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Jewish World Review /Feb. 11, 1999 / 21 Shevat, 5759
Jonathan Tobin
Of Human
HOW SERIOUSLY DO WE AMERICAN JEWS take the cause of human rights? From
Kosovo to China, from Jerusalem to Philadelphia, there are causes aplenty
to catch our attention and spur our outrage. The problem we face is
separating the real human-rights causes from political propaganda. And that
is something that is getting harder these days.
For the American Jewish community, which has always taken the biblical
injunction not to stand by idly while our brother's blood is shed as a call
to defend all persecuted peoples, sorting out these issues is a special
priority. Yet when it comes to some obvious human-rights abuses, none of
us, including Jews, seem quite so eager to charge to the rescue.
Yet despite the fact that the world's most populous country is a cesspool
of human rights abuse, America has yet to find its voice on the subject.
China-appeasing, pro-business lobbyists (such as former Secretaries of
State Henry Kissinger and James Baker) and the Clinton administration have
easily defeated or rendered harmless every attempt to link meaningful trade
sanctions to human rights.
The Beijing regime has cracked down even harder on political dissidents and
religious believers in the months following President Clinton's disgraceful
trip to China last year. Even as reports flow in of worsening conditions,
few are willing to speak up about the issue.
Not so in China.
Too often those moral distinctions are being lost in the general din of
human rights rhetoric. Take the much-honored Amnesty International group.
In the case of China, Amnesty has been an indispensable source for those of
us who have followed events there. But can outrage against China be
sustained when so much of Amnesty's energy is lately being expended on what
its officials consider human rights abuses in the United States?
Even worse, when Amnesty lends its reputation to bogus causes - such as the
campaign on behalf of Mumia Abu Jamal, Philadelphia's celebrated cop-killer
- one has to wonder. The movement to free the former Black Panther - who
was convicted on the basis of overwhelming evidence of murdering police
officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 - is a caricature of what rights advocacy
can be reduced to when leftist politics and celebrity endorsements are set
against common sense.
When some use the title "political prisoner" for the likes of a killer like
Abu Jamal, how can we then use the same term when referring to heroic
Chinese democracy activists like Wei Jingsheng?
In the case of Israeli human rights cases, there is often an equal loss of
perspective. Last month, a Boston-based interfaith alliance of American
clergy calling itself the Search for Justice and Equality in
Palestine/Israel spoke out against what the clergy say were violations of
Palestinian Arab rights by both the Palestinian Authority and the State of
Israel. The group of 1,000 Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics was
attempting to be evenhanded when it denounced Israel and the P.A. with
equal ardor. But any group that cannot make a distinction between a corrupt
authoritarian regime like Yasser Arafat's P.A. and the democratic State of
Israel has lost its moral compass.
Unlike some friends of Israel who prefer to ignore the issue, I happen to
agree that the routine use of torture by Israeli security forces against
terror suspects is a danger to Israeli democracy. Though police have a duty
to use any and all measures to gain information on pending terror attacks,
"physical pressure" against suspects is far too widespread and cannot be
isolated from the rest of the Israeli criminal-justice system. That's why
Israeli courts have taken a serious look at the issue and - I hope - will
eventually eliminate the practice.
These cases must also be seen in the context of a nation that has been
under constant attack from terrorists with safe havens in P.A.-controlled
land. Moreover, when groups such as the American clergy coalition condemn
the existence of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as a human rights
violation, they lose all credibility.
As Jews and concerned citizens, we have an obligation to speak out against
human rights violations wherever they occur. But when we speak of the
imperfections of democracies in the same breath as the routine cruelties of
anti-democratic tyrannies, we can turn the struggle for human rights into
meaningless politics.
That's a mistake civilized people - and Jews in
particular - cannot afford to
Rights and Wrongs
Take the case of China, for example. China has changed dramatically in the
past decade, but it is still the world's largest tyranny, with few rights
for its citizens. In China, supporters of democratic reforms and religious
believers are routinely persecuted and jailed; the people of Tibet are
further subjected to cultural genocide. China also has its own thriving
version of the gulag, called the laogai, where untold numbers of sufferers
languish.
The Dalai Lama 
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that many of us seem
increasingly unable to make moral distinctions between two different kinds
of nations: governments like China's, where injustice rules, and those
imperfect democratic countries such as the United States and Israel, where
abuses can exist despite the rule of law and respect for individual rights.
While all abuses - whether it is a case of an innocent person mistakenly
gunned down by police in New York City or one of Palestinian Arab terror
suspects who are brutalized by Israeli police - deserve our attention and
exposure, a big difference exists between those cases and the laogai. In
Israel and the United States, no matter how badly authorities may act,
victims still have recourse to an independent judiciary and a democratic
legislature to redress their wrongs.
JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
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