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Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-891888
The Jewish Passion for Freedom and Human Rights Was Hijacked by the West
(Jerusalem Post) Gerald M. Steinberg - Freedom and human rights are universal values, and Jews have often been at the forefront of these struggles, playing central roles in the creation of the modern human rights movement, forged in the shadow of the Holocaust. They built strong institutions tasked with implementing these principles. But now these institutions and their leaders have betrayed the moral force behind their creation. They stand for and reinforce hate and demonization directed at Israel. Rene Cassin, a Jewish jurist from France, was a principal drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term "genocide") was a principal author of the Genocide Convention. Peter Benenson, a journalist from a prominent Jewish and Zionist family in Britain, founded Amnesty International, turning it into a political superpower. Robert L. Bernstein, the head of Random House publishers, built Helsinki Watch to report on Soviet compliance with the human rights components of the U.S.-Soviet detente known as the Helsinki Accords. The organization expanded into Human Rights Watch. Bernard Kouchner, a French Jew, helped found Doctors Without Borders. When the founders of all three institutions retired, their legacy and moral principles were abandoned. The new leaders were anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel ideologues for whom the rhetoric of human rights was a convenient political weapon. They went from false claims against Israel of "war crimes" to the poisonous accusation of "genocide" - a heinous form of Holocaust inversion. In 2009, Bernstein began to denounce the organization he created - Human Rights Watch - for turning Israel into a pariah state. The hostile takeover of the principles of freedom and human rights, and the institutions that claim to embody them, has done tremendous damage, not only to the Jewish people but also to the moral values themselves. The writer is founder and president of NGO Monitor and professor emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.