Were they depicting a foreign crisis, these images would have been - TopicsExpress

Were they depicting a foreign crisis, these images would have been condemned by the U.S. State Department and policymakers as evidence of human rights violations. But when they come out of our own backyard, we don’t call them human rights abuses. They are, at best, labeled police misconduct and civil rights concerns. After all, America is a champion of human rights. So why is the world so outraged? Because much of the world is tired of the U.S. double standard when it comes to human rights. It should come as no surprise that people associated images from Ferguson – full of teargas, rubber bullets, and militarized police deployed to suppress protests – with countries with poor human rights records, like Egypt, Bahrain, Israel, and Turkey. Global opinion is informed and influenced by the internet and social media, with domestic human rights abuses quickly and easily disseminated. Even when the violator is a superpower, we are reminded, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”