Human rights violations as vegetation

There's a piece by Conor Gearty in the latest THES which provides a perfect - almost pristine - example of how the 'progressive' apologia for terrorism works. The piece is subscription only but here is the guts of what I'm talking about. Gearty begins by rehearsing how the Palestinian struggle, from being understood at one time within an 'anticolonial narrative', is now seen as a terrorist struggle and therefore as 'uniquely evil'. This is due to a campaign 'conducted by US and Israeli strategists and their intellectual allies'. The effect, he says, is that...

...it disconnected Palestinian violence from its context and turned it into a more generalised problem, one that was faced by the Western world in general, rather than something that grew out of the injustice of the occupation.

OK, the first thing here is that the terrorist component of the Palestinian struggle is not just the product of a campaign over narrative representation; there have actually been terrorist atrocities against Israeli civilians. The second thing is that, insofar as Gearty is willing to allude to this at all, he (a) has it 'growing out of' the injustice of the occupation; and (b) his article is unencumbered by any word of criticism or condemnation of it.

Gearty then moves on. He moves on to the War on Terror. Let me say, before I also move on, that one of the points he moves on to argue I endorse without qualification: this is that the prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment should not be up for discussion; it is not something that should have been problematized. As I have said before on this blog, torture is an abomination. The right protecting people against it must be treated as absolute.

Still, the question is relevant why Gearty, lavish with his criticisms of the Bush administration about this ('moves away from... the rule of law and human dignity', 'the challenge to human rights is manifest'), and a stout defender of human rights ('the human rights idea needs to stand firmly against this kind of distortion of its essence'), should (a) have no interest in whether the bad policies of the Bush administration might themselves be thought to have 'grown out of' anything, and (b) fail to notice (or at any rate to speak about) the way in which acts of terrorism also challenge human rights, violating the rights of the maimed and the murdered; they also distort the essence of the human rights idea.

The locution 'growing out of' is, of course, part of the language of 'root causes', and it will be said on its behalf that there's nothing wrong with it; it merely situates whatever it situates within its social and historical, its causal, context. But everything has causes and a context. If for one type of grave human rights violation you only invoke causes and are altogether silent of any moral judgement, while for another type of grave human rights violation you're strong on condemnation and uninterested in invoking causes, then the causes you do invoke - the 'growing out of' - has an apologetic, an excusing, function.