« Woe Unto Thee America | Main | Memorial Day 2005 »
May 29, 2005
Nothing to Party About
So. The United Nations is planning its 60th Anniversary Party a little early. Perhaps they're afraid they won't make it until October 24, 2005. It seems that they're worried about who will attend the San Francisco gala event, and with good cause.
Sure would be nice if the President of United States backed up his comments on the United Nations by declining to attend any celebration of its existence, but I ain't holding my breath.
It was on October 24, 1945 that the United Nations came into existence as an instrument of peace with a vision to make the world a better place for succeeding generations - a world where nations are at peace with one another, where people's human rights are protected, where the equal rights of men and women are guaranteed, where the rule of law is observed and respected, and social progress and better standards of life are ensured for all.
Sadly, the United Nations has not only failed miserably, but has become a protector of terrorists and a supporter of the regimes which breed them.
When the President of the United States spoke to the United Nations in October of 2004, he spoke of the need for change and called for a new course of action against the threat of terrorism, to stop the killing of school children in Russia, the beheading of construction workers in Iraq, the murder by suicide bombers. He spoke of how, rather than engineers, doctors, scientists and social workers, the Muslim world has become the world's largest exporter of hatred and murder. He spoke of how Muslim equality for women has emerged under the guise of female suicide bombers. He spoke of the consequences of terrorism that have been perpetuated by the Muslim world for over a decade in New York, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, and Bali, Jakarta, Moscow, Madrid and Istanbul.
The President urged action against terrorism, admitting that "for too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability." He promised to implement the radical changes that would lead to freedom, to take the fight to the enemy instead of waiting for them to come to us. He acknowledged that it would not be easy and he urged the world to unite in the effort.
What effect could such powerful words have when most of those oppressors, most of those violators of human rights and decency, most of those dictators that our President was referring to in his speech sat before him as members in good standing of the United Nations?
Sitting on UN Commission on Human Rights are some of the world's worst mass murderers and violators of the very human rights they are supposed to protect, including Cameroon, China, Congo (DRC), Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The Chairman of the Commission is one of the worst human rights offenders, Libya. These are the very same human rights violators that the Commission is supposed to investigate and expose.
No wonder, then, that the UN has failed to even criticize China's human rights violations, failed to even discuss slave labor when the former Soviet Union existed, failed to even consider the sale of white women and children in Saudi Arabia, failed to investigate the denial of the most basic human rights to women in Asia and Arab countries, and failed to examine the slave trade in Arab countries.
In 2004, the Commission has voted against "special observation" of Zimbabwe's violations of human rights; and for the upgrading of the human rights status of Sudan, even while its dictatorship is committing genocide against its southern black Christians, carrying on slavery, and approving of systematic rape.
Consider the actions of Commission member Cuba. Castro had thrown into prison seventy-five dissidents, including journalists and librarians; and it had executed three men who hijacked a ferryboat to escape from this communist hellhole. No matter. The Commission reelected Cuba to another three-year term, "undoubtedly a recognition of the Cuban Revolution's work in human rights in favor of all our people," so Cuba proclaimed.
Ever careful to protect itself and its member dictatorships, the UN went so far as to terminate its relationship with the free speech organization Reporters Without Borders after it criticized the UN's human rights record. Reporters Without Borders had the audacity to suggest reforms that included the restricting of voting by dictatorships and claimed "that granting the chair to Qadhafi's [Libyan] regime has been a disgrace to the commission." The Commission voted 27 to 23 to suspend its relationship with the organization. All of the democratic members voted against it.
As Victor Davis Hanson said in the Wall Street Journal, "It is not the same United Nations of decades past, helping the poor nations with hunger, and sending troops around the world to keep the peace. Gone are the days when UNESCO and UNICEF provided selfless service around the world to fight disease and famine. Now it is a political body with a different agenda. Its membership is rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes."
Immediately prior to the President's October 2004 speech, Kofi Anan declared the Iraq War illegal to a BBC reporter. No surprise, considering that at the time of Iraq's blatant defiance of the United Nations resolutions on its weapons of mass destruction, one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen chaired the May sessions of the UN Conference. No surprise considering Kofi Anan's participation the Oil for Food scandal currently under investigation. No surprise considering the UN was silent while Saddam Hussein starved, tortured, maimed and murdered his own people.
Indeed, the UN was silent while Slobodan Milosevic methodically practiced ethnic cleansing in his country. The UN was silent while the Taliban systematically murdered their own people, repressed all human rights, and enslaved women. The UN was silent while in Rwanda and Burundi, half a million lives were lost in civil war.
The UN was silent while 800,000 people were murdered in 1994 during a systematic genocide organized by the Hutu government, and carried out against the Tutsi minority by its troops, police, and specially trained death squads. In 1999, an independent report condemned the UN's reluctance to accept evidence of a genocide, and reluctance to act once the genocide was undeniable.
The UN was silent while in North Korea hundreds of thousands have been murdered in the last decade, and possibly three million have been starved to death in a government created famine.
The UN was silent while 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica, Bosnia, during the Bosnian war of 1995. Another UN commissioned report on this asserted that the UN peacekeepers stood by while Serb troops massacred those to whom the UN had promised protection. The UN had refused to reinforce their peacekeepers with enough troops, and even then severely restricted the action of those that were there.
The UN was silent while over three million were killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with UN peacekeepers standing by and watching.
And the UN remains silent through the genocide in Sudan.
By its own admission in the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operation, the UN recognized that its peacekeeping efforts have failed. It undertook peacekeeping in only a third of the conflicts during the 1990s, and when the UN did do something, it failed or was not effective.
The United Nations is still "investigating" about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by its staff and soldiers in the Congo. The charges include accusations of pedophilia, rape and prostitution, some of which have been recorded on videotape.
"I am afraid there is clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place," said Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Although it promises a full investigation and to hold those involved accountable, the fact is that the UN has never been open or honest and has been known to ignore evidence in the past – including accusations of rape and murder by "peacekeepers."
And yet, the UN raises its voice, loud and clear, in consistent and constant condemnation of Israel. In the last few decades, more than half of the UN resolutions passed were against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel scores as high as the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom on political rights. On civil liberties, Israel scores much higher than the dictatorship members of the UN. Yet Israel remains only UN member excluded from participation in every UN committee, having been rejected for membership on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, UN Human Rights Committee, UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, UN Racial Discrimination Committee.
Consider the dictatorships of Algeria, China, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, all of whom are members of the UN Commission on Human Rights. The dictatorship of Egypt is a member of all six UN committees concerned with human rights treaties. The dictatorships of Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan participate on the Governing Council of the International Labor Organization. The bloody dictatorship of Iran is on the five-member UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Dictatorships who treat women as second class citizens or slaves like Egypt, Iran, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates are all members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
"So Americans' once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached the final stage--of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it." - Victor Davis Hanson
Happy Birthday United Nations, may this one be your last.
Posted by LindaSoG at May 29, 2005 06:11 PM
Comments
There is only one answer. Get out of the UN, by sustaining our membership were are propping up world terrorism and world dominance by Communism.
Posted by: Jack at May 30, 2005 10:39 AM