by Mike Gray

Our culture is awash in irony at every level. One nettlesome example is how certain groups ostensibly devoted to protecting civil rights and freedom actually manage to suppress them and actively abet the very people who would destroy those rights:

If you were arrested for speaking on public streets, where would you turn for help? These days, the answer may depend on what you were saying.

Suppose you were arrested for marching through the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, protesting Israeli policies against Palestinians. Unquestionably, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would support your rights, even filing suit on your behalf.

Suppose, instead, you were arrested for preaching Christianity on the streets of Dearborn. Would you ask the ACLU for help? Would it help you? Well, maybe.

Consider the four people arrested on June 18, 2010, for proselytizing passersby at Dearborn’s Arab International Festival. Certainly the ACLU agreed that the arrests had violated the missionaries’ constitutional rights. The state ACLU chapter’s legal director told the Michigan Messenger that “the man encouraging others to convert to Christianity was engaged in speech protected by the First Amendment.” But that is all. The organization did not issue any press releases to that effect, address the matter on its website, or reference it in listserv emails.

As Johanna Markind notes in a Pajamas Media article, moreover, it isn’t just a lubricious ACLU that’s being selective in whose rights it chooses to protect:

Like the ACLU, Amnesty International (AI) has prided itself on evenhandedness. From its Cold War beginnings, it projected an image of impartiality by focusing on prisoners of conscience from different geographical and political spheres (communist, capitalist, and developing). More recently, however, it has shown deep reluctance to criticize radical Islam. For example, Brooke Goldstein of the Children’s Rights Institute found the group largely uninterested in jihadists’ use of children as suicide bombers.

Could fear—or sympathy—explain the following:

Likewise, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has sometimes sacrificed advocacy for oppressed groups to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities.

. . . . Between January 2009 and August 2010, HRW published seven reports on Israel (two ostensibly about rights violations by Palestinians also criticized Israel), two on Iran, none on Egypt, and two primarily on Saudi Arabia. None addressed Iran’s oppression of homosexuals, Egypt’s abuse of Christians, or Saudi subjugation of non-Muslims, women, and homosexuals. HRW’s 2009 report Human Rights and Saudi Arabia’s Counterterrorism Response focuses on detainee mistreatment without mentioning “Islamic extremism,” except in reference to a New York Times Magazine article.

By shielding Islamic people, religion, ideologies, governments, and societies from the open criticism routinely applied to all others, these rights groups effectively favor oppressors over victims.

To say that these “human rights” groups are a mixed blessing would, in light of the above, be an understatement—especially when these groups wind up, intentionally or not, supporting tyranny.

For more read Markind’s Pajamas Media article (“Some Rights Causes Are More Equal Than Others”).