Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are attacking Israel for acting in self-defense against Hezbollah, accusing her of “war crimes” and “indiscriminate bombardment” in Lebanon. These groups have a long, documented record of disproportionately picking on the Jewish state, so these latest condemnations cannot surprise. However, Jews will not understand this reflexive anti-Israel attitude unless they step back and examine today’s broad human rights agenda, which is blind to the world’s most oppressed people.

In 1993 I realized that human rights groups are not actually working for universal human rights. I read in the Economist that black women and children could be bought or sold for $15 in Sudan and Mauritania. I called Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to see if they knew. They knew. They sent me their reports on the issue.

Guardians of “human rights” knew that tens of thousands of blacks were being enslaved, yet they were not making a fuss. Why? Apart from guarding life itself, what is more central and sacred to human rights champions than guarding personal liberty – the freedom from being “owned” by another person?

So I went to Amnesty’s national convention and proposed that AI include emancipation of today’s slaves—numbering 27 million, mostly in the Third World—in their mandate. After a long floor debate, I lost.

AI won’t fight hard against Arab enslavement of blacks because their unstated, subconscious principles downplay non-Western crimes.

Why? The human rights community consists mostly of decent middle-class white people who, when they see—or think they see— evil done by Westerners like themselves, feel impelled to act. Think apartheid South Africa, Kosovo, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo.

But when these same folks see evil done by non-Westerners, they choke. They feel that real or imagined Western sin forfeits their right to criticize “others.” After all, they rationalize, we had slaves too. It’s prejudice, they feel, to criticize non-Westerners: they live in dread of being labeled racist, or worse, “Islamophobic.”

Human rights groups do not seek to bring justice to all people. They select cases to expiate Western guilt or scold white elites. In the Muslim world, millions desperately need their help: Blacks, women, gays, apostates, atheists, labor leaders, freedom fighters, and racial and religious minorities live without basic human rights. Yet Amnesty and others abandon them, ignoring non-Western totalitarianism so that they can narcissistically and theatrically define themselves in opposition to Western sins—imperialism, colonialism, and racism.

It's white guilt – not anti-Semitism -- that explains Amnesty's disproportionate attacks on Israel. "Rights" groups frame Israelis as “white, Western, colonialists,” and Palestinians as “indigenous, dark-skinned, and poor.” In other words, as classic victims of Western sin.

It is horribly wrong for “rights” activists to project their white guilt onto Israel, but that may not be their worst crime. In order to pound Israel (and America), Amnesty and other groups must look away, and stay out of the path of non-Western despots, who then oppress millions with impunity. Amnesty’s greatest sin is against these they have abandoned in order to, they think, make themselves clean.