Racism, Pure and Simple

The moral blindness of the 'human rights' industry

A propos my post on Amnesty below, Evelyn Gordon makes an excellent point on the Commentary blog. She draws attention to two shocking pieces in the New York Times by Nicholas Krystof, here and here, on the war in the Congo. Gordon observes:

The civil war in Congo, Krystof writes, has claimed almost seven million lives over the last dozen years. It has also created a whole new vocabulary to describe the other horrific abuses it has generated – such as ‘autocannibalism,’ which is when militiamen cut flesh from living victims and force the victims to eat it, or ‘re-rape,’ which applies to women and girls who are raped anew every time militiamen visit their town.

Yet the world rarely hears about Congo — because groups such as Amnesty and HRW [Human Rights Watch] have left the victims largely voiceless, preferring instead to focus on far less serious abuses in developed countries, where gathering information is easier.

Neither Amnesty nor HRW has issued a single press release or report on Congo so far this year, according to their web sites. Yet HRW found time to issue two statements criticizing Israel and 12 criticizing the U.S.; Amnesty issued 11 on Israel and 15 on the U.S. To its credit, HRW did cover Congo fairly extensively in 2009. But Amnesty’s imbalance was egregious: For all of 2009, its web site lists exactly one statement on Congo — even as the group found time and energy to issue 62 statements critical of Israel.