The death of free speech at the U.N.

In FrontPage today, Robert Spencer argues that "Free Speech dies at the U.N.:

The war against free speech is advancing rapidly: Associated Press reported Thursday that “Muslim countries have won a battle to prevent Islam from being criticised during debates by the UN Human Rights Council.”Council President Doru-Romulus Costea explained that religious issues can be “very complex, very sensitive and very intense…This council is not prepared to discuss religious matters in depth, consequently we should not do it.” Henceforth only religious scholars would be permitted to broach them.

“While Costea’s ban applies to all religions,” AP explained, “it was prompted by Muslim countries complaining about references to Islam.” The ban came after a heated session on Monday, when the representative of the Association for World Education (AWE), in a joint statement with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, denounced female genital mutilation, the penalty of stoning for adultery and child marriage as sanctioned by Islamic law.

And yet, millions of Americans still support dumping millions of American tax dollars into the U.N. cesspool!

Obama and your parental rights

Michael Farris, professor of constitutional law, writes:

...Obama supports the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that would have disastrous consequences for the American family. This treaty would be, according to our Constitution, part of the Supreme law of the land. And in the U.S. international treaties override state law.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the official UN tribunal granted the authority to interpret and enforce the Children's Convention, which sets forth an exhaustive index of children's rights, many at odds with the rights of parents. The tribunal has held, for instance, that the United Kingdom violated children's rights in Wales by allowing parents to withdraw their children from public school programs without first considering the child's wishes.

What this means in plain English is that the UN has determined that the government will decide for all what is best for our children. The government has authority to intervene in decisions regarding a child's education. The government will choose whether the child's wishes or the parent's wishes are the best for children.

This is the ultimate dream of elitists: they get to decide for all of us what is best for our own children.

Kosovo, a threat?

According to an article on WorldNetDaily:

Far from the usual claims that NATO stopped a humanitarian catastrophe in
Kosovo in 1999, the past nine years have seen a slow-motion genocide in progress
against the province's Christian Serbian population under the nose of the U.N.
and NATO, and at times with their facilitation. Two-thirds of the Serbian
population already has been expelled and have not been able to return safely to
their homes, along with similar proportions of other groups (Roma, Gorani,
Croats and all the Jews). Over 150 churches and monasteries have been destroyed,
with crosses and icons of Christ attracting particular vandalistic rage, a
testament to Kosovo Albanians' supposed secularism and pro-Western
orientation.

Global warming and Darfur

"UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday" (AFP, See LGF).

Yeah right. Global warming caused Muslims to kidnap, torture, rape, enslave and murder Christians by the millions! I sure hope this guy is an absolute idiot because if he knows better, it would be a very, evil person who would knowingly try to justify the mass slaughter of millions of innocent people.

Maybe the Secretary General's time would be better spent figuring out how to keep Muslims from firing rockets into northern Israel before another war breaks out.

U.N attacks freedom

According to an article in Assist News Service the United Nations has passed a resolution threatening religious freedom. Excerpts of the article appear below:

On Friday, the United Nations passed a seemingly innocuous resolution combating
the “defamation of religions.” Further investigation reveals that this motion
has erroneously equated legitimate discussion of religious beliefs with the
incitement of religious intolerance. Under this resolution, when an individual’s
religious sensitivities are offended – no matter the intent or consequences of
the opinions expressed – the state must protect the religion from being defamed,
or blasphemed.

Lying at the heart of this resolution is an attempt by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) to impose universal anti-blasphemy laws – an offence punishable by death in many countries – thereby stifling open discussion of religious beliefs.

This is a troubling development, especially since countries across the globe are increasingly using anti-blasphemy laws to punish religious minorities for questioning the beliefs of the majority religion. Such laws are no longer confined to Islamic countries; they are now being called for in democratic societies. Individuals who came to the West to escape persecution are once again in danger.

In an intervention before the Council, Heather Cayless of the Jubilee Campaign stated, “In a diverse society everyone’s personal beliefs will at some point be offended. The vague wording in this resolution leaves all adherents, both in minority and majority beliefs open to accusations of religious intolerance.”

The UN’s history of passing resolutions “combating the defamation of religions” is creating a new universal right – the right to not be offended. Moreover, objective criteria for evaluating “defamation” are now replaced by considerations of the feelings and emotions of the hearer irrespective of intent or effect.

Ultimately, this threatens the freedoms of expression and religion, which include the right to express views critical of or even hostile to the beliefs of others. The pursuit
of religious truth necessitates critical interpretation of religious texts and
doctrine. Anti-blasphemy and defamation laws suffocate this freedom.

This resolution poses a dire threat to the rights of individuals – both Muslims and
non-Muslims alike – to discover and live out their religious beliefs without
fear of prosecution.

True religious tolerance can only be protected in societies that respect the right of individuals to freedom of expression and religion, allowing unfettered dialogue on dissenting religious opinions as individuals search for truth.

Read the entire article at Assist News Service

Hezbollah rearming

According to a recent article in the Toronto Star, Hezbollah continues to rearm in Lebanon:

Hezbollah openly says its fighters have spent the last seven months preparing
for another major battle with Israel by regrouping and amassing some 33,000
missiles.

"We in the resistance have weapons, and we openly declare that we have weapons, that we are completing our preparedness for a greater and more dangerous stage," Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address last month.

What's more, the Israeli military has said in recent weeks it has intelligence that Hezbollah is continuing to smuggle Iranian-supplied weapons across the Syrian border into Lebanon.

Meanwhile the Lebanese government, the United Nations and the world community, like the proverbial "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys, pretend that nothing is going on.

Hezbollah buildup in Lebanon

The Associated Press is reporting that:

Israel's defense minister on Wednesday accused Syria of allowing the
rearmament of Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and said Israel has the right to
act "forcefully" against the Shiite militia to counter the threat.Defense
Minister Amir Peretz's comments came days after Israel said it discovered four
bombs in northern Israel recently planted by Hezbollah guerrillas. The Israeli
claim, denied by Hezbollah, immediately raised tensions along the volatile
border.

With all the U.N.'s self-righteous indignation and cries for peace during last summer's war, I'm wondering what the United Nations is doing to stop Hezbollah's military buildup now?

If Israel has to fight Hezbollah again, they should give non-Hezbollah-supporting residents fair warning to move out of southern Lebanon, and then take off the kid gloves this time.

Alleged U.N. corruption

The Associated Press is reporting new allegations of corruption at the United Nations including allegations of three million dollars skimmed from the U.N weather agency and the firing of an investigator.

Torture in Egypt

Since the United Nations, European nations and Leftists in general seem so concerned about the mistreatment of terrorists at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, why are they so silent about the humiliation, brutality and torture that is a regular part of Egyptian imprisonment? Excerpts of a recent Associated Press article appear below:

The footage is shocking: A man lies screaming on the floor of a police
station as officers sodomize him with a wooden pole.

Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the
film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's
friends in order to humiliate him.

Human rights activists say police brutality is deeply entrenched in
Egyptian life.

"Torture in Egypt is just routine, exerted on everybody whether in
political or criminal cases, and the police don't really feel any shame in
practicing it," said Mohammed Zarie, head of the Human Rights Center for the
Assistance of Prisoners.

Hafez Abu Saada, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human
Rights, said his group reports some 400 cases of alleged police abuse a year. He
said 20 percent result in prosecutions, and convictions are much rarer.

Palestinians and persecution

The United Nations, European governments, and Leftists are so concerned about the treatment of terrorists at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, why don't they say anything about Muslim persecution of innocent Christians in Palestine?

A number of Christian families have finally decided to break their silence and
talk openly about what they describe as Muslim persecution of the Christian
minority in this city.

The move comes as a result of increased attacks on Christians by Muslims over the past few months. The families said they wrote letters to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican, Church leaders and European governments complaining about the attacks, but their appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

According to the families, many Christians have long been afraid to complain in public about the campaign of "intimidation" for fear of retaliation by their Muslim neighbors and being branded "collaborators" with Israel.

But following an increase in attacks on Christian-owned property in the city over the past few months, some Christians are no longer afraid to talk about the ultra-sensitive issue. And they are talking openly about leaving the city.

Read the rest in the Jeruslaem Post.

More child rape and sexual abuse

The Associated Press reports that more allegations of child rape and sexual abuse perpetrated by United Nations “peacekeepers” have surfaced. The United Nations says it will investigate

Isn’t that a little like sending a fox to investigate the hen house. See Recliner Commentaries December 4, 2006 post).

U.N. renovation and Donald Trump

In an interview on Fox and Friends this morning, Donald Trump said that he has great respect for the United Nations but that their new renovation project is estimated to cost 1.9 billion dollars. Trump said that this is the next “food for oil” scandal. He met with Kofi Annan and offered to do the job for 700 million. The response was essentially, don’t call us, we’ll call you. So as you make out your income tax in a couple months, just remember that some of your hard earned tax money is going for this.

I agree that the United Nations needs to be renovated—let’s ask Donald Trump to turn it in to an apartment complex for New Yorkers.

Weapons flowing into Gaza

Not only are weapons flowing into southern Lebanon, they are also flowing into Gaza via Egypt. Why isn't the U.N. reacting?

The United Nations: worse than you think

The following are excerpts from a book called, “The Beast on the East River” by Nathan Tabor.

"Reports of brutal sexual misconduct by UN peacekeepers have surfaced periodically for more than a decade. But these charges have rarely been investigated thoroughly and exposed to the light of public scrutiny. That veil of secrecy and denial began to lift in May 2004, when major media sources first began to publish reports of alleged UN corruption and sexual scandal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

"Those charges included the rape and sexual abuse of Congolese women in certain UN refugee camps staffed by UN soldiers and civilian employees. The UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) employs a large civilian staff, as well as about 10,800 peacekeeper soldiers from fifty countries. Fighting continues in war-torn Central Africa, despite a peace treaty signed in 2002, and the International Rescue Committee has estimated that the combination of war, famine, and disease kills thirty-one thousand civilians each month."

"The specific allegations, as reported by the Independent (London), initially centered around the sexual abuse of teenage girls who lived at the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, in the northeastern Congo, home to about sixteen thousand refugees. Many of these girls, some as young as thirteen, had already been the victims of multiple rapes by the various roving militia groups that had terrorized the region during the preceding six-year conflict commonly known as “Africa’s world war.” These militias regularly used rape and sexual violence as weapons of warfare."

"Desperate for food, both for themselves and in some cases for the babies they had birthed after being raped, each night these young girls would crawl under the wire fences that separated their compound from the UN soldiers’ barracks, where they would sell their shrunken juvenile bodies for as little as two eggs, a banana, or a cake. Their willing but often brutal customers were usually the UN peacekeepers from Morocco or Uruguay."

"By November 2004, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services had issued a confidential report that said its own “investigation into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of local Congolese women and girls found that the problem was serious and ongoing.” Eventually more than fifty UN civilian staffers and peacekeeper soldiers in the Congo were charged with 150 separate crimes, the most serious being pedophilia, prostitution, and rape at gunpoint."

"At the remote Kisangani outpost on the Congo River, UN staffers from Morocco were found to have impregnated eighty-two local women and girls, and Uruguayan staffers fifty-nine more. Women there had given birth to hundreds of illegitimate children fathered by the UN peacekeepers. One soldier charged with rape was hidden in the barracks for more than a year. Major-General Jean Pierre Ondekane, a rebel commander who later became Minister of Defense in the postwar Congolese government, told a top UN official in July 2002 that the only thing the UN peacekeepers at Kisangani would be remembered for was “running after little girls."

"Kathryn Bolkovac was a former Lincoln, Nebraska, policewoman who worked for UN security in Bosnia as an employee of the American security company DynCorp. As part of her job, Bolkovac uncovered massive sex corruption, human trafficking, and prostitution rings in which UN officials and policemen were active participants. Girls as young as fifteen were sold into sex slavery to bar owners, where they were forced to dance naked and perform sex acts for their owners and bar customers. If they refused, they were locked up, starved, beaten, and raped."

"In 1990, Boutros Boutros-Ghali was Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs. Part of his job was to sell weapons, and in that capacity he approved an initial $5.8 million arms deal with Rwanda. That sale opened the door to others, so that between 1990 and 1992, Cairo shipped $26 million worth of ammunition, grenades, rocket launchers, and mortar bombs to Rwanda. It was those arms that the Hutus later used to crush the Tutsis.18 When the wholesale slaughter began in 1994, Boutros-Ghali had moved up in the world—he was now the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The head of the UN’s peacekeeping operations at that time was none other than Kofi Annan."

"The UN Force Commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, sent an urgent fax to Annan requesting permission to defend the helpless Tutsi refugees who were flooding into UN compounds seeking safety and protection. Annan’s fax back to Dallaire ordered him to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality and forbade him to protect the desperate Tutsis. Boutros-Ghali refused to intervene. Later the UN troops were withdrawn completely from the scene of the carnage, leaving behind up to 800,000 hapless Tutsis, many of them bludgeoned to death with clubs or hacked into pieces with machetes by the bloodthirsty rampaging Hutus. The world watched for weeks as the bloodbath continued unchecked."

Please read the rest at “The Beast on the East River.”

Hezbollah re-arms in Lebanon

Remember last summer how the United Nations was going to reinforce its presence in Lebanon to keep the peace? What the United Nations actually did was, in effect, to stop Israel's pounding of Hezbollah so Hezbollah could re-arm for another day. Terrorism expert Daniel Pipes posted this to his website:

"Today comes a report by Uzi Mahnaimi in the Sunday Times (London), 'Hezbollah's missiles back in Lebanon,' that Hizbullah's forces are back in south Lebanon and stronger than ever. He quotes an Israeli intelligence officer. 'Since the ceasefire, additional rockets, weapons and military equipment have reached Hezbollah. We assume they now have about 20,000 rockets of all ranges — a bit more than they had before July 12." In a recent interview with Al-Manar, Hizbullah's television station, Hassan Nasrallah confirmed the Israeli estimate, claiming Hizbullah now possesses at least 30,000 rockets."

"Israeli military intelligence has warned the government that renewed fighting with Hezbollah, which it regards as a terrorist organisation, should be expected as early as next spring. In response, Israeli forces have taken emergency action. They have postponed a plan to reduce the length of national service — currently 36 months for men and about 24 months for women — and are stepping up production of better armoured tanks. They are also grouping all special forces into a single new division and are developing laser technology, jointly with the United States, to shoot down Hezbollah's rockets."

Who cares about Sderot?

According to WorldNetDaily, Hamas announced yesterday that “The only way to stop the regular rocket fire on Sderot, an Israeli city of about 20,000 nearly three miles from the Gaza Strip border, is for the Jewish state to evacuate the entire city”. According to reports from Ynetnews and the Jerusalem Post, Hamas is apparently quite serious.

My question is: Why haven’t we heard from the United Nations? Hamas has been shelling Israel constantly for months (years?) so where is the international condemnation of Hamas? Why is it that terrorists can blow the guts out of innocent Jewish men, women and children and the world community remain silent, but if Israel responds the U.N. and the world become outraged?

Global warming and the U.N.

Britain’s Sunday Telegraph published a remarkably eye-opening article on global warming. The thrust of the article is that everyone agrees that the world’s climate is getting warmer, but U.N. scientists are deliberately manipulating the data for political purposes to make it look like the climate change is due to rising CO2 levels. I encourage everyone to read the entire article (which includes a link to detailed scientific calculations) but some of the less technical quotes are included below (hat tip: Kevin):

"Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst 'market failure' ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, 'creating world government."

"This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect."

"Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people."

"So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels."

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

"So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years."

"Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

"The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note."

"In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming."

"Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it."

"Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong…"

Where are they now?

Ambassador Dennis Ross pointed out on Fox's Weekend Live Saturday that the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel has not stopped for one day—not a single day—since Israel pulled out of Gaza!

This raises some serious questions: Where is all the international outrage against the Hamas government for their continued and unprovoked attacks against Israel? Why isn’t the United Nations Council on Human Rights condemning these attacks? Where is the media coverage of the violence against Israel? Why aren’t Cindy Sheehan and the anti-war crowd condemning these attacks? Why is it that when Israel is continually attacked the world remains silent, but when Israel responds, so many people and nations condemn Israel?

Angelina Jolie and the United Nations

The following is part of an excellent article Michelle Malkin wrote responding to Angelina Joilie regarding the United Nations:

"Increasing aid to a corrupt global bureaucracy may give comfort to Hollywoodliberals. (How, by the way, does Jolie think peace is "established?" With a magic wand? By wishing it so? By relying on feckless blue helmets who coddle jihadists and other thugs?) In the land of make-believe, Jolie's call to pour more tax dollars into the U.N. refugee agency's coffers might well help to stem the refugee tide. But in the real world, it will only perpetuate exploitation. The well-read actress ought to read up on the Kenyan bribery scandal that has plagued the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR."

"You want to talk about scandal? For years, U.N. staff members in Nairobi shook down African refugees seeking resettlement in North America, Europe and Australia while the U.N. looked the other way. The extortion racket charged up to $5,000 a head for resettlement rights. Belated investigations found that the scandal wasn't the result of a few rogue workers-but of negligent management that created a ripe atmosphere for abuse."

"You want to talk about callousness? Tell it to female and child refugees across the Congo who have been victimzed by sexual predators protected among the ranks of U.N. peacekeers and civilian staff. Last year, some 50 U.N. peacekeepers and U.N. civilian officers faced an estimated 150 allegations of sexual exploitation and rape in the Congo alone. The abuse is widespread among U.N. personnel-from the Central African Republic to Bosnia and Eastern Europe. Again, these refugees were exploited while U.N. management fiddled."

"You want to talk about failing to take notice? As Claudia Rosett has reported, the U.N. refugee agency sits on its hands while some 300,000 North Korean refugees have endured decades of abuse and hopelessness underground in China-where the $4.4 million-funded UNHCR office is fortified against refugee intrusions."

"You want to talk about wasted resources? That $10 billion Saddam Hussein siphoned off in the U.N. Oil-for-Food debacle could have fed a lot of hungry people..."

The putrid cesspool that is the United Nations

By some estimates a half-million people have been kidnapped, tortured and/or slaughtered in the Sudan. Hundreds or thousands more are being tortured and imprisoned in countries like Eritrea or Pakistan. North Koreans are starving by the millions. A billion people in China and millions more in numerous Muslim countries lack basic freedoms of speech and religion--the list could go on and on. So the United Nations Council on Human Rights in all its wisdom has chosen to act by focusing its attention solely on....Israel! (LGF, Washington Post)

When will we realize that this dream of all nations coming together in unity and harmony is just a pipe dream, a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Why on earth do we continue to pour millions of dollars into this putrid cesspool that is the United Nations? Can’t we think of anything better to do with millions of tax dollars?