Fein & Franke Article Discussion

Our group found several parts of this week's articles applicable to our action committee subject. In particular, we talked about how the Fein article brought up the issue of when exactly a foreign conflict becomes "our business," when it becomes our place to go in and do something about it and when it's really none of our business. Since our subject is international refugees and displaces persons and our focus is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we felt that this is a particular important question with regards to who we give our help to, and when we give our help, in this conflict.

We also talked about the Franke article and how difficult it is to define universal human rights when you consider every society's own form of cultural exceptionalism: if the believe that what they're doing falls under their own culture's protection of human rights, applying our own definition of human rights to their situation can get complicated. For example, Americans feel very strongly that Afghan women should be properly educated, that education should be a universal right, yet not all Afghanis share that sentiment. Similarly, many of us Americans feel that capital punishment is a fair and justifiable part of our criminal justice system, while many folks in Europe consider this practice barbaric, a violation of universal human rights. As we dig deeper into our Israel-Palestine research, we will have to make sure to continually ask ourselves "does this violate a universal human right or does this violate an American ideal that we feel we ought to impose on everyone else?"