Free Republic

"Samantha Power and the UN are a perfect match," observed the British journalist Melanie Phillips last week after President Obama nominated Power to be the next US ambassador to the United Nations.She didn't mean it as a compliment. Phillips, a conservative lionheart, regards the UN as a cynical institution that long ago dissipated its moral legitimacy. It is a place where the language of human rights is routinely hijacked by the enemies of human rights, and where democracies like America and Israel are reviled while the world's most odious regimes are indulged. In nominating Power, says Phillips, Obama has picked...

Just try to wrap your arms around the magnitude of defiance and chutzpah that led to and accompanied President Obama's appointment of the discredited Susan Rice as national security adviser. But don't let this outrage distract you from his equally disturbing appointment of leftist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador. Though Democrats and their supporting liberal media, with a few notable exceptions, have aggressively downplayed the multifaceted Benghazi scandal, none of them has laid a glove on the irrefutable claim that Rice delivered talking points altered by the administration to distort the facts in order to mitigate any...

The former White House adviser and longtime Obama friend nominated Wednesday as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has a history of controversial comments that could haunt her in confirmation -- including likening U.S. foreign policies to those of the Nazis. In a March 2003 New Republic magazine essay, Samantha Power wrote that American foreign policy needs a "historical reckoning" which would entail "opening the files" and "acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia." She continued: “Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our...

On Tuesday, Dr. Miriam Grossman had a message for the United Nations: Shame on you. Grossman is the author of the acclaimed 2007 book Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. As I wrote in my very first column for Townhall, when I was a junior at Ohio University: “Grossman says her profession has been ‘hijacked’ by radical politics. Unprotected reveals how campus health professionals often risk students' well-being in order to promote feminism, androgyny, and ‘anything goes’ liberalism.” Her follow-up book, You’re Teaching my Child What? showed that radical sexual dogma isn’t...

“It is an outrage.” The source of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s anger? The fact that the United States has yet to approve a treaty known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. Panetta was speaking after the election. His ire about LOST’s status suggests that the Obama administration may well make this a second-term priority. It’s come close to being ratified by the U.S. Senate before -- it dates back to 1982, in fact. But LOST has never been able to gain enough supporters in the Senate. That could change,...

While President Obama and Speaker John Boehner are wrestling with whether or not they will agree to raise taxes, United Nations delegates partying in Doha, Qatar are planning to impose a new kind of tax on Americans. U.N. conferees have been discussing how they can start a global tax that would hit Americans hard. The U.N. bureaucrats are not deterred by the fact that Americans should be protected by our U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, which specifies that "all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives." The greedy globalist U.N. bureaucrats have been conniving for...

While talk of the United States tumbling over a so-called “fiscal cliff” dominates news cycles in the nation’s capital and other major cities, on the other side of the planet, the United Nations is quietly but relentlessly pressing to take control of the Internet. It is being aided in this illicit endeavor by various totalitarian regimes, and by many smaller states that routinely use their strength in numbers to bash America. The vehicle chosen by the internationalists for this power grab is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), one of the many aged bureaucracies that long ago lost any degree...

There’s an old story from the Jewish shetls of Eastern Europe. There was a singing contest among the animals. The Nightingale loses, despite her lovely singing voice. Looking down on the jury, she sees the grunting wild pigs. She weeps, not because she lost, she says. “But see who my judges are!” America must feel like the Nightingale whenever she has to go before a UN panel. I had the honor of serving our country as U.S. Ambassador to the UN’s Human Rights Commission. In those days, the UN body had such worthy respecters of human rights as Algeria, Libya,...

The United Nations may be useful as a forum for world leaders, but it is not a productive place to develop policy. The international bureaucracy compulsively supports statist initiatives that would reduce individual liberty and expand the burden of government. Global taxation with no democratic accountability or oversight. A “right” to taxpayer-financed birth control. An international scheme to undermine the right to keep and bear arms. A Law-of-the-Sea Treaty that would give international bureaucrats tax and regulatory powers over international waters. And you won’t be surprised to learn that the United Nations also wants to control the Internet. Actually, to...

Not shockingly, immediately after President Obama was reelected for a second term, his administration reinforced its support for the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty [ATT], also known as the "Small Arms Treaty." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been expressing full support of the treaty on behalf of the United States for years now while for political reasons, President Obama sat back. Now, the entire administration will be out front in support of ratifying it. Hours after U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected, the United States backed a U.N. committee's call on Wednesday to renew debate over a draft international treaty...

I am grateful to George Washington University professor of Law, Jonathan Turley, for pointing out that a growing number of world leaders find the First Amendment's right of free speech to be an inconvenience. He cites, for instance, U. N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's warning that "when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected." Turley makes the valuable -- and if you think about it, obvious -- observation that free speech becomes intolerable not when it is used recklessly but when one person or a group...

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly last week, President Barack Obama tried to explain this strange attachment that Americans have to freedom of speech. He was handicapped by his attraction to a moral principle whose dangers the journalist Jonathan Rauch presciently highlighted in his 1993 book, "Kindly Inquisitors": "Thou shalt not hurt others with words." During the past few weeks, the widespread, often violent and sometimes deadly protests against "Innocence of Muslims," a laughably amateurish trailer for a seemingly nonexistent film mocking the Prophet Muhammad, have demonstrated the alarming extent to which citizens of Muslim countries -- including peaceful moderates, as...

I spoke at the United Nations back in May, explaining that more government was the wrong way to help the global economy. But I guess I’m not very persuasive. The bureaucrats have just released a new report entitled, “In Search of New Development Finance.”As you can probably guess, what they’re really searching for is more money for global redistribution.But here’s the most worrisome part of their proposal. They want the U.N. to be in charge of collecting the taxes, sort of a permanent international bureaucracy entitlement.I’ve written before about the U.N.’s desire for tax authority (on more than one occasion),...

It is beyond reason. The inmates clearly have control of the asylum. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rant before the UN General Assembly in New York this week would better have been delivered in Stockholm. The famous Stockholm Syndrome was named for the way some hostages began to identify with their terrorist captors. It was offered as a psychological disorder. In New York, at the UN, this psychological disorder is the new order of business. Ahmadinejad called for a new world order. Of what? A rule of a UN world body dominated--or at least held hostage by--the Terroristans that make up an increasing...

When President Obama stood at the UN and proclaimed that "the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," it turns out that's one campaign promise he kept.  A judge has ordered the detention of the maker of the video publicized so assiduously by the President and Secretary of State when they maintained it was the reason behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11/12. Don't get me wrong.  Violating the conditions of one's parole is wrong.  But really? Taking the guy into detention and making sure the news gets out?  As image-makers are wont to say, the...

Two weeks after Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration has conceded it was an act of terrorism. The attack on the U.S. Consulate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now admits, was part of a broader effort by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, working "with other violent extremists to undermine the democratic transitions under way in North Africa, as we tragically saw in Benghazi." Yet 10 days ago, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice was trotted out on every Sunday talk show to blame the massacre on a mob inflamed by...

Why aren't you mad as hell yet, America? What will it take? At home, unemployment is stuck above 8 percent. Twenty-three million are out of work. Millions of others have given up looking for jobs. One American in six is on food stamps. Small businesses are terrified of Obamacare. The economy ran out of gas four years ago and the president still thinks the only way to get it going again is to fill up the tank with trillions of dollars of debt and make successful people pay for the tow truck. Overseas, we have a dead ambassador and three...

We like tribalism for the same reason we like to eat fatty foods: We evolved that way. Homo sapiens didn't survive long on the African savannas as rugged individualists. Alone, they couldn't scare away the scarier animals and, for the most part, they couldn't catch or kill the tastier ones. But in groups, humans rose to the top of the food chain thousands of years ago and have been passing down their tribe-loving genes ever since. Customs and practices that ensured the survival of the species were worked out through trial and error and passed from one generation to another....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Benjamin Netanyahu is delivering his speech at the United Nations General Assembly. I just tuned into a bit of it here during the break, and it's awesome. It's very, very well done. It's an exceptional speech, all about Iran's nuclear weapons and how they differ from the Soviets, for example, in having nuclear weapons and why. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Benjamin Netanyahu, who may be the closest thing we have to a Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher today, Benjamin Netanyahu is at the United Nations. He's giving a great speech, and he's now using a visual aid. He's...

Last time I checked, Americans were responsible for making our own laws. We do not invite foreign nations to have a say in how we govern ourselves within our own borders. Yet if you follow what's been going on with the United Nations this year, you know that the USA came perilously close to having other countries dictate our gun laws. And the fight isn't over yet.The United Nations has been debating an arms trade treaty for nearly a decade now. Though the treaty is ostensibly focused on military arms, it has long been clear that the majority of U.N....

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. President Obama continues to get high marks in all public opinion polls on foreign policy. Much of that, doubtless, is due to his crisp dispatch of Osama bin Laden last year. The latest dust-up about that raid is a mere tempest in a teapot. Some ex-SEALs are saying that Osama was not armed when he was taken down, that he was shot while looking out the window of his residence in Pakistan. This really should not matter in the least. Under centuries of international law, Osama bin Laden would have been...

Every fall, it seems, Americans are subjected to the ugly spectacle of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming to New York to address the UN General Assembly. There, at the podium, he is placed on a par with President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron, France's Francois Hollande, and other leaders of civilized states. Ahmadinejad has used this podium to spew his anti-American, anti-Israel hatred. And yet he receives hearty applause from the Islamist delegates seated before him. Iran signed the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights as long ago as 1948. That's when Iran was ruled by the Shah. That UNDHR contains...

Those of us who believe the United States would be best served by pulling out of the United Nations and starting up a more morally and politically serious clubhouse for morally and politically serious nations are often accused of tilting at windmills. The phrase "tilting at windmills" was inspired by Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote," and it means to fight something that doesn't really deserve to be fought. Quixote mistook the windmills of the Spanish countryside for ravenous giants and set out to vanquish them. ("Tilting" is a jousting expression, in case you didn't know). Well, let's review some recent evidence....

Today NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre addressed the United Nations as the debate about the Arms Trade Treaty, or the "Small Arms Treaty," continues in New York City. The treaty is written to make it seem as though only arms transferred by governments will be affected but the details of the language seem to show the treaty applies to civilian firearms. The treaty has been classified as an international effort to attack the Second Amendment in the United States Constitution. "I am hear to announce the NRA's strong opposition to anti-freedom policies that disregard American citizens' right to self defense....

Given the kleptocratic nature of international bureaucracies (particularly my good buddies at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), I’m never surprised when a bad proposal is unveiled. And since the United Nations has a long track record of supporting global taxation (with the money going to the U.N., of course), I’m even less surprised when that crowd produces another idea for fleecing people in the productive sector of the economy.Here are some excerpts from a Yahoo report. The United Nations on Thursday called for a tax on billionaires to help raise more than $400 billion a year for...

One of the most important periods for the Second Amendment in recent history is upon us, as the opening meeting of the UN Arms Trade Treaty conference began this morning in New York. During the 26-day conference, world leaders are convening to finalize the terms of the ATT, which seeks to regulate the international arms trade and seriously threatens Second Amendment freedoms.   In a press kit that was released in June, the UN was obviously cognizant of the backlash surrounding Second Amendment rights, going so far as to include a "Myths & Facts" section, which states:   Also included...

Want the United States to gain legal access to the vast amount of oil and natural gas in the underwater Extended Continental Shelf? Get LOST. Specifically, the U.S. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. The Obama administration wants the Senate to act on the treaty, which has been around since 1982. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) recently held a hearing to make the case for LOST. According to its advocates, we need LOST for a variety of reasons. One of them concerns the oil and gas resources located in the outer limits of...

British Lord Christopher Monckton parachuting into Durban, South Africa, to challenge UN climate crisis claims, brought numerous journalists and onlookers to the beaches where he landed. A 20-foot banner across our press conference table gave the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow further opportunities to present realistic perspectives on the science and economics of climate change. CFACT played by the rules, obtained the necessary permits beforehand, and ensured that its message was heard throughout the seventeenth annual climate conference (COP-17). Greenpeace, on the other hand, got no permits before staging an Occupy Durban protest in the hallway outside the plenary session...

Blood on the bed. That's what 12-year-old Tamar Fogel saw last week when she opened the door to her parents' bedroom in Itamar, Israel. The blood covered the blankets and the bodies of her father, Rabbi Udi Fogel, and her 3-month-old sister, Hadas. In the other room, her mother, Ruth, lay murdered. So did her brothers, Yoav, 11, and Elad, 4. Five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered in their home last week because they dared to live on historic Jewish land. They were not murderers and were not occupiers. They were people who simply wished to leave in...

United Nations: The U.S. State Department is holding up Arizona as America's human rights problem, fishing for applause from the likes of Cuba and Libya. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer isn't taking it lying down. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to go lower than even Andrew Young in his Carter-era heyday by holding up Arizona as a human rights violator in its groveling "Universal Periodic Review" for the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission. The 29-page mea culpa of America's wrongs is nothing but a political advertisement for recent executive acts from the Obama administration, repackaged as human rights improvements. Apologizing...

The global nanny state wants to take another bite out of your freedom. Its new target – your dinner plate. The Guardian reported on June 2 that the UN was supporting a switch to a radical anti-meat agenda. “A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today,” wrote the paper. Here’s how the group Vegan Action describes this extreme vegetarianism. “While vegetarians choose not to use flesh foods, vegans also avoid dairy and eggs, as well as fur, leather, wool,...

A 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, claimed meat production was responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – more than transport. Its conclusions were heralded by campaigners urging consumers to eat less meat to save the planet. Among those calling for a reduction in global meat consumption is Sir Paul McCartney.

Iran: A Russian general has issued a public warning about the dangers posed by the Islamist regime in Tehran. Is further confirmation needed to convince the West that the dithering United Nations isn't the answer?Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, speaking at a Russian press agency news conference Thursday, corroborated intelligence that Iran is developing a next-generation, long-range missile and has dangerous nuclear weapons ambitions. Dvorkin, who heads Moscow's Center for Strategic Nuclear Forces, said, "Iran has long abandoned outdated missile technologies and is capable of producing sophisticated missile systems." Dvorkin doesn't believe Iran is capable — yet — of building an...

United Nations: It takes some gall to grumble about getting billions in U.S. taxpayer handouts. Does U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expect spend-happy Uncle Sam to give the corrupt U.N. its own stimulus?It wasn't the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S. Congress — even this spendthrift band of power-drunk lawmakers. In a private meeting with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the secretary-general called America a "deadbeat" nation because U.S. taxpayers have been slow in chucking out another billion dollars in dues. The U.S. ponies up some 22% of the nearly $5 billion U.N. budget. We...

Climate Change: When the United Nations insists that man-made global warming is now proved beyond doubt, it's practicing one of the few things it has proved itself good at: censorship of dissenting viewpoints.The wasteful, corrupt, dictatorship-dominated U.N. may not be successful in fulfilling very many of its supposed objectives — world peace, the end of poverty, mutual understanding, etc. — but when it comes to suppressing contrarian points of view that interfere with official U.N. stances, the organization ranks with the best. Take the attempts two years ago to tell the truth about the anti-Semitism of the Hamas terrorist organization,...

People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change, the world's leading authority on global warming has told The Observer Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year earned a joint share of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that people should then go on to reduce their meat consumption even further. His comments are the most controversial advice yet provided by the panel on how individuals can help tackle global warning. Pachauri, who was re-elected the panel's...

Father of victim says U.N. body's order 'don't mean diddly' Texas is refusing to bow to yesterday's World Court order to stay the Aug. 5 lethal injection of convicted rapist-killer and illegal alien Jose Medellin. (snip) Texas Gov. Rick Perry's office rejected Mexico's complaint. "The world court has no standing in Texas, and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court," Perry spokesman Robert Black said. "It is easy to get caught up in discussions of international law and justice and treaties. It's very important to remember that these individuals are on death row for...

United Nations: It's said that the U.N. is only as good as its members. But putting a Nicaraguan dinosaur communist at the presidency of the General Assembly takes it all a step lower. Already, the America-bashing is back.Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, Nicaragua's foreign minister until his Marxist Sandinista party was booted in 1990, has now got a new gig leading the U.N. General Assembly. Oh, lucky us. A Maryknoll priest of the old liberation theology school, the 75-year-old rifle-and-cassock radical is famous for taking the U.S. to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1986 over President Reagan's arming...

Bangkok - The United Nations will send nearly a quarter of a million condoms into cyclone-hit Myanmar to help needy survivors with no access to contraceptives, a UN official says. So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72 800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May. A total of 218 400 condoms would be delivered, UNFPA aid advisor Chaiyos Kunanusont said. "We don't want regular use of contraception disrupted. An emergency usually damages the health system, so people don't have access to condoms and contraceptives," said Chaiyos.

Politics: With the world awash in disaster, the United Nations is spending money to send a "special rapporteur" to look into racism in one of its member nations. The country? Why, the United States, of course.The rapporteur in question, Senegal's Doudou Diene, will investigate "contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" in a number of American cities. In fact, the U.S. is the least racist nation on Earth. Diene's visit is a calculated insult to both the American people and President Bush, and an attempt to influence the upcoming U.S. election. Sure we have our problems. But...

World Bodies: The newest adviser to the U.N. Human Rights Council hates democracies and loves dictators. The only right he wants is to bash the United States and Israel. Truly, the inmates are running this asylum.We commented last week on how the Human Rights Council of the U.N. has ignored China's occupation and brutalization of the Tibetan nation while finding time to condemn Israel a dozen times in the HRC's two years of existence. This is no surprise when people like Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss Socialist lawmaker, is picked as one of the council's 18 advisers. His election last...

Iran: The United Nations Security Council and the U.N.'s atomic "watchdog" have confirmed their critics' worst fears: Even when they can bring themselves to act on Iran's nuclear threat, their actions are toothless.Iran's new punishment from the Security Council for continuing to enrich uranium freezes the assets of 12 individuals and 13 companies, and monitors two financial institutions. But it may actually be worse than doing nothing. It tells the Islamofascist mullahs that the civilized world is so fixed to diplomatic fantasies that it actually thinks Tehran will be swayed by more of the same pointless measures Iran has gleefully...

Children are among those who are most devastated by climate change, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced today. “They pay with their health, their development and – too often – also with their lives,” Hilde Johnson, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director, told reporters in New York. Every year, three million children under the age of five die from environment-linked diseases, such as diarrhoeal disease, respiratory infections and malaria, and the agency predicts that these numbers will rise with climate change, she said. Curbing climate change and UNICEF’s top priority – to protect and support the health, development and education of...

International Affairs: Now the United Nations is sounding alarms about problems in the world's food supply. Typical. These people always need a crisis to justify the expansion of their powers.Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, worries there is "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food." The International Herald Tribune reports that FAO's "food price index rose by more than 40% this year, compared with 9% the year before" — a rate, according to Diouf, "that was already unacceptable." The prices of wheat and oilseeds have reached record highs. On the...

NEW YORK — Did the United Nations Development Program use an American charitable organization to secretly funnel nearly $2 million, and perhaps much more, to North Korea — over and above the millions in hard currency it is already known to have given the Kim Jong-il regime in violation of its own rules?UNDP documents seen by FOX News raise those questions, and others about the relationship between UNDP and the humanitarian group Mercy Corps, also known as Mercy Corps International. The documents show millions of dollars allocated to Mercy Corps International for North Korea seem to have escaped normal UNDP...

BALI, Indonesia - World powers meeting at a UN climate change conference in Indonesia this week won't be able to craft a meaningful plan to address global warming without co-operation from the United States, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, the UN's climate chief said Sunday. The United States refused to sign the last major international treaty on reducing greenhouse gases, undermining its effectiveness. Delegates from 190 countries will gather on the resort island of Bali on Monday for one of the largest global warming conferences ever, bringing together about 10,000 people including Hollywood luminaries, former vice-president Al Gore, fishermen...

WASHINGTON -- Now that we are stuffed like turkeys, consider that Thanksgiving is celebrated as an official national holiday in only two countries -- the United States and Canada. In both nations, it is uniquely mandated as a day for offering thanks and praise to God. Interestingly, there is no mention of God or thanksgiving in the U.N. Charter. Nonetheless, United Nations officials apparently take full advantage of the holiday as a respite from the grueling work of international diplomacy. Calls to the secretary-general's office (212-963-7162) on Thursday, Nov. 22, were unanswered. One can only wonder whether the striped pants...

"I’m no tech head, but I think I know a thing or three about the Internet and how it works. And as far as I can tell, it works pretty well. More than 1.4 billion people around the world seem to be emailing each other a lot, and those emails get delivered a lot faster and more reliably than “snail mail.” Lots of people are innovating around the Internet – voice calling over the Internet, e-commerce, blogs, education, employment, and healthcare services, music and video streaming and downloads, and such – and lots and lots of people are profiting from...

Recent U.S. policies and behavior have “greatly diminished” the nation’s standing in the world, United Nations advocate Gillian Sorensen said Wednesday. The U.N., she said, provides an opportunity to restore a spirit of international cooperation with the accompanying benefit of burden-sharing. “It’s time for us to join the rest of the world,” Sorensen told a University of Nebraska College of Law audience. Sorensen is senior adviser and national advocate for the United Nations Foundation and former assistant U.N. secretary general. She is the wife of Ted Sorensen, the former aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a UNL...

Anne Bayefsky, editor of website Eye on the UN, writing in The Wall Street Journal on the hopeless United Nations WHAT is it about standing up for human rights that the UN finds so difficult? A year ago, then secretary-general Kofi Annan dissolved the UN Commission on Human Rights under pressure after the commission discredited itself repeatedly, even electing a Libyan chairman. Now its successor, the UN Human Rights Council, is proving itself to be worse than what it replaced. This week the council marked its first anniversary in Geneva by adopting an agenda that is an affront to the...