Mufti Declares U.S. Foreign Aid Undermines Human Rights

Author: Sahan Mufti

America is supposedly fighting this war to ensure human rights, global security and to increase the security of the average American. It claims it is opposed to flouting international law and disregarding U.N. resolutions. One is only to look at the state of present American foreign policy to realize the sheer absurdity of such claims.
Israel has received in excess of $100 billion in U.S. aid and has coincidentally been carrying out an illegal occupation of a Palestinian population and Syrian land for almost four decades now, in violation of several United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs), including 242 and 338.
The State Department and numerous other organizations have confirmed that Israel has employed collective punishment, home demolitions, torture of detainees, extra-judicial killings and numerous other violations of Palestinian human rights, sometimes through state sponsored terrorism. The State Department has also recognized that as China's second largest arms supplier, Israel routinely violates American laws by supplying the Chinese with restricted U.S. military technology. This constitutes dangerous weapons proliferation.
America's second largest aid recipient is a brutal dictatorship. Egypt has been given over $40 billion in aid yet is also found on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of known proliferators, along with Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and Egypt "continues its effort to develop and produce ballistic missiles with the assistance of North Korea." Egypt's state sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda is as well known as is its "numerous serious human rights abuses."
America's largest non-treaty aid recipient also has the worst human rights record in the whole of the Western Hemisphere. According to the State Department the Colombian security forces that the United States supports and trains "commit numerous, serious violations of human rights" along with "illegally collaborating with paramilitary forces." The same paramilitary forces, known for their chainsaw skills, "kill, torture and threaten civilians" and are "responsible for an increasing number of massacres."
This comes alongside Drug Enforcement Agency reports that "all branches of government" in Colombia are involved in "drug-related corruption." The leader of the paramilitaries Carlos Castano recently "acknowledged ... that the drug trade provided 70 percent of the group's funding."
Turkey, the second largest aid recipient, has had possibly the worst human rights record in the Middle East region during the last decade when terror has "mounted to levels far beyond anything attributed to Milosevic in Kosovo before the NATO bombing."
"The ruthless measures of the Turkish state in the 1990s have left tens of thousands of Kurdish people dead" and have turned almost two million people into internally displaced persons by destroying over 3,000 Kurdish villages. Turkey's close relationships with Iran including a natural gas pipeline deal are all obviously in violation of the U.S. embargo. America sees Turkey as a key ally in its war against "tyranny."
Saudi Arabia is at present America's number one customer of military equipment and has received over $40 billion in military equipment since 1990. The U.S. government redirects 35 percent of all the revenue back into Saudi Arabia. Along with having an atrocious human rights record, Saudi Arabia, more than any other single country, protects and serves the jihadists waging war against the west. A majority of the Sept. 11 hijackers who were Saudi citizens.
According to the State Department, wealthy Saudis, who our oil baron leaders are in presently in bed with, "provide funds to HAMAS ... as well as to extremist elements in Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Private Saudi benefactors also sponsor paramilitary training for radical Islamists from many countries in Afghanistan, Yemen and Sudan," of whom Osama bin Laden is only one. The Saudis are also believed by many to be trying to buy access to a nuclear weapon. The American government's love affair with the Saudis is bathed in the blood of the victims of Sept. 11.
Very much in the same manner as our present client regimes carry out some of the most heinous crimes and pose a threat to international peace and stability, did Saddam in the 1980s and 90s with active American and British approval and support.
Whether Saddam Hussein truly poses a threat to the U.S. and the rest of the world is anyone's guess. What is incontestable though, is that the American ruling elite in no way cares for our security or human rights and actively undermines them by arming and supporting jihadists, drug lords, death squads and ruthless occupying armies, etc. on a daily basis.
Who will save us from Saddam Hussein is somewhat irrelevant at this point, but who will save us from this ruling elite is the real dilemma.

Sahan Mufti is an International Politics and Economics major from Bartlett, Ill.