The Weaponization of Human Rights

Human rights, a platform for war on the Empire’s enemies

Kevin Barrett

Sha'ban 15, 1439 2018-05-01

News & Analysis

by Kevin Barrett (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 47, No. 3, Sha'ban, 1439)

In March and April 2018, the people penned up in Gaza — the world’s biggest concentration camp — began staging protests alongside the walls of their prison. Tens of thousands have camped near the walls in preparation for the Great March of Return. The Palestinians are peacefully demanding their UN-recognized right to return to the homes from which they and their relatives and ancestors were brutally ethnically cleansed by the Zionist movement.

The Zionists responded to the scheduled protests before they had even begun by deploying snipers with “shoot to kill” orders. At this writing, the snipers have shot more than 3,000 people who posed no physical threat to anyone, killing more than 30. The Zionist leadership has gone so far as to order apparent targeted killings of journalists.

Since when was it acceptable to shoot down thousands of unarmed people demonstrating for their human rights, as well as the journalists covering the protests? Surely the human rights trumpeting Western governments and their lavishly-funded NGOs must have immediately responded with crippling sanctions against the genocidal Zionist entity? Undoubtedly the Western powers must have mobilized their military forces, as well as the forces of their regional proxies and associated irregulars, to impose “regime change” on Tel Aviv?

No such luck. On the contrary, the hectoring hegemons of human rights have largely ignored the ongoing Gaza massacre, just as they have downplayed the genocidal destruction of Yemen. Apparently the slow-motion genocide of Palestine and the more rapid annihilation of Yemen — crimes against humanity bought and paid for by the West itself — are not major human rights issues. Even the Kashmiri and Rohingya genocides fail to draw much attention. Instead, the Western world has worked itself into hysteria around two non-issues: blatantly false claims that the Russian government poisoned a certain Mr. and Ms. Skripal; and the even more obvious lies about the supposed Syrian gas attack in Douma.

The human rights hullaballoos over Skripal and Douma are a triumph of image over substance. The notion of “poison” as a metaphysical evil has been weaponized and deployed in a public relations war against the enemies of the Anglo-Zionist Empire, while real human rights crises are ignored. Since the Skripal and Douma “poisonings” appear to have been false flags, scripted and deployed sequentially to rally public opinion against the alleged perpetrators, we must ask ourselves whether the only “human rights abuses” that matter to the West are the fake ones — the ones they themselves stage for the purpose of providing an excuse to drown the earth in a flood of crocodile tears, and then blood.

The hypocrisy of the West’s approach to human rights is mind-boggling. What historical and cultural factors have produced such madness?

The peculiar Western obsession with human rights is a product of secular humanism, the dominant religion of today’s Western elites. Secular humanism worships the human being, not God. To secular humanists, the whims and desires, projects and plans, ambitions for self-realization, and above all the “pursuit of happiness” of the individual human being are sacred; these are what give life meaning. Anything that restricts the freedom of the individual to indulge in such pursuits is a metaphysical evil… indeed, the only metaphysical evil.

To their credit, some secular humanists have waged admirable battles against obscurantism and tyranny. Early humanists helped end the Wars of Religion pitting Catholics against Protestants. During the Age of Enlightenment, such people helped overthrow or liberalize op-pressive European monarchies. Some were part of the campaign that ended overt slavery. Others have worked to end torture and other evils.

But like all idolatries, humanism is fundamentally flawed. When the human being worships the human being, the result is cosmic narcissism. As an object of worship, “the pursuit of happiness” inevitably degenerates into “my pursuit of my happiness” and finally “at your expense.”

It is generally the powerful and ambitious who harbor the strongest desires for “self-realization” through the material “pursuit of happiness.” For them, “humanism” and its corollary “human rights” are a club to beat their victims over the head with. At its worst, humanism can degenerate into the command “worship the human being — worship me.” That was the attitude of the Qur’an’s most exemplary villain, Fir‘awn (Pharaoh) — who would have fit right in with the rulers of today’s Anglo-Zionist Empire.

To understand how secular humanists can become the world’s worst human rights violators, consider the life and work of the Marquis de Sade. Unlike today’s hectoring hegemons of human rights, this unsavory individual was no hypocrite. For de Sade, humanism — the worship of the human being — meant deifying the human body as a source of power and pleasure; and naturally he made himself the subject, and others the object, of that quest, just as less philosophical sex criminals do.

Whatever morality or immorality secular humanists choose to embrace is ultimately arbitrary, since it lacks metaphysical grounding. While some, to their credit, may choose to side with the truth against lies, or with the downtrodden against oppression, there is no particular reason why they should do so. On the contrary, for the capable and ambitious — those who are willing and able to rise through the ranks and achieve wealth and power — secular humanism offers an excuse to dispense with (God-given) morality in order to better achieve their chosen form of self-realization and happiness.

That is why it should not surprise us that most of the leaders of the secular humanist West are, knowingly or not, disciples of the Marquis de Sade. Hence the entire British ruling elite was complicit in Jimmy Saville’s rapes of thousands of children; just as the entire US mainstream media, CIA, FBI, and even the George W. Bush White House (where call boys were given “midnight tours” according to a front page headline in the Washington Times) were all complicit in the Franklin Scandal.

So this is what the West’s “human rights” really means: the right to rape children, to lie, cheat, steal, torture, commit war crimes, scapegoat and persecute others, and indulge in all forms of gross indecency and immorality. And let’s not forget the “human right” to lie as outrageously and self-righteously as one likes, in an effort to cover up or rationalize one’s crimes while blaming scapegoats and victims.

In a world without God, such beliefs and actions might make sense. But because God exists, and God-given morality is woven into the very fabric of the universe, the West’s humanist experiment — including its hypocritical approach to human rights — is doomed to cataclysmic failure.