Haaretz (www.haaretzdaily.com) has published an article by Amnon Rubinstein that describes how strange and sad it is that it took almost 2 years for "Human Rights" organizations to declare that Palestinian homicide/suicide bombers are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity:

Surprise, surprise! The Human Rights Watch organization condemns the suicide attacks, considers them war crimes and crimes against humanity, and comes out against the Palestinian Authority and its leader for not preventing such offenses. Amnesty International has also condemned the suicide attacks in the past, but has not said a word against the PA.

According to Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, "those who carry out suicide bombings are not martyrs, they're war criminals. So are the people who help plan such attacks."

This is a big surprise indeed; but what is actually so surprising here? Can there be any doubt that someone who commits suicide, or someone who sends young people to commit suicide in order to murder civilians, is committing a crime against humanity? Is there any doubt that this is a double and triple crime - the crime of inciting young men and women to commit suicide, the crime of murder and the crime of praise after the act?

The surprise stems from the difference between the behavior of Human Rights Watch and that of similar organizations that have distorted the concept of human rights in two senses: First, they did not distinguish between a primary right and a secondary one. A person has a right to life, as well as a right not to have his letters opened. Both rights are important, but they are not equally important. The right to life precedes all else; since without it, there are no other rights.

This elementary distinction has been forgotten, such that many reports focusing on human rights - including those from the UN Human Rights Commission - make no distinction between the primary and the secondary, between countries in which human life has no value, and countries that do not strictly enforce all the eavesdropping laws. A large number of these organizations suffer from a total conceptual confusion, which has been intensified by the modern viewpoint that there are no absolute truths, there is no hierarchy of values, and everything is relative.

Mr. Rubinstein is right on. Two weeks ago I was in Mexico and I did some Scuba diving. My dive master was Yngve, a nice guy from Sweeden. After our talks turned to politics, I was amazed at how he considered the "use of force" (his words) by Bin-Laden, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist murderers just a "cultural difference". For him, the fact that Arab/Muslim societies are incapable today of accepting and embrassing gay rights, women rights, Democracy and freedom, was just a "cultural difference".

It is wrong to deliberately murder women and children, I don't care how "culturally different" you are. One last note: the Human Rights Watch spokesman, Kenneth Roth, that condemned Arafat and his thugs for the senseless murders of the last two years is an American. It will take a bit longer for the European leftist morons to understand that deliberately killing 4 and 5 year olds in their beds is wrong, even if the kids are Jewish Israeli.

I got the link from Imshin. I copy the full article below, it's well worth the read.

A condemnation and a surprise
By Amnon Rubinstein
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages
/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=230486&contrassID=2&subContrassID
=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

Surprise, surprise! The Human Rights Watch organization condemns the suicide attacks, considers them war crimes and crimes against humanity, and comes out against the Palestinian Authority and its leader for not preventing such offenses. Amnesty International has also condemned the suicide attacks in the past, but has not said a word against the PA.

According to Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, "those who carry out suicide bombings are not martyrs, they're war criminals. So are the people who help plan such attacks."

This is a big surprise indeed; but what is actually so surprising here? Can there be any doubt that someone who commits suicide, or someone who sends young people to commit suicide in order to murder civilians, is committing a crime against humanity? Is there any doubt that this is a double and triple crime - the crime of inciting young men and women to commit suicide, the crime of murder and the crime of praise after the act?

The surprise stems from the difference between the behavior of Human Rights Watch and that of similar organizations that have distorted the concept of human rights in two senses: First, they did not distinguish between a primary right and a secondary one. A person has a right to life, as well as a right not to have his letters opened. Both rights are important, but they are not equally important. The right to life precedes all else; since without it, there are no other rights.

This elementary distinction has been forgotten, such that many reports focusing on human rights - including those from the UN Human Rights Commission - make no distinction between the primary and the secondary, between countries in which human life has no value, and countries that do not strictly enforce all the eavesdropping laws. A large number of these organizations suffer from a total conceptual confusion, which has been intensified by the modern viewpoint that there are no absolute truths, there is no hierarchy of values, and everything is relative.

The second mistake of these organizations - in Israel and abroad - is that their position was not determined by the extent of damage to human rights, but rather by the identity of the party causing the damage. Strong whites are subject to condemnation, weak non-whites are immune to it.

Veteran American leftist Michael Walzer, professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and editor of Dissent magazine, censures the radical American left for this position. (His article, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" appeared in Hebrew in the September issue of Mifneh). He insists that the oppressed have obligations too - first and foremost, not to murder the innocent, and not to turn terror into policy. He adds that a left that doesn't insist on this is abandoning politics and morality and the right to make its demands in other areas as well.

Human Rights Watch is following in Walzer's footsteps rather than adopting the international trend, which maintains that whatever Israel does is deserving of condemnation, and whatever the Palestinians do is above criticism. That is the surprise. "Thou shalt not kill" applies not only to Israelis, but to Palestinians as well. They no longer have immunity.

It's true that in the past the organization issued a harsh report on the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in Jenin -- although it rejected the false claims of a "massacre." But it writes courageously that every citizen, even if he is a settler in the territories, has a right to protection from murder, unless he himself participates in hostile acts.

The report is important for another reason. PA Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected the generous offers of former prime minister Ehud Barak and former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and, in the midst of diplomatic negotiations, initiated a war of terror against Israel. This is perhaps the greatest crime - a crime against peace.

Why did he do so? The common assumption is that Arafat wanted to intensify the crisis to such a severe level that the international community would have to intervene, as it did in Kosovo. After two years of bloodshed, this wish is far from being fulfilled.

A secondary aim, apparently, was to condemn Israel in world public opinion, in order to weaken it and cause it to surrender. In this mission, Arafat has succeeded - with the generous help of the olive stealers and the hallucinatory hilltop youth. But he has not succeeded in avoiding blame. The Human Rights Watch report makes this clear.

Posted by David Melle
 Link to this page |   Email this entry |   digg this