Don’t Democrats Care About Human Rights?

With so much turmoil in the Middle East and the recent reports of the horrible infringements upon human rights and common decency it makes me wonder if Democrats even care about human rights anymore?

Obama thus far, believes that Iran is full of gumdrop mountains and chocolate falls, but yet they make statements like the one earlier today in which they say that “it will take 11 days to wipe Israel out of existence!?”

Afghanistan has violated various human rights protocols and most recently shot and killed a man and a woman whom they felt were committing adultery and flogged another woman for some other sexist law.

Saudi Arabians don’t allow women to make eye contact or even drive cars, but we still conduct plenty of business with them and feminist liberals don’t seem to have as much outrage when it comes to crimes that are committed by these regimes.

There are other countries that also have human rights issues (China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) and lately it seems like the majority of these cruel dictatorships are now on Obama’s ally list.

The latest act that violates human rights took place in Iran over the weekend, where a 23 year old girl, convicted of murder as a juvenile, was hanged.  Authorities executed the 23-year-old woman Friday in northern Iran without informing her lawyer or allowing the family to be present, said the lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei. She was 17 at the time the crime was committed, in 2003.

Which leads me to this op-ed written in the Boston Globe of all places:

ARE HUMAN RIGHTS still a Democrat priority?

To Democrats of a certain age, such a question might seem incomprehensible. After all, it was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address proclaimed “to friend and foe alike” that Americans would resist “the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.” It was another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who made support for human rights an explicit foreign-policy concern, declaring at his inauguration: “Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.” It was Senator Henry Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik – Democrats both – whose landmark Jackson-Vanik amendment helped win freedom for tens of thousands of Soviet dissidents and refuseniks.

But somewhere along the way, Democratic priorities seem to have changed.

For example: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have used her recent trip to China to vigorously defend human rights – to make it clear to those who rule the world’s largest dictatorship that the new administration in Washington cares about the liberty and dignity of China’s people. Instead, she more or less announced in advance that talking to Beijing about human rights was pointless, since “we pretty much know what they’re going to say.” Besides, she told reporters, human rights must not “interfere” with more important issues, such as the economic crisis or climate change.

China got the message. As Clinton arrived in Beijing, dozens of pro-democracy dissidents were placed under virtual house arrest. True to her word, the secretary of state made no fuss about the regime’s brutality.

[...]

Closer to home, President Obama last week relaxed US policy toward Cuba, making it easier for Cuban-Americans to travel and send money to relatives living there. The president’s order was titled “Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba,” but in fact it said nothing at all about democracy and human rights in Cuba. Nowhere did it mention the Communist tyranny of the last 50 years – there was nothing about the denial of free speech; the abuse and murder of political dissidents; the persecution of journalists, librarians, and human-rights activists; the relentless surveillance and secret police; the regime’s stranglehold on property and employment.

Unfortunately, I think that over the years the priorities of the Democrat Party have become power and control.  This in turn has lead to less freedoms, liberties and more infringement upon our basic values like freedom of speech.

The party of JFK, it is not.

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