On Being Anti-Israel and Pro-Human Rights – A response to Hillel Neuer : By Abdul Halik Azeez

The following statement is being taken seriously and shared around on Facebook, I thought I might actually take a moment to consider why I found it so ridiculous.

“If in the past year you didn't CRY OUT when thousands of protesters were killed and injured by Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more victims than ever were hanged by Iran, women and children in Afghanistan were bombed, whole communities were massacred in South Sudan, 1800 Palestinians were starved and murdered by Assad in Syria, hundreds in Pakistan were killed by jihadist terror attacks, 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, villagers were slaughtered in Nigeria, but you ONLY cry out for GAZA, then you are not pro HUMAN RIGHTS, you are only ANTI-ISRAEL.” — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, July 15, 2014

Neuer’s implication is that those only protesting against Gaza not only do not care about human rights, they are only motivated by a desire to bring down Israel, and are not acting out of concern for innocent Palestinian civilian lives. They must be therefore be evil, immoral people.

Note that Neuer isn’t denying that what Israel is doing is a gross violation of human rights. He is only denying the right of those that do not fit into his chosen criteria to protest against it. Let us pause for a moment to digest the absurdity of this notion. At it’s most innocent, it is only an attack against the idea of freedom of speech itself.(The statement is full of absurd notions and rhetorical moonwalks. But sadly this doesn’t seem to have stopped anti-slacktivists and pro-Zionists going to town with it.)

What do we classify as ‘protest’?

Neuer accuses; ‘if you didn’t cry out’, but how does he know that the vast majority of his targets (and it must be a vast majority, else he wouldn’t have bothered with this) haven’t cried out against all those other atrocities? Simple, because he hasn’t heard them. Like that tree in the forest, your protest doesn’t count if Neuer didn’t hear it.

He assumes all protest should fit some standard criteria to be valid, ignoring the fact that our reactions are decided and judged in complex ways, and the ways in which we protest depend a lot not only on our feelings (i.e. pro-human rights sentiments) but also on how effective we think said protest will be, and who we assume we are speaking to when we protest.

Missing the obvious

Neuer’s problem is that current protest against Israel is just really really loud. Louder than anything he’s ever heard before. And, instead of seizing at the most obvious conclusion; i.e. louder the protest the more upset people are by it and by extension the more seriously you need to look at the violation in question, he chooses to take offense.

He demonizes the protesters for not being pro-human rights and being anti-Israel. But he shoots himself in the foot by essentially admitting that you are still pro-human rights if you have protested in the past at a level sufficient to satisfy him and are also protesting against Israel now.I.e. let there be no doubt that Israel is engaging in a gross violation of human rights.

How ‘Slacktivism’ works

Online citizenry is notoriously apathetic, self-absorbed and has a tendency to look at too many amusing pictures of kittens for too long. So it takes something really serious to get them to raise a hue and cry about something beyond their immediate surroundings.

Therefore, by giving voice to the sheer loudness of the protest against Israeli aggression in Gaza, Neuer has inadvertently pointed out an important fact; when looked at outside of his convoluted logic, it is obvious that the level of protest against Israel as opposed to everything else he has encountered is actually indicative of the seriousness of the problem.

Neuer’s energies would be far better spent tackling the real problem (i.e. Israeli terror) as opposed to taking down those who are trying to do the same in their own way (the effectiveness of which is a different debate). Also, and here we come to a rather thorny area

Um, the UN Watch is very likely an Israeli Lobby

The UN Watch (an NGO working out of Geneva claiming to be a UN watchdog) has long been hounded with accusations (surprise, surprise) of being an Israeli lobby. Though equally unsurprisingly, calls for its very incriminating pro-Israeli stance in all matters to be investigated to determine the above have been dismissed. It repeatedly focuses on presumed attacks against Israel and on lashing back against its critics, the above statement is a fine example of the fact.

Meanwhile in Gaza

Nearly 2000 civilians have died as a result of ongoing brutal Israeli strikes, many of them are children. I will not go into gruesome details here, they are available aplenty in the news. Let me just say this, if you are NOT protesting against Israeli terror in Gaza, even if it’s only with a thought, you aren’t just non-pro-human rights, how are you even human?

http://twitter.com/halikazeez