Free Republic

I have seen a report that Claudia Rosett has passed away. She was one of the good ones. She did some incredible work on the corruption of the UN.

If the International Olympic Committee ever decides to add Totalitarian Cruelty and Nuclear Extortion to its roster of Olympic sports, it might make sense for the IOC to bend over backwards to include North Korea -- which would be a shoo-in for the gold. But the Olympics are supposed to involve healthier forms of activity. So I'd strongly urge a sober rethink of the applause we're now hearing for North Korea's last-minute enrollment in the Winter Olympic Games, to be held Feb. 9-25 in Pyeongchang, South Korea. And there sure has been plenty of applause, from many quarters, for Tuesday's...

With Libyans dying by the hundreds in their uprising to evict Moammar Gadhafi, the United Nations is speedily backing away from the same Libyan regime it so recently embraced as one of its most favored darlings. Since lifting sanctions on Libya in 2003, the U.N. has honored Gadhafi’s envoys with seats on the Security Council and Human Rights Council, plus the 2009-10 presidency of the entire U.N. General Assembly. Now the U.N. is professing itself shocked — shocked! — that Gadhafi is displaying brutality consistent with his previous four decades of terror, repression and slaughter. The U.N. Security Council just...

Note: The important link in this article is to this “Urgent Appeal to World Leaders to Prevent Atrocities in Libya.“As uprisings sweep the Middle East and North Africa, the bloodiest crackdown is happening, right now, in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi has ruled for more than 41 years. There are reports of hundreds killed, of massacres in Libya’s second-largest city of Benghazi, of snipers shooting peaceful protesters, of tanks crushing bystanders, of regime gunmen firing on mourners in funeral processions for protesters previously murdered; of rocket-propelled grenades and helicopter gunships used against crowds of demonstrators.That’s Gaddafi. Since Gaddafi came to power...

“We need to create a problem for the world,” Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi declared on Libyan state TV Sunday, in what Reuters describes as his first major speech since a popular uprising toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak last Friday. The problem Gaddafi would like to create, as he explicitly urged in his speech, is a siege of Israel. Saying “this is a time of popular revolutions,” Gaddafi called for Palestinians to mass along Israel’s borders, by land and sea. These are the words of a dictator who has a big problem of his own. Gaddafi’s real problem has nothing to...

History is being made with Egypt’s Lotus Revolution, as President Obama reminded us on Friday, intoning “This is one of those moments. This is one of those times.” Big things are happening in the Middle East, freighted with opportunity and fraught with danger. So you might expect that Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, would be working overtime, manning the ramparts of the UN’s multilateral councils, mapping out strategies and maneuvering among U.S. friends and foes to enhance the chances that Egypt’s uprising will become a portal to democracy, rather than a replay of Iran.Guess again. While Egypt was...

As long as America provides such toys as the United Nations, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might as well play with them — and this week, again, play he did. Ahmadinejad has just treated himself to quite a week at the UN — speaking Tuesday at a planet-wide central planning “development” summit, and again on Thursday in the starting lineup of the General Assembly debate. He has used his UN access to Manhattan to dispense TV interviews, from ABC to CNN. He has hosted media gatherings and met with Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Ahmadinejad created this year’s special stir by using the UN podium to peddle propaganda about the 9/11 Islamist attacks, telling the world that...

After summering in Malaysia and assorted petro-capitals of the Arabian Gulf, the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is back in America — though not for long. His Cordoba Initiative web site now features a newsletter which mentions that this month Rauf will be off again, this time to Australia … apparently there is now some urgent “bridge-building” to be done in Perth. But while transiting New York, site of his proposed $100 million-plus Cordoba House, Rauf has taken time to publish an op-ed in the New York Times. The op-ed itself, “Building on Faith,” is such a feat of unmitigated...

“Peace” is a word so over-used and abused that by now it’s wise to brace yourself every time some self-declared “peace-maker” pipes up. But even by those standards, the perversion of “peace-making” hit fresh heights Wednesday evening, when CNN’s Larry King Live, guest-hosted by Soledad O’Brien, devoted a full hour to an interview with the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf. Asked if it’s really a good idea to go ahead with his plans to build a mosque and Islamic center at an address so close to Ground Zero that it has become a flash point,...

As the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, continues his State Department-hosted “public diplomacy” visit to the United Arab Emirates, the glimpses of his activities over there get ever more interesting. Back home, Americans are now reading the Bergen Record’s dispatches on Rauf’s history as a New Jersey landlord with a tangled financial trail and angry tenants registering recurring complaints about his premises, listing such items as infestations of cockroaches and rats, piles of unremoved trash and “filthy halls.”  Meanwhile, in the UAE, U.S. State Department officials have been squiring Rauf around on the final leg of his taxpayer-funded $16,000 swing...

Despite sanctions, Iran continues to exploit the U.N. itself.The United Nations has just created a new "entity" on women's rights, called U.N. Women. Elections to its governing board are now being organized. How long before Iran wins a seat? If the question sounds absurd, the realities at the U.N. are even more mind-bending. The most recent high-profile outrage on this score was Iran gaining a seat in April on the U.N.'s Commission on the Status of Women. But that's the least of it. The reality is that Iran, despite being under four sets of binding sanctions resolutions by the U.N....

Gaza’s Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has got the bloody propaganda triumph he was preparing for when he told followers last week that whatever came of the Gaza “aid” flotilla, it would be a win for Hamas [1]– whether the ships reached Gaza, or ended up in a showdown with the Israelis at sea. At least 10 people, possibly more, are reported dead, after Israeli forces boarded one of the ships, the Mavi Marmara, to stop it running the Israeli blockade on the terrorist enclave of Gaza. The “peace activists” had advertised themselves (scroll down to point 8 in their “mission” statement [2]) as adhering...

While the world is focused on bloodshed aboard a Turkish ferryboat manned by sympathizers of the terrorists of Hamas, the real crisis looms like Godzilla rising from the sea. In its latest report on Iran, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, reports that Iran has now piled up enough fuel for two nuclear bombs. Was this the reason the Security Council went into an emergency huddle on Monday? Was this the reason UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon pronounced himself “shocked”? Was this the reason the European Union called for an inquiry and Turkey’s Prime Ministers Erdogan began clanging alarms about “state terrorism”? Nope....

So, under the headline “Gates Says U.S. Lacks Policy to Curb Iran’s Nuclear Drive,” the New York Times reports that according to anonymous government officials: “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability.” Gosh, golly and no kidding. The tragicomic touch is that Gates, or anyone else in President Obama’s administration, would feel compelled to treat this information as “secret.”The failure of U.S. policy may be news to Obama, but for some time now it’s been...

... President Abdullah Gul, ... recently received a visiting group of Americans, including a handful of reporters, of which I was one. ... Despite the hospitality, I came away with the uneasy sense that there is trouble brewing in Ankara. A secular, Muslim-majority state, long allied with the West, Turkey in 2002 voted into power an Islamic party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The AKP's leaders have been fashioning a new role for their government--a role embraced by President Barack Obama--in which Turkey behaves less as a firm ally of the West than as a multilateral mediator and...

The Fort Hood shooting, the goverment and mass media denial that this was jihadi terrorism, while President Obama urges us not to rush to judgment, dithers over Afghanistan, declines to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, panders to Iran, and astride an exploding federal budget and tanking dollar is busy pushing socialized medicine….  So, what next? Right on cue, here comes the United Nations, with its “climate change” plans to operate as the global toll booth for the process of combustion itself — never mind the questionable and politicized science, the Nobel-bedecked quackery, and the...

Founded "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," today's United Nations is instead laying the groundwork for war galore. In the name of "justice," the U.N. handicaps democracies trying to defend themselves against tyrants and terrorists. That's the bottom line of the so-called Goldstone report, ... ... From this exercise Goldstone emerged to accuse Israel of "reprisals" and "collective punishments" and "war crimes." He also criticized "armed groups" in Gaza (where the major "armed group"--terrorist Hamas--runs the enclave). But in the U.N. universe, that is a nod to the appearance of impartiality, of no real relevance to action....

... In his Moscow speech, Obama delivered what is by now familiar as his trademark mix of historical omissions and revisions, sweeping statements about the "arc of history" and phrases of hope, change and moral equivalency. He brought up, yet again, America's "imperfections," dismissed as outdated the brand of American moral certitude and leadership that brought victory in World War II and called for collaboration, convergence and partnerships forged on common ground and progress toward a shared future. Call it Brotherhood 2.0. ... But missing from Obama's philosophy is the immense role played by the U.S. America stood for decades...

Joe’s question about taxes threw a wrench into Barack Obama’s campaign pitch. So, oh what a background check Joe got. Within days, reports were all over the news that Joe owes back taxes, he doesn’t have an Ohio plumber’s license, his real name is Samuel, and he is — shock and horror — a registered Republican. Within days, Obama and Biden were holding up Joe to [1] public ridicule, and by implication mocking any American working stiff who might have the audacity [2] to want to earn more than $250,000 per year. Obama may be full of talk about delivering the American dream, but he apparently has enormous disdain for Americans who actually sweat to earn it...

In the Ivory Coast, a 13-year-old girl is gang-raped in a field by 10 UN peacekeepers , and left on the ground, bleeding, trembling and vomiting. This is part of a larger picture involving fresh allegations by a U.K.-based charity, Save the Children, of UN peacekeepers abusing children in the Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Southern Sudan. As detailed by the BBC, "the UN has said it welcomes the report, which it will study closely." Oh, great. The UN can add this report to its research collection of previous reports on UN peacekeeper rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the...