The Left’s Selective Concern About Freedom & Human Rights
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When it comes to defending freedom and spreading Democracy, liberals today are all talk and no action. Charles Krauthammer has the details:
“…(G)oing back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero — a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing — Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons — nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left’s concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel — an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.”
For every Christopher Hitchens or Jeff Jarvis on the left, there are 10 Michael Moores and Ted Kennedys who are so morally bankrupt that if they were given a choice between seeing tens of millions of people freed from a despot or a politically damaging Bush foreign policy failure, they’d happily choose the latter.
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