Organised human rights warriors get things very wrong

We should all be grateful for the US’s decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) — if only because a frank examination of these rights things is overdue.

In SA, television host Ashwin Willemse is approaching the Human Rights Commission to challenge his employer, SuperSport, on a finding that excluded racism as the influencing factor in a live skirmish. The same Human Rights Commission could, technically, just as easily accept an application from Willemse’s fellow hosts, Naas Botha and Nick Mallett, seeking relief from the sports minister’s statement regarding the Willemse incident shortly after it occurred, which deprived both men of the fundamental human right of the presumption of innocence until otherwise determined.

In the US, a civil rights campaigner called the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), which has about $477m stashed away in the Caymans, has been forced into a humiliating retreat after it libelled a popular antiextremist an “extremist”. In the UK, the SPLC’s equivalent, Hope Not Hate, a group of neurotic buffoons, frequently smear anyone who diverges from their hyperpartisan world view.

The UNHRC is the most expensive expression of industrial hypocrisy ever designed, from which smaller institutions have leaked to copy its selective outrages and thus obfuscate and ultimately cheapen the concept of rights.

Because it is impossible to rehabilitate complacent bureaucrats who insist upon turning left when entering aircraft and demand all manner of subsidy, I propose that we dismantle the UNHRC, sack its boards and advisory panels, and suspend all human rights, eventually replacing it with a global basic decency index. Or, even better, common sense.

The period of suspension will last for as long as it takes countries in the Middle East region — the same ones persistently moaning about Israel in the present UNHRC — to grasp the term “common sense”. This is not a bad thing: we’ll have ample time to correct injustices provoked by political correctness and its fashionable extensions, prompting a golden age of delightful revenge.

Caught an overweight council official sniffing around the estate wanting to remove your kids because you’re white and working class? No problem. Arrange an impromptu trial and execute the cow. Bored by overly woke gender-fluid UCT students using the word “problematic” to excess? Easy now. Just raze the campus and build a car park. Concerned about the state of education? Take a flame thrower to every “gender studies” department in academia (it’s not even a proper subject, let alone a job).

I would encourage the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo to go to Brussels and liberate their property from those inbred descendants of King Leopold — then condemn the EU’s Guy Verhofstadt to spend the rest of his days extracting rubber from trees near Lake Kivu.

I suspect, however, that rights aren’t as important to the UN as pandering, and that the UNHRC is just a politicised opiate; allowing Ahmed from Pakistan to moan about people in Tel Aviv will hopefully shut him up for the rest of the year.

I also suspect there’s renewed scrutiny on the appearance of institutional moral superiority and its advocates, accelerated by, among other things, the damning exposure of Oxfam’s sexual terrorists who purged desperate young Haitians of their virginities after that country’s earthquake in 2010.

One of the most effective ways to destroy an objective is to load it with ideologues. The UNHRC lecturing anyone on rights and abuses has today about as much credibility as Nomvula Mokonyane trying to explain the Higgs boson particle to a room full of scientists.