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03/07/2018 Amnesty International, War Propaganda, and Human Rights Terrorism | Dissident Voice

Amnesty International, War Propaganda, and Human


Rights Terrorism
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 8th, 2013

In Jaramana on the outskirts of Damascus on 7 August, 18 civilians were blown to bits. Among the dead
were children. The Russian government condemned the crime against humanity. The crime was hardly
even reported in the Western press, not to mention the silence of Western governments who are supplying
the terrorists with arms. Perhaps the babies murdered in the attack were supporters of Bashar al-Assad
and were therefore guilty.

Meanwhile in the “land of human rights”, Parisians sipped coffee reading France’s “journal sérieux“ Le
monde. The French daily published a story from an organization internationally recognized for its role in
defending ‘human rights’: Amnesty International.

Amnesty International was outraged at the violence against civilians in Syria. But there was no mention of
the Jaramana massacre. Strangely, they had not heard the news. They were unaware that terrorists had
planted a bomb in a crowded civilian area in Jaramana murdering civilians. Instead, the Le Mondearticle
quoted statements made by Donatela Rovera, an Amnesty activist who had spent some time with similar
groups to those who had planted the Jaramana bomb.

Rovera was outraged at the Syrian army’s determination to defeat the terrorists. “The regime is using
banned weapons” she said.  In Rovera’s twisted view, banned weapons would not include car bombs
planted in crowded market squares. Banned weapons are the weapons that all  national armies fighting to
defend their nations use, such as ballistic missiles.

Rovera, our “human rights” activist was forced to admit that some crimes may have been committed by
her  beloved “rebels” but she, like a true professional, took great care to spin their crimes as collateral
damage:

“The war crimes which they commit essentially target members of the government forces and their militia
whom the rebels capture, but these groups have also become more visible among the civilian population,
upon whom they force their viewpoint.”

Amnesty’s human rights militant doesn’t elaborate on just what that viewpoint is. She makes no mention
that her beloved rebels are forcing women in occupied Aleppo to wear the burka, nor does she mention the
fact that they are using food as a weapon against the people in an attempt to starve them into submission.
No, the message is clear, the rebels are the good guys, although there are some rogues among them.

Is it not astonishing that a government that AIMS to kill as many as possible of its own people, a
tyrannical monster that sadistically massacres scores of its own citizens day after day, could manage to
stay in power, in spite of the fact that so many of those citizens support the heroic car bombers attacking
that government, support the head-hackers opposing that government, cheer on the child soldiers
wielding guns they can barely lift against that government, and that such a “popular uprising” could have
the full logistical, propaganda, and military support of the most powerful nation the world has ever
known, and still after two-and-a-half years of head hacking, cannibalism, and murdering mayhem, the Al-
Qaeda “rebels” still can’t bring the “revolution” to a close?

For Amnesty International, the small babies in the Jaramana rubble are obviously “government forces”. If
the opinion of Amnesty International were to the contrary, they would have published condemnations of
such crimes. They didn’t and are therefore complicit in these crimes. This is what Amnesty International
has been doing now for many years and since the start of this war against the Syrian people, Amnesty has
been unwaveringly on the side of the aggressors. Their reports of the war have all been based on “activists
say” and “according to activists”, “human rights militants” and yet they have condemned the Syrian
government on the basis of all these wholly unsubstantiated claims by their so-called “reliable” sources,
who have been caught committing crimes and blaming them on the government since unknown snipers
opened fire on protestors and police in the town of Deraa in March 17, 2011.

Amnesty International is a war propaganda organization for imperialism. In fact, the majority of the most
highly publicized human rights organisations in the West function as ideological indoctrination agencies
for neo-colonialism and imperialism. In this respect, they have replaced the Christian missionaries of the
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03/07/2018 p Amnesty International, War
p Propaganda,
y and HumanpRights Terrorism | Dissident Voice
19th century who provided the justification for colonial subjugation on the pretext of spreading “Christian
civilization”. Christian value-spreading colonialism has been superseded by human rights promotion.

During the terrorist campaign led by the CIA’s Mujahedeen against the Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan during the 1980s, Amnesty International published a report condemning alleged torture and
human rights abuse against the Mujahedeen terrorists by the Afghan government, while ignoring the car
bombings and atrocities against civilians being committed by Bin Laden and his hoards of drug-dealing
thugs, racists, and misogynists.

The mastermind of the ‘Afghan Trap’, designed to provoke a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, was US
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. He is also a former director of Amnesty International. The
former director of Amnesty International’s American section is Suzanne Nossel, former US State
Department Assistant Secretary for International Organizations. It is time to question not only Amnesty
International but the entire ideology of human rights.

Human Rights versus Social Rights

French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that man as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ was
essentially an invention of the 18th century, arguing that the notion of individuality conceived as
transcendental ego separable from social and historical forces, first appears in Western philosophy during
the Enlightenment. Foucault celebrated the “death of man” as human beings began to be conceptualized
by structuralists and post-structuralists as decentered points in a vast matrix of power relations, a vision
which ultimately deprived the human being of agency. The political consequence of this profoundly
Nietzschean conception of man is relativism, nihilism and petty-bourgeois, reactionary leftism, which
opposes everything and defends nothing. However, in spite of their rejection of man post-structuralists
and postmodernists still defend human rights.

Marxists also reject the notion of human rights due to the fact that it represents a bourgeois conception of
the human being. For Marxists, human rights are bourgeois categories that correspond to bourgeois class
interests.

Many left-wing activists defend the notion of human rights. There are others, however, who contend that
the concept of human rights should be critiqued and rejected; human beings as social entities are what we
should be defending; human beings as socially and historically constituted actors, shaped by their
environment but also capable of shaping and overcoming that environment; complex social, dialectical
beings not abstract egos with rights.

It should not surprise us that human rights agencies would function as the propaganda departments of
imperialism. The concept of the rights of man was born with the historical rise of the bourgeoisie and the
capitalist mode of production. Therefore, human rights go hand in hand with the rights of property.
Human rights are always property rights; the rights of exploiters; the rights of oppressors, of the
terrorists.

Instead, we need to defend social rights. Man, as Aristotle argued, is a political animal, that is to say, an
animal whose being is inseparable from the polis, the social fabric, the community.  Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and similar rights-based organizations are the call girls and rent boys
of a new type of hyper-individualist imperialism that is threatening the future of human beings’ ability to
empathize with the suffering of others. Human rights groups are more interested in “rights” than humans,
with titles and deeds than emotions and passions, with being on the “right” side of political correctness
than being truthful and honest; with the liberty of the market than the liberty of the human being.

Peace activists should not only denounce, expose, and condemn their lies and manipulation but the very
philosophy of human rights itself; for  human beings cannot be conceptualized as entities born with
inalienable rights but rather as social beings growing and evolving in dynamic communities that impose
ineluctable duties, debts and obligations upon them towards their fellow toilers and labourers. Without
such complex relations of interdependence there would be no society and consequently no human beings.

We should reject abstract human rights and proclaim  concrete social rights; rights to free housing; the
right to democratic ownership of means of production; the right to live in peace; the right to a job; the
right to privacy; the right to free education, transport and health care; the right to healthy food and water;
the right to freedom of expression.

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03/07/2018 Amnesty International, War Propaganda, and Human Rights Terrorism | Dissident Voice

We should not forget that most, if not all, the unspeakable crimes of this war have been committed by the
so-called rebels. We should not forget the massacres of Houla, Banias, Hatleh, Aleppo University, among
countless others less known, less publicized; and now the massacre of Jaramana. Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch and others, have been complicit in covering up these crimes. They should be held to
account. It is not because Amnesty International is a phony human rights organization that it is complicit
in the war crimes being committed against the Syrian people; rather, Amnesty’s war propaganda on behalf
of imperialism is simply a corollary of the bourgeois ideology adhered to by all human rights groups. The
current “humanitarian” wars so zealously defended by human rights fanatics are symptomatic of a deep
crisis of civilization.

In the 1960s, France’s Maoist film director Jean-Luc Godard attempted to show in his nightmarishly
prescient film Le Weekend how French bourgeois ideology would turn civilized humans into blood-thirsty
cannibals. This author has heard numerous commentaries in the French and international press playing
down and explaining the cannibalism of some of the Syrian terrorists as a reaction to the unfathomable
“brutality” of the “regime”. Cannibals and psychopaths have been converted into Montaigne’s noble
savages. This is the ideology of a decadent consumer society where certain atavistic tendencies of hunter-
gatherism are re-emerging in the chaos caused by the slow death of technocratic capitalism.

We must document crimes such as the massacre of Jaramana and  expose those who attempt to cover for
their perpetrators, not because they are violations of human rights but because they are violations of
humanity and the social networks that sustain meaningful human relations. We must stand up for the
human being and consign human rights to the dustbin of history.

Gearóid Ô Colmáin is a journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on
globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. He is a regular contributor to Dissident Voice, Global
Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English, Al Etijah
TV, Sahar TV, and has also appeared on Al J azeera and Al Mayadeen. He writes in English, Gaelic,
and French. Read other articles by Gearóid, or visit Gearóid's website.

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