Matt Yglesias

Is Mary Robinson Bad for the Jews?

Mary Robinson has had a long and interesting career. As the White House press office noted when explaining Barack Obama’s decision to grant her a Presidential Medal of Freedom:

Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland (1990 – 1997) and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997 – 2002), a post that required her to end her presidency four months early. Robinson served as a prominent member of the Irish Senate prior to her election as President. She continues to bring attention to international issues as Honorary President of Oxfam International, and Chairs the Board of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI Alliance). Since 2002 she has been President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, based in New York, which is an organization she founded to make human rights the compass which charts a course for globalization that is fair, just and benefits all.

Naturally, Abe Foxman sees an insidious plot against the Jewish people:

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, today issued a statement saying that Robinson has “anti-Israel bias” and calling the decision to bestow America’s highest civilian honor upon Robinson as an agent of change “ill-advised.”

James Besser explains the case, such as it is, against Robinson. You see, back in 2001:

Robinson didn’t support the anti-Semitic outbursts at Durban, but a credible case can be made that she didn’t do enough to prevent them – or speak up loudly enough after the debacle.

I think it takes a pretty serious case of narcissism to reach the conclusion that this bill of particulars ought to outweigh a person’s entire career.

My sense is that what’s really going on here is the same as what’s happening with pro-Israel groups’ years-long campaign against Human Rights Watch. It’s simply not possible to do a credible job of international human rights monitoring without criticizing Israeli behavior now and again. Exercising sovereign authority over the lives of millions of stateless persons is a human rights fiasco waiting to happen. But a lot of Jewish organizations in the United States seem to take the view that because Israel’s human rights record is better than, say, Sudan’s (and it sure is better) that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Israel bias.

Israeli Government, AIPAC Stepping Up Attacks on Human Rights Watch

As a Jewish progressive, one of the most disturbing elements about Israel’s recent trajectory has been an increasingly tendency by the Israeli government and by hawkish Jewish organizations to respond to criticism of Israel’s human rights record by lashing out against human rights groups. The Jerusalem Post, for example, has a report on how the Israeli government is planning to step up attacks on Human Rights Watch not by contesting HRW’s work on the merits, but by assailing the organization as somehow hypocritical for raising funds from private Saudi individuals. And Matt Duss observes that AIPAC has been emailing journalists with a story making the same argument.

Anyone genuinely interested in a good-faith exploration of whether or not Human Rights Watch ignores human rights abuses by Saudi Arabia or by other states in the region can easily enough click over to their website and find their comprehensive work on the Middle East and North Africa. You will swiftly see that the idea that HRW is some kind of Israel-bashing organization is nonsense. Their currently featured item is about just the subject you’d expect—the recent clampdown in Iran. The headline is “Iran: Detainees Describe Beatings, Pressure to Confess”. They also did a July 8 item highlighting broken promises on women’s rights from Saudi Arabia. They’re highlighting work on torture in the United Arab Emirates and on how administrative detention undermines the rule of law in Jordan.

This is vital work taking place in a large number of countries. Countries that, as the Israeli government is usually the first to point out, tend to treat their citizens really poorly. Smearing the organization doing this kind of work is very damaging. There aren’t, after all, a lot of people doing credible work of this sort. And part of the reason HRW is credible is that they call it like they see it—they don’t zero in on particular countries to serve a geopolitical agenda. Which means that when Israeli policies violate international law or human rights norms, Israel gets criticized. If this makes Israelis uncomfortable, then maybe instead of lashing out with unsupported accusations of of bias they ought to reconsider their own actions.

Shirin Ebadi Supports Obama Approach on Iran

Objectively pro-Ahmadenijad? So says Bob Kagan. (Wikimedia)

As conservatives continue to criticize Barack Obama’s rhetoric on the Iranian political crisis, Iranian dissidents and human rights leaders continue to support Obama. Shirin Ebadi, for example, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts as a human rights lawyer and advocate in Iran. For her trouble she’s been persecuted in the press, threatened with physical violence, etc. And as Spencer Ackerman points out she thinks Obama’s doing the right thing:

Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, said she has no complaints about Obama’s rhetoric. “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard,” she said in a telephone interview from Geneva. “I respect his comments on all the events in Iran, but I think it is sufficient.”

There’s been an effort made to fit this into some grand tableau about “idealism” in foreign policy, but the simple fact of the matter is that the time for the United States to do something on behalf of the Iranian opposition would be when Iranian opposition leaders ask us to. Simply inserting ourselves more directly into the situation in order to feel more self-righteous about it would be horrible. The people protesting on the streets in Iran are running very real risks to their lives and their families. We owe them more than thoughtless rhetoric.

China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software

For quite a while, I subscribed to the theory that China’s capitalist development would require the diffusion of modern information technology, and the diffusion of modern information technology would necessarily tend to undermine the Communist Party’s dictatorship. But over the past few years, the dictatorship has proven itself to be much more resourceful about squaring this circle than a lot of us used to assume was possible. The key factor is that the Chinese market is so enormous that China can impose rules like this new one and know that many companies will want to play along:

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet. The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.

Hard Labor in North Korea

As you’ve no doubt heard, two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been arrested by the North Korean government and sentenced to twelve years hard labor. I’ve been trying to Google around for more information on the DPRK’s labor camps, but part of the nature of the Hermit Kingdom seems to be that there’s relatively little available in the way of up-to-date information. That said, the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea did publish this report on “The Hidden Gulag” several years ago based on defector reports mostly from the 1990s. You won’t be surprised to learn that conditions are terrible:

The concentration camp is a kind of closed town where a number of camps are linked together by a road. At least two of the camps, Hoeryong and Hwasong in Hamkyong Province, are larger in area than the District of Columbia. All the gulags are located in remote and desolate mountain areas to further their anonymity and isolation to foreigners and dissidents. Presently, there are six gulags known to the outside world where it is speculated that some 150,000 to 200,000 inmates are imprisoned.

As in the Soviet Union during the high tide of the Gulag, it appears that the forced labor camps are important to the regime not just as a mechanism of repression, but as part of the economic model and the internal incentives of the bureaucracy. Spencer Ackerman also links to the State Department’s human rights report on the DPRK:

[P]rolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.

Needless to say, it’s easy to recognize this sort of barbarism as the torture that it is when you read about it being done by North Korea (it appears that the Bush administration and the DPRK were both modeling themselves on the Chinese Communist tactics from the Korean War). And it is being done, and on a massive scale. Meanwhile, a related angle to this is that many of the people in the prison camps are people who actually escaped from North Korea and then wound up getting apprehended in China and deported back. In terms of practical things that could be done to help the population of North Korea, getting the Chinese to stop doing this.