Narrative on Human Rights History and UN Involvement

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Chapter 18: From Human Right to Human Wrongs: How the hard left hijacked the Human Rights Agenda The United States Constitution guarantees equality under American law, but the vast majority of the world’s population has no such legal protection. Human rights are not limited by geographic or political borders. They apply, at least in theory, to all human beings, regardless of nationality, race or religion. I have devoted much of my life to trying to turn theory into reality on an international scale. I was brought up in the golden age of human rights. Our heroes were Eleanor Roosevelt, Rene Casin and Albert Schweitzer. Our great hope was the United Nations with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our mantra was FDR’s “Four Freedoms:” freedom of speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear. The enemies of human rights were also clear: fascism, communism, racism, religious discrimination, McCarthyism, authoritanism, slavery, apartheid and other forms of oppression emanating from both the extreme right and left. All good liberals—and my friends, neighbors and co-religionists were almost all good liberals—were kneejerk supporters of the human rights agenda? And why not? How could any decent person be opposed to the Four Freedoms and other universal human rights such as racial and religious equality, the ability to travel freely, the right to a fair trial and the ability of workers to join unions and collectively bargain for fair wages and working conditions. We all admired the United Nations and looked to it as a guarantor of peace and a protector of human rights. And again, why not? It had been founded in the wake of the allied victory over Nazism by nations—mostly democracies—that had been on the right side of the war against Germany, Japan and other members of the Fascist Axis. One of the U.N.’s first actions was to divide the British mandate over Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, thereby creating the conditions that led to the establishment of Israel. I vividly recall watching the U.N. vote with my father on a small black and while television and cheering when cast the deciding vote in favor of the two state solution (that Israel accepted and the Arab states and Palestinian Arabs rejected.) In those golden years, there was no conflict between supporting the U.N. and supporting Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. My first confrontation with the United Nations My earliest experiences in human rights (other than signing the petition to save the Rosenbergs, which earned me both the respect and the concern of my frightened parents, and my act of civil disobedience against the slave-owning King of Saudi Arabia, which nearly got me arrested) involved the United Nations. When I was a junior in Yeshiva University High School, the United Nations came up with the idea of a universal calendar that would introduce a “bland day at the end of each year [that] would 317 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017404