American Interests Demand Human Rights Judgements

According to White House tapes reported in The New York Times, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Nixon, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy…And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Oh, the uproar! Why, because he was Jewish? Because he was a high ranking government official? Because he had exactly no moral scruples under his foreign policy expertise? Like we didn’t already know that.

According to White House tapes reported in The New York Times, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Nixon, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy…And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Oh, the uproar! Why, because he was Jewish? Because he was a high ranking government official? Because he had exactly no moral scruples under his foreign policy expertise? Like we didn’t already know that.

It is worth noting, however, that his point was and remains U.S. policy. Not gas chambers, exactly, but the question of what is, and is not a U.S. foreign policy concern. Americans should be outraged because, regardless of who sits in the Secretary’s chair, the United States remains loath to judge the internal affairs of others lest they become uncooperative on what we call “bigger” and “more important” policy matters. A decade ago, JINSA wrote about Palestinians being executed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) as “traitors and collaborators,” often at the whim of the government and without even the pretense of a trial.

A call to the State Department to determine what level of condemnation the U.S. attaches to such targeted killing elicited an odd, but we believe truthful response. The United States is opposed to Palestinian killings of what they call “traitors” because of the lack of due process and the failure to provide rights to the accused. The U.S. has no formal opinion of the PA definition of a “traitor,” but we don’t want anyone executed who wasn’t actually one according to Palestinian law. We were told… it is not for us to judge how governments define crimes against the state or the punishments they mete out. Our State Department official said that to do that would be a “slippery slope.”

To do otherwise would be amoral. The worst human rights violators create an intricate web of “laws” and “systems” to protect the government and punish the people.

In our own country, the government for a long, long time legally sanctioned the enslavement and sale of human beings – and afterward enacted a whole series of laws to keep African-Americans second-class citizens. It would be an outrage to say that the creation of those laws was no one’s business as long as the proof and due process were put before the punishment… There are good laws and bad laws, good governments and bad. And even good ones can make bad laws.

To officially ignore that is realpolitik– of which Henry was the master. So let’s see how it has been working out for us.

As a matter of policy, the U.S. government had nothing to say about Saudi Arabia when “religious police” pushed young girls back into a burning building because they fled without head scarves, and nothing to say about the legalized second-class status of women or the slave-like treatment of foreign workers. Nothing to say about the illegality of churches and synagogues in the Kingdom or the persecution of Copts in Egypt. Female genital mutilation isn’t our business, nor was it when the Taliban crushed homosexuals under bulldozed rocks – and we said nothing when the Taliban shut women away from society, resulting in the highest suicide rate in the world. Nothing when Omar Bashir of Sudan, architect of the decimation of Darfur and under international warrant, received a standing ovation before the Organization of Islamic States. In Iran, a woman awaits execution by stoning for adultery. “Blasphemy” is a crime in Pakistan.

Russia, Iran, Syria and Turkey arrest journalists on the flimsiest of pretexts and at least in the first three, they have been tortured. In China, Christianity is illegal, the Internet is censored and people who speak out of turn disappear. China returns refugee North Koreans to Pyongyang in violation of UN conventions and is the pass-through for weapons to Iran (thank you, WikiLeaks). Russia’s flirtation with democracy is over, it invaded and occupied Georgia and sells weapons to Syria that are transferred to Hezbollah. We said nothing about North Korean encroachment in South Korean waters or the sinking of a South Korean ship; when missiles landed on a South Korean town, our hand was forced. Almost nothing is said about rabid Arab anti-Semitism that mimics the Nazi propaganda on which it is based.

If there are no friends in foreign policy, which of these countries helps us reach our American foreign policy goals? Which of them actively work against us?

Not to recognize and categorize good/bad and right/wrong at the most basic level of life and death is an abdication of the American interest in promoting freedom and liberty. You cannot be in the human rights business without being in the judgment business.

It was wrong in 1973 and remains wrong.