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Who determines what are “basic rights” or “universal values”?
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has never permitted women to drive and has always whipped criminals and had a death penalty.
When did these practices first begin to contradict “universal values”?
When did it become America’s “traditional role” to defend women’s right to drive automobiles in every country, when women had no right to vote in America until after World War I?
In the America of the 1950s, homosexuality and abortion were regarded as shameful offenses and serious crimes. Now abortion and homosexuality have been declared constitutional rights.
Are they basic human rights? To whom? Do 55 million abortions in the U.S. in 45 years not raise an issue of human rights?
Has it become the moral duty of the U.S. government to champion abortion and LGBT rights worldwide, when a goodly slice of America still regards them as marks of national decadence and decline?
And if the Saudis are reactionaries whom we should join Canada in condemning, why are we dreaming up an “Arab NATO” in which Saudi Arabia would be a treaty ally alongside whom we would fight Iran?
Iran, at least, holds quadrennial elections, and Iranian women seem less restricted and anti-regime demonstrations more tolerated than they are in Saudi Arabia.
Consider our own history.
From 1865 to 1965, segregation was the law in the American South. Did those denials of civil and political rights justify foreign intervention in the internal affairs of the United States?
How would President Eisenhower, who used troops to integrate Little Rock High, have responded to the British and French demanding that America end segregation now?
In a newly de-Christianized America, all religions are to be treated equally and none may be taught in any public school.
In nearly 50 nations, however, Muslims are the majority, and they believe there is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet, and all other religions are false. Do Muslims have no right to insist upon the primacy of their faith in the nations they rule?
Is Western interference with this claim not a formula for endless conflict?
In America, free speech and freedom of the press are guaranteed. And these First Amendment rights protect libel, slander, filthy language, blasphemy, pornography, flag burning and published attacks on religious beliefs, our country itself, and the government of the United States.
If other nations reject such freedoms as suicidal stupidity, do we have some obligation to intervene in their internal affairs to promote them?
Recently, The Independent reported:
“Since last year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in northwest China have been unjustly arrested and imprisoned in what the Chinese government calls ‘political re-education camps.’ Thousands have disappeared. There are credible reports of torture and death among the prisoners. … The international community has largely reacted with silence.”
Anyone up for sanctioning Xi Jinping’s China?
Or do Uighurs’ rights rank below those of Saudi feminists?
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