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Human-Rights Bodies Corrupt Human Rights to Vilify Israel

(Real Clear Politics) Peter Berkowitz - 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. In the 21st century, powerful human-rights organizations have politicized human rights, wielding human rights as a propaganda tool, inflating the claims of favored groups and disparaging the claims of the disfavored. Nowhere do human-rights organizations more crudely politicize human rights than in the case of Israel. Human-rights organizations' attacks on Israel tend to suppress such basic international laws-of-war principles as the prohibition on combats' embedding themselves within their own urban areas to use civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields. The organizations also ignore that these reprehensible tactics give Hamas presumptive moral and legal responsibility for the collateral death and destruction that result from Israel's exercising its right of self-defense to eliminate threats to its territorial integrity and political sovereignty. The writer, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department (2019-2021).
2025-04-29 00:00:00
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