Posted on 01/26/2003 4:51:37 PM PST by Black Powder
Perhaps the best reason for the U.S. and Great Britain to invade Iraq is that most of the United Nations is opposed.
Fact is, the UN has fallen so far away from its once noble ideals - capped by last week's outrageous decision to name a delegate from Libya to head the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) - it can no longer be trusted as the conscience of the world community.
As Adrian Karatnycky, president of the respected human rights organization, Freedom House, warned the UNHRC prior to its repugnant decision: "Moammar Khadafy's regime simply should not sit in judgment of those countries with decent human rights records ... This will undermine the UN's moral authority and send a strong and clear message to fellow human rights violators that they are in the clear."
Karatnycky pleaded with the UNHRC to remember "The United Nations itself has voiced concern over Libya's human rights practices, including extra-judicial and summary executions perpetrated by state agents, arbitrary arrest and long-term detention without trial, systematic use of torture ... imposition of the death penalty for 'political and economic offences' and numerous restrictions on freedom of expression and, in particular, the right to express opposition or criticism of the government."
Other human rights groups made similar warnings, but to no avail. Thirty-three of the UNHRC's 53-member nations voted in favour of Libya and 17 abstained, even though Libya is still under UN sanctions for supporting international terrorism.
Only three nations voted against Libya, including, to its credit, Canada, which too often mistakes neutrality for morality.
Prior to this disaster, there was the terrible decision to put Syria on the UN Security Council, which, like Libya, is a brutal dictatorship and a rogue state that sponsors terrorism.
Syria has committed countless atrocities, including the murder of up to 20,000 people during the razing of the city of Hama in 1982 while viciously ending a local insurrection.
But considering the UN's seminal role in creating the state of Israel, it has been the UN's long descent over many years into open anti-Semitism that is its greatest shame.
While not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, all anti-Semites criticize Israel and no international body has been more obsessed with condemning the Jewish state than the UN's General Assembly. Driven by its Arab block and supported by Third World dictatorships, it has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation on Earth, while excusing Palestinian terrorism and ignoring catastrophic human rights violations elsewhere in the world.
The UNHRC, now headed by Israel-hating Libya, has a similar history of singling out Israel and recently all but endorsed terrorism against its civilians through a resolution supporting "armed struggle ... by all available means."
But it was at the UN's infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001- which the UNHRC had a key role in organizing - where the years of anti-Semitism the UN had allowed to fester within itself exploded into the open.
Jewish delegates attending the conference and the related NGO Forum and Youth Summit were subjected to raw displays of anti-Semitism, including intimidation, harassment and hate-filled speeches. Attempts were made to revive the infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution passed by the General Assembly in 1975 (and only repealed in 1991 after a campaign by then U.S. president George Bush Sr.) - a resolution UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called "a low point" in the UN's history. While that wording did not make it into the final communique at Durban, the conference was hijacked by those whose only interest was to bash Israel at what was supposed to be a forum against world racism.
Finally, we had the unseemly spectacle last week of Security Council members France and Germany undermining the U.S. by jointly announcing their intent to block UN authorization of an invasion against Iraq, even before UN weapons inspectors had submitted their final report to the council.
As a permanent council member, France can make good on this threat by vetoing any resolution authorizing war with Iraq. Germany, as a temporary member (like Syria), cannot.
Still, the irony of Germany and France combining forces to pose as the great defenders of peace against American aggression ought not to be lost on anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of World War II and the Holocaust.
America-bashers today prop up the UN as the only body with the moral authority to hold the power of the world's one remaining superpower in check. This argument is absurd.
Not only has the UN lost the moral high ground by its own actions, but contrary to popular myth, it is not a world government. Other international alliances have acted, and will act, independently of it in order to bring countries considered aggressors to heel, as occurred with NATO's actions in Kosovo.
Finally, given its blatant anti-Semitism, the UN should remove from its entrance the famous phrase that ostensibly defines its mission: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." This now repugnant body no longer deserves to be graced by the words of the great Jewish prophet, Isaiah.
Any organization that started with Josef Stalin as one of the pullers of strings never had any moral authority.
These days it's Lybia as a clearing house for human rights. The fact that the US is still even part of this depravity speaks volumes as to how far into the morass liberalism has allowed us to sink.
"Libya is to human rights what a fox is to chicken rights"
The UN lost it's moral authority a long time ago
The UN is nothing but a JOKE
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