AMNESTY International has a lethal dose of our new intellectual disease - the racism of the anti-racists. It's got it so bad that what was once the world's most admired human-rights group can no longer tell the moral difference between a democrat and a dictator. At least, not when the democrat is as white as - yes! - John Howard, and the genocidal despot is not.
Amnesty's secretary-general, Irene Khan, last week released its 2007 report, and in its foreword listed what to her were the greatest threats to human rights. "Today far too many leaders are trampling and trumpeting an ever-widening range of fears," trumpeted Khan, a Bangladeshi Muslim whose own country, by the way, is under military rule. And she named four leaders - no one else - who demonstrated to her this kind of "myopic and cowardly leadership".
The Muslim and morally blind Ms Khan above. Not an unusual combination of attributes. Muslim respect for human life and their love of Western civilization is well-known
First, was our own Prime Minister Howard - prime evil for stopping boats of illegal immigrants. Second, was US President George Bush, for invoking "the fear of terrorism" just "to enhance his executive power". (I know, that fear was invoked not by Bush, but by terrorists on September 11, 2001, and ... but we're interrupting Khan's lecture.) Trailing in third place, in Khan's pantheon of evil, was Sudan's Islamist President, Omar al-Bashir, behind a genocide in Darfur that's killed some 200,000 people. Last was Robert Mugabe, who has turned Zimbabwe into a cemetery for the starving, although Khan merely accuses him of grabbing land for his supporters.
This grouping of two leaders of free democracies with two genocidal thugs is bizarre, but does have supreme virtue for the modern anti-racist racist. See? Two whites were "balanced" by two dark-skins. Two Westerners by two Third-Worlders. Two Christians by a Muslim and an old Communist. What could be fairer? And that fake balance - so kind to the cruel - ran right through Khan's essay. A typical line: "The politics of fear has been made more complex by the emergence of armed groups and big business that commit or condone human rights abuses." How about that? Al-Qaeda (which Khan never mentions by name) is no more deadly than a big business like Nike.
Here's another: "If unregulated migration is the fear of the rich, then unbridled capitalism, driven by globalisation, is the fear of the poor." Perfectly balanced. The capitalism that actually makes poor people richer, is thought by Khan to be as scary as the race riots and no-entry immigrant enclaves of France, or the bomb plots of jihad-minded sons of immigrants in Britain.
Nowhere does she note that the West is swamped by migrants from the East precisely because the East has too little capitalism. And, of course, too many dictators. Nor does Khan acknowledge that the fears expressed by her hated Western politicians have very real causes, often originating in lands ruled by Muslim theocracies and autocrats.
You might think I've read too much into one article, but Khan has form in likening the worst to the West, and seeing an equivalence between those defending the West and those trying to destroy it. Three years ago, for instance, she said that of all the horrors of the world, the US-led "war on terror" (her scare quotes) was "the biggest attack on human rights, principles and values". Honest. To Khan, defending ourselves against Islamist terrorists is deadlier to human rights than, say, the brutalising of Zimbabwe, the mass murder in Darfur, the state oppression in China, the civil wars in Algeria and Sudan, the withering of democracy in Russia, the Islamist fascism of Iran, and the open jail of North Korea.
The following year, Khan even called Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our time" - this time making a prison for 400 suspected terrorists seem as terrible as the vast Soviet network of forced labor camps in which millions of innocent civilians were jailed in conditions so brutal that countless of them died. This outraged Pavel Litvinov, a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, who warned: "By using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesman put its authority at risk."
I wish. In fact, Khan's anti-racist racism and consequent likening of white democrats to black totalitarians has made her a hero. In 2004, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize and invited to give the University of South Australia's annual Hawke Lecture, broadcast across the land by the ABC. How the audience at that lecture cheered Khan as she cried there was a "feeling in many parts of the world that the West has lost its moral high ground to advocate human rights" - an irrational feeling she has tried harder than most to whip up. Those cheers confirmed that Khan simply reflected a suicidal tendency among the West's intelligentsia to see the worst in the West and the best in the totalitarians pledged to destroy it.
Want recent examples? There are our prominent Leftists - ABC host Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, columnist Jill Singer, Islamist Keysar Trad - who've invited Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to visit and "inspire" us. That is, when he's not too busy closing down TV stations that criticise him, rigging laws to stay in power and calling George Bush a "devil".
There's Age cartoonist and National Living Treasure Michael Leunig, who similarly draws Bush as a devil, Howard as a murderer and Israel as Auschwitz, but demands we treat terrorist chief Osama bin Laden as our "relative" and "consider (his) suffering". There's the Melbourne University Press boss, Louise Adler, who two weeks ago likened al-Qaeda recruit David Hicks to Nelson Mandela.
There's University of Technology Sydney's Islamic law lecturer, Jamila Hussain, who this week called visiting author Ayaan Hirsi Ali an "extremist" who should stay "where she came from" when real extremists - Muslim ones - have forced this liberal Sudanese-born feminist and critic of misogynist Islam to bring her bodyguard to ensure she doesn't suffer the fate of her former colleague, director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004.
Or take the Global Peace Index released this week by The Charitable Foundation of local IT millionaire and philanthropist Steve Killelea. It rated Australia at 25 in its ranking of countries most at peace - and the US at just 96, below even Syria, China, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Democratic Israel was rated the least peaceful of all, apart from Sudan and Iraq. Not one report I saw of that survey drew the obvious conclusion: that this was madness. That this was a manifestation of a moral blindness among our elites.
And now Amnesty International is as blind as the rest, flailing at the very societies that most protect the freedoms it claims to defend. How defenceless we are, when even this once-great defender of human rights now treats us as one of the deadliest enemies of all.
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(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
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