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How Human Rights Advocates Became Antisemites

(Tablet) Gadi Taub - Antisemitism has evolved and is now conveyed through the lingo of human rights. A host of people - many of them Jews - have been seduced into supporting NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact promoting a racist view of the Jewish people. They do so by singling out the Jews as the one people not partaking in the universal right to self-determination, and Israel alone among the nations as the one state which has no right to exist. Singling out the Jews for special hostile treatment is, of course, the very definition of antisemitism. How did the idea of human rights, which purports to serve as a universal standard, get distorted so badly as to yield an argument for the targeting and exclusion of Jews? One part of the answer lies with academia and the media which, by using gross double standards, portrays Israel as a uniquely monstrous violator of human rights. The world's actual egregious violators of human rights - such as China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and most of Israel's neighbors - don't receive a fraction of the moralizing attention that Israel gets. A vast number of NGOs - which include "human rights" in their mission statements - operate freely inside Israel, with the aim of changing Israeli society and subverting its democratic modes of governance. As Swedish journalist Paulina Neuding aptly put it, Israel is a virtual Disneyland for NGOs. Many of these are bent on inflaming the conflict, defaming Israel by documenting the human rights violations of one side only, real and imagined, with the explicit intention of drawing outside pressure to force Israel into making concessions to its foes. The writer is a senior lecturer in communications and public policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
2023-12-07 00:00:00
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