In December, Amnesty International released a lengthy report alleging that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. When Amnesty’s Israeli branch registered its objections, the organization promptly kicked it out. Elliott Abrams comments:

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are colossal. In the world of human-rights organizations, which are often small and poorly funded, these two giants dominate access to funding and to media. . . . In 2021, Human Rights Watch had $256 million in assets and revenue of $130 million. It employs more than 500 staff members in 105 locations globally and has an annual budget of $97 million. Amnesty International is even larger, raising $436 million in 2020 and spending $376 million.

Compare that to charities like the International Committee for Tibet, which spent less than $8 million in 2023. But both these colossi have one great prejudice: they seem to hate Israel.

Alluding to the Roman author Juvenal, Abrams asks who exercises oversight over these self-appointed guardians of human rights, which have amassed wealth and prestige. The answer?

No one. Not within those organizations, for fear of being expelled. And not in other human-rights organizations, because staffers will be reluctant to criticize such powerful players—in part because anyone in the field may think he or she might one day seek employment as part of their large (and at the top very well-paid) staffs, and in part because they do not wish to tangle with organizations having such influence.

Gratitude is owed to Amnesty’s Israel branch (or as it is now, Amnesty’s former Israel branch) for speaking out and rejecting biased and unfair reporting. But the fundamental problems remain: the world’s two largest “human rights” organizations by any measure are both deeply hostile to Israel, seem to be beyond effective criticism, and show their hostility repeatedly in a never-ending series of unbalanced and unfair attacks on the Jewish state.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”