How Ideology Hijacked Human Rights
We find ourselves today living through a period when even the most elementary moral ideas are no longer safe from political weaponization.
Concepts once regarded as universal – even, foundational – now regrettably serve as pawns on an ideological chessboard.
The resulting cognitive terrain resembles something out of the popular Netflix series "Black Mirror" or the television show "The Twilight Zone": a disorienting landscape where words are stripped of meaning, truth is inverted, and institutions created to defend human dignity instead participate in its distortion.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and its collaborators in southern Israel.
The barbarism of that day is well documented: more than 1,200 people were slaughtered – Jews, Arabs, Bedouins. Families were burned alive.
Whole communities were terrorized. Men and women were raped and mutilated.
Children were executed. Foreign nationals were murdered indiscriminately. More than 250 people were dragged into Gaza as hostages; many were killed along the way or murdered in captivity. Survivors – even minors – were subjected to torture, starvation, and sexual violence.
Yet even as these crimes were unfolding, global social media platforms became distribution channels for terror propaganda – unedited videos of killings and kidnappings designed to traumatize Israelis and rally sympathizers circulated like viruses.
Within days, an elaborate ecosystem of denial and inversion took hold: claims that the murders and rapes were fabricated, that the victims were responsible for their own suffering, that the slaughter constituted "resistance," and the moral corrosion was heroic. The messaging was orchestrated – amplified by bots, opportunists, ideologues, and the chronically gullible.
By Oct. 8, this machinery was operating in broad daylight.
Cities and campuses in the United States and Europe witnessed choreographed demonstrations celebrating the attacks. Wearing a keffiyeh became a fashionable badge of defiance; antisemitic attacks spiked, and supporting Zionism–even identifying as Jewish–became dangerous.
Against this backdrop, the conduct of the "human rights" establishment became nothing short of a case study in selective outrage.
Amnesty International took more than two years to produce a comprehensive accounting of the October 7 atrocities.
Even then, internal objections nearly derailed the effort. Some staff likely feared that acknowledging the scope of the massacres and rapes could undermine their cherished political narrative.
By contrast, Amnesty's report accusing Israel of “genocide in Gaza,” released a year prior, generated no comparable hesitation.
But even Amnesty appeared measured when contrasted with the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide.
Appropriating the name of Raphael Lemkin – a Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide after studying the Nazi extermination machine – the Institute has for years turned Lemkin's legacy on its head to vilify the world's only Jewish state.
Though Lemkin's family has strongly objected, filing complaints with Pennsylvania authorities; and prominent Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, have appealed directly to Gov. Josh Shapiro, the distortion of Lemkin’s moral framework persists.
Indeed, the Lemkin Institute's worldview remains predictably uninformed and disinterested in disguising its naked political warfare: the United States is a "settler colonialist" project; Israel is the same–this, despite an unbroken Jewish presence in the land for more than three millennia.
Its 2023 report devotes 13 uninterrupted pages to excoriating Israel and repeatedly accusing it of genocide. Notably absent: meaningful criticism of Hamas or support for the hostages still held in Gaza at the time of that publication. Neither Amnesty International nor the Lemkin Institute responded to the author’s inquiry and request for comment on the issue.
Silence remains the most hostile form of complicity.
But for those who suspect the broader human rights community's axe grinding is limited to Israel, consider Iran.
This month, Iranians filled the streets demanding basic necessities and, increasingly, the regime's overthrow.
According to UN Watch, "the majority of UN human rights experts" remained silent as the Islamic Republic engaged in violent crackdowns ordered by the regime’s Supreme Leader and carried out by the IRGC against civilian protestors – with just 5 of 87 experts condemning the atrocities.
Their deafening quietude, UN Watch concluded, was not a result of "institutional paralysis" but rather "selective engagement."
Consider also Yemen, where a civil war has pushed more than 18 million people to the brink of hunger and left millions of women and children acutely malnourished, even as 73 UN aid workers are held hostage by the Houthis.
Or Sudan, where civil war has displaced 12 million people and left roughly 21 million facing acute food insecurity – a crisis that seems only of interest to school children participating in Model UN conferences.
Or Nigeria, where Islamist militias continue to massacre Christians with impunity.
Each of these crises represents the kind of systemic mass suffering the human rights community should confront.
Yet none generates the activism, campus mobilization, or sustained moral outrage that anti-Israel campaigns regularly inspire.
The uncomfortable truth is that in today’s human rights arena, the value of human life is too often determined by political fashion. As George Orwell wrote in his allegorical novella "Animal Farm": "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Such is the world we now inhabit–one where human rights are negotiable, victims are ranked, and institutions with a duty to uphold universal norms have abandoned their responsibilities in favor of ideology.
(A related article may be found here.)
Ivan Sascha Sheehan is the interim dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore where he is a professor of public and international affairs. The views expressed are the author’s own. Follow him on X @ProfSheehan. Read more Ivan Sascha Sheehan's Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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