Can the West Ever Understand Human Rights?

The answer is no. The standards inherent in Western leaders are impossibly color conscious and geographically specific. The core of human rights as a philosophy and as a discipline of international public law is that each and every person is a valuable being and deserves a life free from oppression and abuse on all levels. After the US reluctantly intervened in the first and second world wars, it was named "the great humanitarian": then came the second half of the twentieth century.

As humanitarian wars took the forefront of international conflict, the US was suddenly unavailable as presidents began to forget their ideological foundation: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, yadda yadda. The West has proved that it cannot understand human rights because it has a selective conscious. Though it took the Clinton Administration months of ethnic bloodshed, an unprecedented number of resignations within the Department of State and the promise of primary military support from NATO, the US did end up intervening in the genocide of the former Yugoslav nations. The situation there was that Muslim men and boys were being torn away from their families, isolated in detention areas, murdered and buried in mass graves that to this day have not fully been recovered. The approximations of deaths in Bosnia range from 8,000 to 10,000. Regardless of the actual number of deaths in former Yugoslavia, it remained in the thousands and the Clinton Administration decided to intervene. Yet when it came down to assisting a tiny, impoverished African country, we refused to even acknowledge its occurrence.
"In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days." Yet in this case, the Clinton administration not only ignored direct and fully incriminating evidence about the planning of the Rwanda genocide ("The Dallaire Fax"), but they made it administration policy not to discuss or intervene in the actions of a rogue government nor dirty their hands with peacekeeping efforts (PDD 25). Hence, when a million people died in Rwanda we made it POLICY to let it happen, but we intervene in a FAR lesser genocide in Europe. And we only did that after standing by an arms embargo on the Muslim victims; preventing them from defending themselves. This in turn forced them to seek help from Islamic extremists, including Osama Bin Laden himself. West values the human rights of those who they consider valuable. That is a gross perversion of the core of Human Rights.