Terror and Human Rights Violations, both begin with tyrants

"In 1948, the United Nations recognized the "inherent dignity" and "the equal and inalienable rights" of all human beings when it ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Though this week's U.N. conference in Geneva claimed to stand for these noble values, the world's dictators were the real winners."

So says Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a former guest of Hosni Mubarak's prisons and now a visiting professor at Harvard.

• Too many official country delegates didn't come to Geneva to stand up for the oppressed. They came to condemn the "colonial powers" of the West and Israel.
• The deep divide between those who seek to expose human-rights abuses and those who only use the language of human rights as a shield is not new.
• Rightly anticipating that the Geneva conference would be a forum for anti-Western and anti-Israel propaganda, the U.S. and a score of Western democracies boycotted the conference entirely.
• Unfortunately, lost in this circus were the real victims who suffer at the hands of autocratic and theocratic regimes.
• Though the decision to boycott the conference was understandable, I believe it was a mistake.
  

Read Professor Ibrahim's complete Op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal On-line, "Tyrants Get Another U.N. Platform."