E. Benjamin Skinner, “A World Enslaved,” Foreign Policy, March/Spring 2008.

Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19^th century, yet there are more slaves today than at any time in human history, says author Benjamin Skinner.

Human rights activists may call $1 an hour sweatshop laborers slaves, regardless of the fact that they are paid and can often walk away form the job. But the reality of slavery is far different. Slavery exists today on an unprecedented scale, says Skinner:

• In Africa, tens of thousands are chattel slaves, seized in war or tucked away for generation.
• Across Europe, Asia and the Americas, traffickers have forced as many as 2 million into prostitution or labor.
• In South Asia, which has the highest concentration of slaves on the planet, nearly 10 million languish in bondage, unable to leave their captors until they pay off “debts,” legal fictions that in many cases are generations old.

Few in the developed world have a grasp of the enormity of modern day slavery and fewer still are doing anything to combat it, says Skinner:

• The U.S. State Department has secured more than 100 anti-trafficking laws and more than 10,000 convictions worldwide, but enforcement has resulted in no measurable decline in the number of slaves worldwide.
• Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. Justice Department increased human trafficking prosecutions from 3 to 32, and convictions from 10 to 98.
• Yet during the same period the United States liberated less than 2 percent of its own modern day slaves.

In the United States, there is a warped view of slavery as only including the commercial sex trade. And though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all its victims. Skinner warns that it is an approach that threatens to put most governments of the wrong side of history.

For more http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=14

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Coming to Terms with the Past Safeguards Human Rights for All:
The UN’s New Holocaust Outreach Programs
By Eve Epstein and Felice Gaer

At the UN, it has taken more than half a century to turn history right-side up when it comes to the Holocaust. Until 1998, top officials were routinely invoking euphemisms such as “World War Two” or “the acts of the Nazi regime” when referencing the Holocaust. Remarkably, no senior United Nations official had ever spoken publicly about the Jews as victims of the Nazi genocide. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention against Genocide former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan ended the UN’s silence when he said that “the Holocaust of the Jews” must never be repeated. Annan’s exhortation was no mere ceremonial pablum. Given the UN’s political realities, it was an act of courage and moral leadership. For the first time in the UN’s history, a secretary-general linked the Second World War and Nazi atrocities to its Jewish context and spoke about the relationship of the Holocaust to the Genocide Convention and the UN’s founding mission.

Today, an impressive UN website, http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/ is devoted to Holocaust education and remembrance.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — A report from the U.S. State Department details “an upsurge” across the world of anti-Semitism — hostility and discrimination toward Jewish people.

“Today, more than 60 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history, it is a current event,” the report says.

The report — called Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism and given to Congress on Thursday — is dedicated to the memory of the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II.

The report details physical acts of anti-Semitism, such as attacks, property damage, and cemetery desecration. It also lists manifestations such as conspiracy theories concerning Jews, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel.

“Over much of the past decade, U.S. embassies worldwide have noted an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, such as attacks on Jewish people, property, community institutions, and religious facilities,” the report says.

The report also deals with efforts to combat the bigotry, described by Gregg J. Rickman, the department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, as “one of the oldest forms of malicious intolerance.”

The report says violent acts and desecration of Jewish property happen whether there are a lot of Jews or only a few living in the region. Bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories regarding Jews, and anti-Semitic propaganda are transmitted over the airwaves and on the Internet.

It says that although Nazism and fascism are rejected by the West “and beyond,” blatant forms of anti-Semitism are “embraced and employed by the extreme fringe.”

For more, click here. 

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