September 04, 2007
U.N. follies
Dean Barnett guest hosted for Hugh Hewitt and had a chance to ask Brit journalist Mark Steyn about the latest madness out of the United Nations.
DB: [T]he United Nations is once again convening one of its stop racism conferences, and I believe they’ve chosen the perfect country to lead that conference. Can you fill us in on that?
MS: Yeah, Libya is going to chair this latest…well, they hold these world conferences against racism at the UN every couple of years. The last one was held the weekend before September 11th. And basically, it was an orgy. It was supposed to be a conference against racism. It was an orgy of racism. It was anti-American, it was anti-Zionist. The United States wound up pulling out entirely, and other countries, such as Canada and Britain and the European Union guys, so-called downgraded. And you know what I always find so pathetic about these things, they’re always the same. You know, somebody had claimed that the Holocaust had never existed, and so Israel was therefore an improper racist state. And Mary Robinson says oh, well, what we need to do, as the UN high commissioner at that time, says oh, we need to stay in, this proves we need to stay in the conference and discuss it. In other words, there’s no chance of persuading the Syrian foreign minister that six million Jews were killed, but perhaps we can, if we stay in there and we negotiate all night with him, he’ll concede that you know, maybe ten, fifteen thousand were killed, mostly troublemakers who were asking for it. I mean, I think this level, negotiating those kind of statements and pretending that the foreign ministers of these gangster states are like regular diplomats, I think is really disgraceful and repugnant, and I don’t know why we go through this charade every couple of years.
DB: Now as you mentioned, Libya is chairing this forthcoming conference against racism. And that’s coming up in 2009, something to put on your calendars immediately, that Libya isn’t exactly a Quaker-like state in terms of its view towards other races, is it?
MS: No, it’s not. It’s not at all. I mean, these are explicitly…Libya, like most Muslim states, is a state that explicitly discriminates against non-believers, and takes a very robustly nationalist view of the Arab world in general. And I think it’s very interesting that we supposedly had all these reforms…this comes under the UN Human Rights aegis. We supposedly had all these reforms to end the farce by which you have gangster states on the Human Rights Commission. For example, Sudan was a member at the time Sudan was killing all those people in Darfur. They’ve nearly killed everyone now, so the job’s almost done. But at the height of the killing frenzy, they were appointed to the UN Human Rights Commission. Can you imagine that? You’re trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people, and they’re trying to tie you up in UN meetings all day long. And we were told that the UN reforms would end the charade of countries like Sudan of being on the Human Rights Commission. It hasn’t. It’s always the same. The UN is dysfunctional in its very identity, and we should stop lending credibility to these kinds of circuses.
What a waste of time and money. I spent a semester at the U.N. back in the mid-'80s; there was a moment, sitting in the gallery, looking down at the General Assembly, when it struck as risible that dictatorships and tin-pot banana republics had the same number of votes as did Western democracies.
The hopes of the world for peace and tranquility rested upon the United States and its allies winning the votes of countries like Communist China and the Soviet Union, two governments responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler; persuading maniacs like Idi Amin, thugs like Castro, lunatics like Ghadaffi and Khomeni.
Steyn's observations are accurate -- and a reminder that the United Nations long ago failed, replacing the League of Nations as the most ineffective organization ever created.
Ineffective, unless the goal is to perpetuate totalitarian regimes, lend legitimacy to the enemies of Western-style economic, religious and political freedom. If your heart is set on seeing the West laid low, well, then the U.N. is your kind of place.
Posted by Mike Lief at September 4, 2007 07:45 AM
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