Don't abuse `human rights'
Kenny Liu's complaints about Brian Kennedy's pieces, the US and human rights (Letters, Dec. 22, page 8) display the same shallow understanding of human rights that Kennedy has written about so often and so effectively in these pages.
Liu argues that wartime atrocities, rapes and even vandalism by a Taipei American School student are "violations of human rights."
The fact is that US troops are not ordered by their commanders to rape girls in Okinawa. Rape is a crime and a violation of the victim's rights, but it is not a human rights violation on par with a lack of jury trials, a lack of rights for the accused, the lower legal status of women and other systemic problems in Taiwan. That is a whole different order of problem. US officials were correct in those cases to complain of the Japanese legal system's well-known lack of respect for the rights of the accused. As for US officials not having sympathy for the victims, I'm not even going to dignify such a diatribe with a response.
In the vandalism incident, Liu does not even bother to say whether the child involved was American, let alone make a case for impudence being a human rights violation.
If Liu properly understood the concept of human rights, he'd be complaining about the presence of US troops in Okinawa and their lack of respect for local autonomy. He'd have pointed out that US troops committed atrocities in Vietnam because of systemic problems. He'd have words for the behavior of US textile companies in the Asia-Pacific region. He'd be arguing about the US waffling on the issue of Taiwan independence.
Instead, Liu appears to believe that an adolescent acting out is a major human rights violation, on par with My Lai, even.
Michael Turton
Leander, Texas
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