Burma Gravely Violates Christians' Human Rights

Buddhists are not so peaceful as the Western stereotype portrays them.

In Burma, ethnic Chin Christian children and youth are coerced to convert to Buddhism.

Burma troops kill and rape Christian civilians, burn churches and homes and destroy crosses.

"Discrimination on grounds of religion and ethnicity is both deep-rooted and institutionalized" within the army, an official said.

Human rights organizations have linked Burmese troops to rights abuses and are calling on the international community to urge Burma to protect its minorities.

From BosNewsLife:

NAYPYIDAW, BURMA (BosNewsLife)-- Rights groups urged the world Friday, March 22, to pressure Burma to end a crackdown on ethnic and religious minorities after government troops reportedly killed and raped dozens of mainly Christian civilians while burning hundreds of churches and homes.

In a statement obtained by BosNewsLife, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) said the "international community" should "push ethnic and religious minority rights higher up the reforms agenda for Burma."

In one of the most reasons incidents, CHRO said a 13 year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a Burma Army soldier in the Paletwa area of southern Chin State. "A ceasefire agreement between the Chin National Front and the government has been in place since January last year, but Chin State remains heavily militarized with more than 54 Burma Army camps," the group said.

Elsewhere, in predominantly Christian Kachin state, government troops killed at least nine civilians and wounded more than a dozen others in mortar attacks from September 2012 to February, explained the the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT).

Though President Thein Sein announced a unilateral ceasefire in the region, "the Burma Army offensive in Kachin State has continued," said the Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC), representing devoted Kachin Christians.

ONGOING WAR

The ongoing war in Kachin State resulted in the destruction of over 200 villages, with 66 churches reportedly damaged and over 100,000 people internally displaced, according to KBC investigators.

CSW, CHRO, Human Rights Watch, and KWAT testified this week about the violence in Burma during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Human Rights at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

"We welcome the ceasefire agreement, but the international community must recognize that this is only a first step," said CHRO’s Executive Director Salai Bawi Lian Mang. "So far, there has been no discussion about troop withdrawal from Chin State. As long as there is a heavy military presence, we expect human rights abuses to continue,” the official explained at the hearing.

Speaking about Chin State, CHRO’s Program Director Salai Za Uk Ling told the Subcommittee that ethnic Chin Christian children and youth "are coerced" to convert to Buddhism at military-run ‘youth development training schools’.

"Discrimination on grounds of religion and ethnicity is both deep-rooted and institutionalized," within the army, the official said. "Current reforms in Burma should focus on dismantling the institutional structures and policies that enable continued discrimination and forced assimilation against ethnic and religious minorities.”

"CONSIDERABLE CHALLENGES"

CSW’s Senior Advocate UK/UN Matthew Jones agreed. "We see considerable challenges in Burma’s ethnic regions including in the Burmese Army’s offensives against civilians in Kachin State, the conflict and suffering of the Rohingya in Rakhine State, and continuing violations of religious freedom and other human rights [of the Chin people] in Chin State," Jones explained in remarks obtained by BosNewsLife.

"There is a need to encourage clear benchmarks and timelines for reform, and to maintain pressure on Burma to take steps to address human rights violations and engage in a meaningful nationwide peace process and political dialogue,” the official added.

The panel strongly condemned grave human rights violations in Rakhine and Kachin States, and called on the European Union (EU) to urge President Thein Sein’s government to allow immediate unrestricted humanitarian access to those areas.

Europarliamentarian László Tokés has also expressed concerns about Burma's "state policy of segregation" of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Rakhine State, and the destruction of large Christian crosses in Chin State.

It came amid reports Friday, March 21, of unrelated deadly sectarian clashes that killed at least 10 people, injured 20 others and left scores of homes destroyed.

OWNERS ARGUMENT

The riots in the town of Meikhtila, 540 kilometers (335 miles) north of Burma's capital Naypyidaw, broke out after an argument between a Buddhist couple and Muslim owners of a gold shop, witnesses said.

Relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma, also known as Myanmar, have simmered since last year’s sectarian violence in western Rakhine state killed 110 people and left 120,000 homeless, analysts say.

The United Nations fears such incidents could endanger democratic reforms introduced since military rule ended in 2011.

In separate meetings with government and other officials in Washington this week, a CHRO and CSW delegation also spoke about "the problem of ethno-religious based discrimination in Burma. Since 1999, the US has designated Burma a 'country of particular concern’ for what it views as the country's poor record on freedom of religion or belief.

Next week a CHRO delegation was to meet with legislators, government officials, and staff at Canada’s newly-established Office of Religious Freedom, to discuss the tensions in Burma, the rights activists said.

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Persecution of Christians in Japan

The conference "Religious Discrimination in Japan" was recently held, organized by several human rights and religious freedom NGOs :

In the last 40 years, about 4000 members of the Unification Church as well as members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were kidnapped, confined and submitted to brainwashing for days, weeks, months and sometimes years in total impunity to force them to recant their faith.

This video presents two shocking testimonies (presented at the UN office in Geneva on Oct 31st, 2012): Mr. Toru Goto, who has been kidnapped and confined for his beliefs during 13 years and Mrs. Mitsuko Antal, member of the Unification Church, both of them kidnapped by their own relatives and tortured by Japanese citizens, professional faith-breakers and deprogrammers.

Unfortunately, the Japan Ministry of Justice has turned a blind eye to the severe human rights violations by non-state actors and treated them merely as a "family matter". Even the media in Japan has imposed a total blackout on these crimes.

The United Nations have been alerted to the problem but have done nothing about it:

While Japan was lightly criticized for discrimination including religious discrimination during its UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on 31 October 2012, the international community failed to note the refusal of Japanese authorities to protect the human rights of thousands of members of minority religions who have been violently abducted by family members and forced to change their religion, Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) reported today.

“Despite having objective evidence of gross negligence by the authorities concerning kidnapping and coercion of Japanese citizens, UN delegations ignored the issue and thus helped Japan maintain its strategy of denial,” said Willy Fautre, president of HRWF, which undertook research on the issue and published a report on “Abduction and Deprivation of Freedom for the Purpose of Religious De-conversion” in late 2011. Human Rights Without Frontiers and other organizations made submissions on the issue to the UN prior to the UPR review and met with numerous UN delegations to ask that the issue be raised with Japanese authorities.

If I say "Japan" and "persecution of Christians" you wouldn't think that the two go well together, would you?

Japan is traditionally Buddhist and we all think that we know Buddhism to be a pacifist, tolerant religion. Yet how much do we know about it? Buddhism's pacifism is more of a stereotype than anything else. And Western people have in recent decades developed a guilt complex, a self-flagellation inclination that induces them to look at others with excessively benevolent eyes.

In The Religions Next Door: What We Need To Know About Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and what Reporters Are Missing (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , American author Marvin N. Olasky (page 129) writes:

Although many Americans equate Buddhism with the search for serenity, two books by Methodist-turned-Buddhist Brian Victoria show that Zen Buddhist priests before and during World War II taught Japan's military leaders to be serene about killing others and, if necessary, themselves. As samurai warriors in previous centuries had found Zen's mind control useful in developing combat consciousness, so kamikaze pilots visited Zen monasteries for spiritual preparation before their last flights.

Buddhism also has its parallels to the teaching by some Muslim clerics that dying in the process of killing enemies guarantees passage to paradise. Some Zen priests during World War II told prospective kamikaze attackers that they would gain improved karma for the next life, and in a deeper sense would lose nothing, since life is unreal and there is really no difference between life and death. Mr. Victoria shows that D.T. Suzuki, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s and became the prime spreader in America of Zen's mystique, stated in 1938 that Zen's "ascetic tendency" helped the Japanese soldier to learn "that to go straight forward and crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him."

Mr. Victoria also shows that Hakuun Yasutani, who helped in the 1960s to make Zen popular in the United States, was a major militarist before and during World War II, and even wrote in 1943 a book expressing hatred of "the scheming Jews." Stung by such evidence, leaders of Myoshin-ji - the headquarters temple for one major Zen sect - issued shortly after 9/11 an apology noting that "in the past our nation, under the banner of Holy War, initiated a conflict that led to great suffering." Myoshin-ji noted specifically that its members "conducted fundraising drives to purchase military aircraft."

Other Buddhist groups besides the Zen sects supported Japan's aggression and looked to historical warrant for it, and there was plenty.

The book continues by enumerating some of the many bloody conflicts and wars fought by Japanese Buddhists, including priests.

Regarding Christianity, Buddhist leaders were ruthless in their persecution, torture and massacre of Christians in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, desperate to prevent Christianity from becoming Japan's main religion after the opening of trade between the country and Europe. Not even a single Christian should be left alive in Japan, the slaughter had to be complete. The threat from Christianity was so great that different Buddhist sects put aside their disagreements and joined forces.

Classical Liberal Human Rights Are Not Today Socialist Human Rights

The principle of human rights is derived from the political doctrine of classical liberalism (not to be confused with "liberalism" in the modern American sense of left-wing political orientation).

Consistently with the liberal theory's emphasis on the individual's need to be protected from state interference and power, the concept of human rights has an originally negative connotation (permitting or obliging inaction), as the right not to be killed or physically attacked (right to life), not to be unduly restricted by the state (right to liberty), or not to be hindered in one's legitimate ambitions (right to pursuit of happiness). These are also called liberty rights, i.e. not entailing obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder.

The human rights principle that has been used in recent times has the same name but little else in common with the liberal, original one.

It has a positive connotation (permitting or obliging action): right to a job, a house, a minimum income, free health care, free education, social security, financial support during unemployment, sickness or retirement, welfare, and many more: the list is endless. These are also called claim rights, i.e. entailing responsibilities, duties or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder.

The state in this perspective has become a provider, like a parent, it is a "paternalistic" state. Far from trying to limit its reach and power to control, people who advocate these ideas cause the state to expand its authority, become bigger and more influential on people's lives. The state becomes more and more like, well, a socialist state.

Karl Marx's formula for communism, his final goal after the intermediate, transitional socialism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

This formula, especially in its latter part, is no other than the new re-definition of "positive" human rights by socialists.

Every need gives rise to a new human right.

The governed then expect everything from the state. But as rights are the other side of duties, and freedom is the other face of the coin of responsibility, inversely to delegate responsibility is to abdicate power and renounce some freedom. The more people expect from the state, the less control they have over their own lives.

So, what happened to "human rights" is what happens to a concept when used in a different theoretical context.

"Time" and "space" have very different meanings in Newton's classical physics than in Einstein's relativity theory.

Time and space are absolute in the former, relative in the latter. In addition, time becomes the fourth dimension of space in the theory of relativity.

Each theory redefines its concepts. So, modern-day socialists, who have virtually all ideological and doctrinal power in the Western world since the end of the Second World War, have redefined the liberal concept of human rights and transformed it into something antithetical to it.

Time and space are absolute in classical mechanics but relative in modern mechanics.

Human rights in classical liberalism are a protection from state power, but in contemporary socialist view they are a way to make that power never-ending. These two concepts, under the deceitful guise of the same name, couldn't be more in opposition to each other.

Should Human Rights Be Rejected?

In Europe in particular, “human rights” have become dirty words.

For that we have to thank supranational bodies like the European Court of Human Rights, that have given this concept a bad name through a never-ending proliferation of entitlements that often have very little to do with the concept’s original and true meaning.

Parts of the European counterjihad have also started systematically attacking the idea of human rights. And there were some who did not sign the Brussels Declaration at the conference of July 2012 because they had problems with its human rights strategy.

The phenomenon of so-called “judicial imperialism”, by which unelected judges through their verdicts supersede laws passed by elected representatives of the people, has long been recognized by many brilliant writers, from the British journalist Melanie Phillips to the Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, former President of the Italian Senate — the second highest office in the country — author of the book Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, and incidentally the professor with whom I prepared my undergraduate thesis, who wrote:

It was not a law of the United States Congress that first liberalized abortion in America, but a ruling of the Supreme Court. The Italian parliament has never authorized euthanasia, but court rulings have. No public debate preceded a court decision in the Netherlands that euthanasia may be performed on twelve-year-old children. Not by parliamentary law was same-sex marriage first granted equal status to marriage between a man and a woman in some countries. Not by parliamentary vote has eugenics become a right. No parliamentary decisions allow for polygamy to be freely practiced, as often occurs, or for the recognition of transgender rights. Nor is it the will of the people that distinctions be made between terrorists and ‘resistance fighters’ who plot to carry out massacres, or that migrants be allowed to remain in a country they have entered illegally.

However, these authors do not think, and I agree with them, that we should throw away the human rights baby with the bathwater of its distortions.

To bring clarity to this discussion, we need to look at the philosophical basis and origin of “rights”. People sometimes scoff at philosophy, but they probably don’t realize that practically all major views that are held today, mainstream or not, have at one point been formulated by philosophers.

Without delving too much into a historical analysis, the contemporary idea of human rights derives from the concepts of rights, natural rights and God-given rights in ethics, established by the 16th- and 17th-century thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers, continuing a Christian tradition.

In politics, classical liberalism is the doctrine that has at its centre the theory of the fundamental rights of human beings, namely that all humans are naturally free and equal, and their basic freedoms exist before, are independent from, and incoercible by the state.

Human rights are individual rights, not group rights. Liberalism does not recognize the right of cultures to exist or to be protected, which is one of the dogmas of multiculturalism in open contradiction with the theory of human rights, showing once again how the latter has been distorted beyond recognition — even transformed into its opposite — by its current usage and applications. Cultures that violate individual rights should not be protected at all.

The criticism levelled against human rights, that they conflict with each other so someone, usually a judge, has to decide on their relative weights, describes a situation that is common to all legal or ethical principles, so is not a good reason to reject human rights. Even a summary knowledge of the law will show you that laws constantly contradict other laws, so a balancing act is always required.

The problem, highlighted by “anti-humanrightists”, of the infinite, ever-expanding number of new “rights”, often used to help Muslims in the West, illegal immigrants and jihadists, is real, but the target here is this proliferation, not human rights.

Bear with me while I bring in philosophy again. In logic, a concept has two dimensions: meaning and sense. The former is the class of objects to which the concept refers, the latter the information it conveys. There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa. If you ask me what happened today and I answer “everything”, this reply’s descriptive power is almost nil because its meaning is so all-comprising.

The extension of the meaning of “right” has decreased its sense, to the point that today it just describes nothing more than a desire for something. In these times of public spending cuts I found even a “right to our library”.

In fact, many of the current “human rights” policies are violating real rights. The distinction between negative and positive rights is also crucial.

But I think that we cannot do without the principle of rights.

You can see why we need the concept of human rights when you think of free speech. Presumably all counterjihadists support free speech, but what does that mean if not the “right to” free speech? It’s impossible even to formulate the idea without a reference to rights or some very similar principle.

Anti-jihad people (in the comments section of the linked post) who say they only believe in democracy, narrowly defined as majority rule, and nationalism will find it impossible to derive the case for free speech from those two beliefs alone: if a nation’s majority decided to abolish free speech, they would have nothing to oppose this undesirable result.

It is no coincidence that we need the concept of rights, and it’s not just for semantic or political reasons. It goes deeper than that, to the foundations of our beliefs. It may be true that there have been great political movements without an ethical basis theoretically formulated, but I think that, in the same way as we need ethical guidance in our personal lives, so we do in our political actions.

Throughout this debate on human rights, I have encountered many references to “gut instincts” and similar, as bases for making political decisions. I believe that it’s dangerous to leave everything to that, for a simple motive. As individuals, we all have “instincts”, feelings, emotions which are entirely subjective and not shared by anyone else.
What we have in common is reason, which is universal.

Once we do away with a rational ethical foundation, which the rights’ view provides, we can no longer be sure of what other people in the same movement really want, what are their motives behind what superficially may appear the same aspirations: different people may be for democracy for all the wrong reasons, for example, as the Muslim Brotherhood clearly shows.

There are other ethical theories, but the only real rival of the rights’ view is utilitarianism which, as I explained here, would be a worse substitute.

In conclusion, human rights should not be discarded but, far from it, returned to their original meaning. Their present use, deriving from a quasi-socialist interpretation of them, is in conflict with the liberal doctrines and the spirit from which they originated.

Human Rights Are Not the Problem

I continue here my discussion of the issue of human rights which I started on the previous post Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, so I take it from where I left.

As in my previous article, I will concentrate on the arguments found on Islam versus Europe (henceforth IVE) because, as far as I know, that blog is the only Counterjihad voice to have attempted a systematic attack on human rights.

Throughout this piece I'll refer to human rights using the singular pronoun "it" because the reference is to the concept.

Interestingly, during our discussion IVE says that it advocates only two principles: democracy narrowly intended as majority rule, and nationalism. But later on it reveals that it also supports free speech. What is that if not a classical human right? When somebody says that he believes in free speech, what he means is that he believes in the "right to" free speech: it would not have any sense otherwise.

IVE talks about strategy and asks for a strategy, which is obviously a complex issue that IVE oversimplifies.

IVE doesn't really have a strategy. What it has is an aspiration, doing away with human rights, but doesn't know how to do it: a strategy would require to spell out how to achieve that.

That human rights is a false enemy you can see from a simple example.

Let's take freedom of religion, a typical example of human rights. Let's look at Cameron/Clegg's plan in the UK to force the Christian clergy to go against their religious principles and marry "gays" in church. If the British PM and deputy PM really believed in the right of people to act in accordance with their religious beliefs, they would not do that.

Much more difficult is to justify a "right" of homosexuals to use the services of an established Church in a way that contradicts the tenets of that Church.

Here you can see that the elites don't necessarily believe in human rights, they just use it arbitrarily to favour whomever, for non-human-rights ideological reasons, they like (in this case, homosexuals) when their interests (not rights, but desires) conflict with those of others who don't enjoy their favour (in this case the Christian clergy).

Human rights is just a tool they use because it's there and it's handy, but if they were deprived of it they would find another means.

The real problem is in the ideology of the elites, human rights is just a paper tiger and a false target.

IVE might say that human rights serves well any of the elites' unfair agenda because of its plasticity but, as I explained in Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, all legal and ethical principles, all laws need to be balanced against each other, so anything else they could use would have the same ambiguity and the same effect desired by them.

It's a case of appropriation. The current PC, pro-Islam elites have appropriated human rights for themselves and used it for their own agenda and purposes. We must take this principle back and show that it's been distorted and how it can be returned to its original, restricted, better defined meaning.

Many of the constantly-claimed “rights” are actually not rights at all, they are privileges. The definition of “right” these days has become so broad that what people really mean when they say they have a right to something is simply that they have a need or desire for something, as you can see when debt-burdened governments have to cut spending and people say they have a “right” to those benefits or services that are being cut or closed, even down to local libraries. Here's an example of this use of the term:

I believe in our community and its right to our library.

Basically, anything that anybody wants gives rise to a “right”, but this is simply a misnomer of the real concept. It is not difficult to show that these are misinterpretations.

It goes back to my original idea that the principle of human rights is in this predicament because it’s wrongly applied. The distinction between negative rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and positive rights, which we could call for short the never-ending proliferation of “entitlements”, pointed out by Gates of Vienna and vederso of EJBron, is fundamental.

That's the goal of our strategy on human rights. As for the means, this is a good, old-fashioned battle to truly, not just superficially, get public opinion on our side and for power through democratic elections, as it would be anyway, human rights or not.

These are the scenarios, if we concentrated on abolishing human rights:

Outcome 1) We succeed in getting rid of human rights. To achieve that we must have garnered so much power that human rights would no longer represent a problem anyway because, as I explained, the problem is just how the current elites apply and use this principle.

Outcome 2) We don't succeed and we've wasted precious time and resources in fighting a false enemy.

In summary, the real enemy are the ideology and goals of the present elites, not human rights, which is only the means they use to implement that ideology and achieve those goals and would be easily replaced to the same effect.

In the next posts I'll deal with other examples cited by IVE in support of its position.

Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?

The great German philosopher Hegel wrote something that is true as well as poetically beautiful, namely that philosophy is like Minerva's owl, that only takes flight at dusk.

What he meant is that the awareness of a historic period takes place at the end of it.

In history there is a constant shift of power, the dominant orthodoxy changes, and often the oppressed become oppressors and vice versa. And yet generally society, public opinion continue to see things as they used to be in a past age, to believe that today's victims are the same as in a previous historical time and those in power now are those who were in power yesterday, whose power is in fact largely gone.

You can see that every day when men and whites are discriminated against, yet people still believe that women and blacks are victims of discrimination. Homosexuals are classical oppressed of yesterday who are now - or rather the homosexual activists are - oppressing and persecuting whoever disagrees with them. Their "rights" trump everyone else's, in particular those of Christians, as the clergy of the Church of England who will soon be forced to marry "gays" in church well knows.

Another example of this Hegelian Minerva's owl syndrome comes from a part of the counterjihad movement. Some people in it, like the blog Islam versus Europe, say that human rights are practically responsible for all evils on earth, or at least in the West.

Whether they mean the ethical and political concept of human rights or the way it has been legally applied by - especially international - courts is a little ambiguous - although it has been better specified after my pointing out these ambiguities -, but it does not matter so much from their perspective because they are not in search of theoretical clarifications but of short- or medium-term strategic solutions to the problems caused by mass immigration and Islam in the West, or rather just in Europe. So they happily neglect the question of the validity of the concept because only its space-temporal consequences of here and now are important for them.

Minerva's owl comes into this because the anti-humanrightists (I had to find a shorthand, and this is the best I came up with) rely heavily on Samuel Moyn's book The Last Utopia, which is a classical case of misunderstanding of the historic myopia Hegel highlighted with his metaphor.

Moyn says that the great moral and political achievements of the last couple of centuries, like the abolition of slavery, owe nothing to the principle of human rights because this expression and idea only became popular in the 1970s. This allegedly helps the anti-humanrightists in their argument that nothing good has ever come out of human rights.

Aside from the literality of this approach (was the radio invented only when the term became widely used?), Moyn's fundamental error is that he thinks that historical figures and movements should be aware during their lifetime of their future role in history.

What Moyn says about human rights is true of most other constructs, constantly applied with hindsight to past events. History is a continuous re-interpretation of the past in light of the present. So there is nothing new or exceptional, no conspiracy here.

Specifically, the concepts of rights, natural rights and God-given rights in ethics were established by modern philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), John Locke (1632 - 1704) and the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, continuing a Christian tradition, so well before the 1970s.

It is no coincidence that suffragettes were calling for women's rights to vote and black leaders for civil rights.

The danger of not having any ethical theoretical foundation and relying just on democracy purely intended as majority rule, as anti-humanrightists advocate, should be obvious when analysing when that approach could take.

If the majority were allowed to rule without any ethical guidance or restraints, you would have nothing to oppose a majority group who decided to enslave and exploit for their own benefit, even in the cruellest and most violent way, a minority group.

One of the problems, these counterjihadists say, is that "rights conflict with one another so someone has to decide on their relative weights".

This is common to all laws. That's why there are judges. It is fallacious to think that this problem is limited to human rights. No law, legal or ethical principle has absolute validity. Even the most basic concepts, like individual freedom, have only relative validity. One person's freedom ends when another person's freedom begins. If a man had absolute individual freedom, he would become a despot, like the tyrants of the past.

So, in the same way as we don't consider the limits to the principle of individual freedom and the balancing act that we need to perform in its application sufficient reason to reject it, neither should the principle of human rights be discarded because "Rights conflict with one another so someone has to decide on their relative weights".

As anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the law will tell you, each law has only a limited scope, and often different laws contradict each other. There is always someone who "has to decide on their relative weights".

In fact, coming back to the issues of immigration and Islam, if there is a problem it is that human rights have not been protected and respected enough, be it those of the native Western populations, or of people dissenting from the politically correct line.

The examples that the anti-humanrightists give as reasons in support of their cause are in fact better viewed as the opposite.

I will explore them in a forthcoming post.