FIRE WITH FIRE

This is in response to the second of the comments listed.

Look, don't cry Israeli. It is not like the Israeli's here are completely without blame. Some of their excesses in stomping out Palestinian resistance are repugnant to the rest of humanity. Sure you ahve to protect your people and borders, but there has been a lot of gratuitous Palestinian killing and destruction of houses for reprisals, and these were killings of innocents and destruction of the property of innocent civilians. Do not think that you are so squeaky clean here. There is enough blame to go around. Israelis have to show maturity here, but make sure they keep their strength and survellience up until the juvenile antics of their neighbors mature. How long will that take? Well, I agree with the Watcher that the UN needs to get in with both feet and work both sides of the Arab Israeli conflict until it is resolved. This is a major force driving terrorist activity and destruction aound the globe. The Arabs are going to have to back off from their intransigent stance of the destruction of Israel. That is going to take some doing. However, it has to be done and Israel has to help the process by emmbracing some compromises and reducing its beligerance and sometimes over-reaction. Yes, no one likes it citizens needlessly and no one should stand by helpless, but staying armed to the teeth for the idefinite future is no solution elther. How many people on both sides of the equation here have to die becuase of ideological intransigence. Time to move toward a resolution of the conflice. OK, so you have to give up Jerusalem. Is that so bad if it stops all hostility? Let me ask you that.

Ah yes, the UN, protector of terrorists and a supporter of the regimes which breed them.

When the President of the United States spoke to the United Nations in October of 2004, he spoke of the need for change and called for a new course of action against the threat of terrorism, to stop the killing of school children in Russia, the beheading of construction workers in Iraq, the murder by suicide bombers. He spoke of how, rather than engineers, doctors, scientists and social workers, the Muslim world has become the world's largest exporter of hatred and murder. He spoke of how Muslim equality for women has emerged under the guise of female suicide bombers. He spoke of the consequences of terrorism that have been perpetuated by the Muslim world for over a decade in New York, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, and Bali, Jakarta, Moscow, Madrid and Istanbul.

The President urged action against terrorism, admitting that "for too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability." He promised to implement the radical changes that would lead to freedom, to take the fight to the enemy instead of waiting for them to come to us. He acknowledged that it would not be easy and he urged the world to unite in the effort.

What effect could such powerful words have when most of those oppressors, most of those violators of human rights and decency, most of those dictators that our President was referring to in his speech sat before him as members in good standing of the United Nations?

Sitting on UN Commission on Human Rights are some of the world's worst mass murderers and violators of the very human rights they are supposed to protect, including Cameroon, China, Congo (DRC), Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The Chairman of the Commission is one of the worst human rights offenders, Libya. These are the very same human rights violators that the Commission is supposed to investigate and expose.

No wonder, then, that the UN has failed to even criticize China's human rights violations, failed to even discuss slave labor when the former Soviet Union existed, failed to even consider the sale of white women and children in Saudi Arabia, failed to investigate the denial of the most basic human rights to women in Asia and Arab countries, and failed to examine the slave trade in Arab countries.

The Commission voted against "special observation" of Zimbabwe's violations of human rights; and voted for the upgrading of the human rights status of Sudan, even while its dictatorship committed genocide against its southern black Christians, carried on slavery, and approved of systematic rape.

Consider the actions of Commission member Cuba. Castro had thrown into prison seventy-five dissidents, including journalists and librarians; and it had executed three men who hijacked a ferryboat to escape from this communist hellhole. No matter. The Commission reelected Cuba to another three-year term, "undoubtedly a recognition of the Cuban Revolution's work in human rights in favor of all our people," so Cuba proclaimed.

Ever careful to protect itself and its member dictatorships, the UN went so far as to terminate its relationship with the free speech organization Reporters Without Borders after it criticized the UN's human rights record. Reporters Without Borders had the audacity to suggest reforms that included the restricting of voting by dictatorships and claimed "that granting the chair to Qadhafi's [Libyan] regime has been a disgrace to the commission." The Commission voted 27 to 23 to suspend its relationship with the organization. All of the democratic members voted against it.

As Victor Davis Hanson said in the Wall Street Journal, "It is not the same United Nations of decades past, helping the poor nations with hunger, and sending troops around the world to keep the peace. Gone are the days when UNESCO and UNICEF provided selfless service around the world to fight disease and famine. Now it is a political body with a different agenda. Its membership is rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes."

Immediately prior to the President's speech, Kofi Anan declared the Iraq War illegal to a BBC reporter. No surprise, considering that at the time of Iraq's blatant defiance of the United Nations resolutions on its weapons of mass destruction, one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen chaired the May sessions of the UN Conference. No surprise considering Kofi Anan's participation the Oil for Food scandal currently under investigation. No surprise considering the UN was silent while Saddam Hussein starved, tortured, maimed and murdered his own people.

Indeed, the UN was silent while Slobodan Milosevic methodically practiced ethnic cleansing in his country. The UN was silent while the Taliban systematically murdered their own people, repressed all human rights, and enslaved women. The UN was silent while in Rwanda and Burundi, half a million lives were lost in civil war.

The UN was silent while 800,000 people were murdered in 1994 during a systematic genocide organized by the Hutu government, and carried out against the Tutsi minority by its troops, police, and specially trained death squads. In 1999, an independent report condemned the UN's reluctance to accept evidence of a genocide, and reluctance to act once the genocide was undeniable.

The UN was silent while in North Korea hundreds of thousands have been murdered in the last decade, and possibly three million have been starved to death in a government created famine.

The UN was silent while 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica, Bosnia, during the Bosnian war of 1995. Another UN commissioned report on this asserted that the UN peacekeepers stood by while Serb troops massacred those to whom the UN had promised protection. The UN had refused to reinforce their peacekeepers with enough troops, and even then severely restricted the action of those that were there.

The UN was silent while over three million were killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with UN peacekeepers standing by and watching.

And the UN remains silent through the genocide in Sudan.

By its own admission in the Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operation, the UN recognized that its peacekeeping efforts have failed. It undertook peacekeeping in only a third of the conflicts during the 1990s, and when the UN did do something, it failed or was not effective.

And yet, the UN raises its voice, loud and clear, in consistent and constant condemnation of Israel. In the last few decades, more than half of the UN resolutions passed were against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel scores as high as the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom on political rights. On civil liberties, Israel scores much higher than the dictatorship members of the UN.

Consider the dictatorships of Algeria, China, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, all of whom are members of the UN Commission on Human Rights. The dictatorship of Egypt is a member of all six UN committees concerned with human rights treaties. The dictatorships of Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan participate on the Governing Council of the International Labor Organization. The bloody dictatorship of Iran is on the five-member UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Dictatorships who treat women as second class citizens or slaves like Egypt, Iran, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates are all members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

"So Americans' once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached the final stage--of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it." - Victor Davis Hanson
The United Nations is still investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by its staff and soldiers in the Congo. The charges include accusations of pedophilia, rape and prostitution, some of which have been recorded on videotape.

"I am afraid there is clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place," said Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
It has been years since the UN promised a full investigation and to hold those involved accountable, the fact is that the UN has never been open or honest and has been known to ignore evidence in the past – including accusations of rape and murder by "peacekeepers."

In a June 21, 2004 speech at the Conference on Confronting anti-Semitism: Education for Tolerance and Understanding sponsored by the United Nations Department of Information, human rights scholar and activist Anne Bayefsky made the following points:

- There is only one entire UN Division devoted to a single group of people: the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977).

- The only UN day dedicated to a specific people is November 29, the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

- There is only one refugee agency dedicated to a single refugee situation: UNRWA (in operation since 1950).

- The General Assembly operates through six committees of the whole. One of them, the Fourth Committee, routinely devotes 30 percent of its time to the condemnation of Israel.

- The General Assembly emergency sessions... began in 1956, and since then six of the ten emergency sessions ever held, have been about Israel. The 10th such session began in 1997 and has been reconvened 13 times. One might think that a million dead in Rwanda or two million dead in Sudan might have warranted one General Assembly emergency session.

- The UN's primary human-rights body is the UN Human Rights Commission. 30% of the resolutions condemning specific states ever adopted over 40 years are directed at Israel.

and finally...

UNIFIL (United Nations Forces In Lebanon) announced yesterday that it will be compelled to [try] to shoot down Israeli reconnaissance jets flying over Lebanon as a violation of "the deal." The flights have revealed the extend to which Hizbollah is re-arming in Southern Lebanon and from where the ballistics are coming.

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