].

Outside of blatant inaccuracies in your statement, Mr. Roth (i.e. "[the U.S.'s] acceptance and deployment of torture") riddle me this: what will be acutely felt in and by the rest of the world if a nuclear bomb goes off in, say, New York or San Francisco? I dare say there will be a whole lot more shaking going on at that point and you, and all of us, will have much bigger things to worry about than whether Washington's "moral authority" has weakened.

UPDATE:Dennis Boyles over at the National Review's always on target EuroPress Review, blasts HRW as well. Read the entire thing here. My favorite quote is:
[I]f HRW was sincerely interested in any "betrayal of human rights principles" it wouldn't be doing its gratuitous Yank-bash-for-cash thing for the millionth time. It would be over in Turtle Bay whipping Kofi Annan and the U.N., because wherever there are blue helmets, there's hell to pay. No place is this more true than in the U.N.'s biggest "humanitarian" mission, MUNOC, the fiasco in eastern Congo, where, as yet another BBC report notes, "UN peacekeepers working in DR Congo sexually abused girls as young as 13."

Those who dislike America's role in Iraq never propose an alternative solution, except to let the U.N. take care of it all somehow. But haven't the Iraqis suffered enough? It would be kinder to return the country to Saddam than to give it to Annan. The apparent corruption of the U.N. is simply staggering.


UPDATE II: Diplomad lauches a cannonade at HRW's feeble bleethings as well, noting:
HRW also shows the confusion that liberal advocates of multilateral military action have when it comes to the use of power by the USA. These advocates want the USA only to use its power in defense of the objectives that the advocates want. Any other use, is illegitimate.
Read the entire thing here. Frankly,I don't know how Roth ever was picked to be a prosecutor in the S.D.N.Y. as his apparently grasp of logic principles not only defies reality, but our comprehension.

posted by anonymous at 10:28 PM

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