Inhuman Rights

In case there were any lingering doubts left among about the morality deficit of the United Nation’s beleaguered Human Rights Council (HRC), this article by Ibn Warraq published in City Journal puts the case to rest.  Given that the UN has been rendered nearly toothless by its own authoritarian members on issues of human rights, might John McCain’s proposal for the league of democracies come back? 

During his presidential campaign, Republican senator John McCain advocated forming a League of Democracies that would work independently of the UN (though not replace it) to hold dictatorial or totalitarian regimes to account, impose economic sanctions on rogue states, and provide succor to targets of ethnic cleansing or genocide. With its strict rules for membership, such a multinational assembly would be free of internal obstruction by states like Russia and China, and would thus be in a better position to uphold human rights.

The League–which Anthony Lake, who has advised Barack Obama, alsofavors–might even create its own counterweight to the HRC, a body inwhich symbolic victories for human rights could take place outside thetwilight zone of Islamic interference.

At the close of World War II, Bertrand Russell observed that thehuman species was historically unwilling to acquiesce to its ownsurvival. An intellectual accomplice in this ongoing suicide pact issurely cultural relativism, an invention of Western liberalism thatnon-Western reactionaries have taken up as a license to kill andbutcher people in peace and quiet. There has been no worse exemplar ofthis fatal tendency than the UN Human Rights Council.