> A friend of mine made the same comment recently in regards to condemning human rights abuses in Israel. You can condemn until your face is blue the human righ

> A friend of mine made the same comment recently in regards to condemning human rights abuses in Israel. You can condemn until your face is blue the human rights violations in Iran, but there's not a lot the Iranian population can do about it. Israel is a democracy, and therefore (at least in theory) the government represents the people. The problem with that line of thinking is that it twists perceptions, which can and does lead people to believe falsehoods. Harm can come when those falsehoods are acted upon (for voting, policy, activism, etc.). To use a little hyperbole: if you focus on condemning democracies for human rights abuses and ignore (to various degrees) the worse abuses of non-democracies, you may end up just delegitimizing democracy in the eyes of many, because you've created the impression that democracies are the bad guys and are the main human rights violators.