EclectEcon

Those holding an anti-Western bias probably love the anti-democracy, anti-human-rights, and anti-Semitic direction that has been taken by The United Nations over the past few decades. Fortunately there is the WSJ to take the UN to task. But it criticizes not only the UN but also recent decisions by the US to tolerate the nonsense that has been going on at the UN:

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D'Escoto (he's a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He's also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.

The U.N. also voted to name the government of Burma – which otherwise has been busy preventing humanitarian assistance from reaching hundreds of thousands of its own needy victims of last month's devastating cyclone – as one of the Assembly's vice presidents. Only at the U.N. is this not considered an embarrassment.

If that weren't enough, a U.S. official was present for the vote – which was by acclamation – when the U.S. could have at least protested the choice with an empty seat. Nor did the State Department make any effort to offer an alternative to Father d'Escoto, who ran unopposed. Somehow, we don't think this would have happened had John Bolton still been ambassador.

Speaking after his election, Father d'Escoto called for greater "democracy" at the U.N. – an odd remark coming from a former servant of a communist dictatorship. He also called for the U.N. to take a stand against "acts of aggression, such as those occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan." That would be American aggression, not the Taliban's, the Mahdi Army's or al Qaeda's.

A former Lenin Prize winner as General Assembly president and cruel Burma as vice president – another sick joke from the U.N.

Canada has opted out of the 2009 United Nations Human Rights conference. The reason? Canada actually cares about human rights.

The Stephen Harper government has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference scheduled to take place next year in South Africa, according to a media release today from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said today that the conference, like its predecessor in 2001, "has gone completely off the rails... Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it. We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance".

... The last UN anti-racism conference held in Durban in 2001 degenerated into a hate-fest of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel vitriol, while the most egregious human rights violators escaped criticism. The Toronto Star today reported that "all of the non-governmental organizations invited to the first conference have been invited back to the second, including those that were at the 'forefront of the hatred', some of which posted pro-Hitler posters at the 2001 gathering."

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is in charge of planning for the conference, an entity that has directed 93% of its resolutions on human rights violations at just one nation - Israel. Iran is a member of the organizing committee, despite its government's open call to wipe the Jewish homeland off the face of the earth.

"The Stephen Harper government has again demonstrated that Canada can project power as a moral leader in international affairs," added [Alistair] Gordon [Director of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies]. "A nation does not need a massive military to provide the moral leadership and clarity that denies legitimacy to Orwellian UN agencies that hijack the language of human rights to promote Jew-hatred.

"Stephen Harper has signaled that Canada will act on principle, regardless of UN consensus. This is the stuff of global leadership."

Also, yesterday, Canada was the only country to vote against an anti-Israel motion before the UN kangaroo Human Rights Council. A youtube of the votes (30-1, with 15 abstentions) is here. Check out the 30 countries that voted in favour of the condemnation.

[T]he Arab and Islamic states, represented by Syria and Pakistan, have called an emergency “Special Session” of the UN Human Rights Council for this Wednesday, January 23, 2008.

The proposed resolution would condemn Israel yet say nothing about the Hamas attacks. This inverts the simple reality whereby Hamas and its terrorist allies are deliberately targeting civilians, while Israel in its defensive measures takes pains to avoid harming civilians.

From UN Watch.

From Ynet news:

A UN conference, held at the European Parliament in Brussels, heard an array of speakers call for a boycott against Israel and strategize on ways to achieve its international isolation, during the first day of an event billed by organizers as a gathering to promote "Middle East peace".

The 'International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace' has been organized by the UN's Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and attracted political figures and pro-Palestinian members of non governmental organizations (NGOs).

WHAT? The UN actually has such a committee?

The loaded language of such rhetoric is very disturbing. It is the same people dragging out the same tired arguments we heard from Durban in 2001. They were wrong then and they are still wrong.

[h/t to Scoop]

I had first seen reports of this from Melanie Phillips and then Stephen Pollard. A representative from UNWatch.org made a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council in which he pointed out all the council's blatant biases and anti-Semitism.

The ... UN Watch speech, lifting a mirror to the shortcomings of the UN Human Rights Council, was rejected by council president Luis Alfonso de Alba as "inadmissible." ... He banned the statement from being delivered again, and the speech was stricken without notice from the official extranet record of the Human Rights Council Secretariat

For a comparison of the types of statements welcomed by the Council on the one hand, in contrast with the remarks from UN Watch, see this.

Here is the speech that caused the commotion:

The UN Security Council has voted more sanctions against Iran in an attempt to force Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme. From the NYTimes,

All 15 members of the Security Council adopted the sanctions, Resolution 1747, which focus on constraining Iranian arms exports, the state-owned Bank Sepah — already under Treasury Department sanctions — and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military organization separate from the nation’s conventional armed forces.

No surprises were in the resolution, which modestly strengthens largely financial sanctions adopted in December in a first, limited resolution.

Meanwhile, of course, French and Russian financial institutions and arms dealers are licking their chops in anticipation of big profits to be made; so is Kofi Annan's son.

Addendum: These cartoons from a previous posting capture the situation pretty well.

Bill Sjostrom at Atlantic Blog brutally dissects a poll of international relations "scholars". The poll construction and results reveal the field of international relations to be rife with left-wing anti-Semites. The title of this posting came from this paragraph:

[I]n questions 66 and 67, only 8% (6% in Canada) support an attack against North Korea if it continues developing nuclear weapons, but that jumps to 53% (50% in Canada) if the Security Council approves. Questions 68 and 69 show the same result for Iran. Support for invading Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons jumps from 9% without Security Council approval (7% in Canada) to 48% with it (41% in Canada). The poll offers for no explanation for the fetish for the largely irrelevant Security Council. Is there something about IR scholars wanting to keep Putin happy?

It appears that the RCMP incorrectly informed the US that Maher Arar was a suspected terrorist with the result that he was seized while in the US and deported to Syria, where he was tortured. As a consequence there was an inquiry into the RCMP's actions. From the Canadian Coalition for Democracies,

Certain RCMP officers made a serious mistake. The government has recognized the fallibility of its security forces by undertaking an independent investigation into how such a mistake was made. We cannot expect a democracy to be perfect, but we can expect it to recognize its mistakes, to compensate the injured parties, and to take concrete steps to prevent a recurrence.

But who will hold inquiries into the torture being committed in Syria? Where are the UN resolutions condemning Syria for its violation of human rights?

The most important lesson to be learned from Mr. Arar’s case is not the shortcomings of our own security services, but the barbarism of our radical Islamist enemies who brutalized an innocent Canadian. The real lesson is the treatment of Bill Sampson, a Canadian tortured and sentenced to death by beheading in Saudi Arabia. The real lesson is the torture and murder of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi under Iran's chief prosecutor, Said Mortazavi, who was subsequently welcomed at the inaugural session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Also see this.

From the UN Watch,

As everyone expected, the one-sided resolution—sponsored by the Arab and Islamic members and automatically supported by China, Cuba and the like—was adopted by a strong majority, with 32 in favor, 8 opposing and 6 abstentions. Israel was condemned for the "willful killing" of civilians, and yet another UN "high level fact-finding mission" will be disptached to the region.

What matters most, however, is that the leading democracies refused to support today's charade. With the help of our campaign's swift action, not a single European Union country voted to support the anti-Israel text. This determines how intelligent public opinion the world over will interpret today's events.

In addition to Canada, there was the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the United Kingdom who all voted "No" to the one-sided condemnation. (The U.S. and Australia firmly spoke against it as well, but neither is currently a voting member of the 47-nation Council.) Although France merely abstained, this was nevertheless an improvement from their "Yes" vote last week at the Security Council.

From this source [h/t to Judith]:

Who killed 80,000 Muslims recently, imprisoned thousands more and brutally occupied and de-facto annexed their country? Israel? no. USA? Try again. Remarkably, no UN debate ensued. If Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International made a fuss about it, nobody noticed.

Please check the original source to see what country has been responsible for all this anti-Islam behaviour. I just love the conclusion there:

Something to think about, for those who insist on the fiction of international law.

The Sunday Times (UK) makes a pretty good case that Kofi Annan has been a war criminal [h/t to Little Green Footballs and MA] in its piece, "Is there blood on his hands? THE CASE AGAINST KOFI ANNAN". Here are some excerpts:

[B]ehind the honorifics and the accolades lies a darker story: of incompetence, mismanagement and worse. Annan was the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) between March 1993 and December 1996. The Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 men and boys and the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda happened on his watch. ...

Annan’s term has also been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme. Arguably, a trial of the UN would be more apt than a leaving party.

The charge sheet would include guarding its own interests over those it supposedly protects; endemic opacity and lack of accountability; obstructing investigations, promoting the inept and marginalising the dedicated.

The details provided by The Times are painful.

Update: MA writes:

The article (apart from page 3) is actually merely an extract from this book:

Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide, by Adam LeBor, is published by Yale University Press on October 31, price £17.99.

. .

Melanie Phillips recommends that all major democracies simply withdraw:

All civilised countries should now eject themselves from the UN. The disgraceful scenes of Ahmadinejad being treated this week as an esteemed member of the world community as he took the UN stage graphically illustrated the fact that the UN is not merely useless — it is the global Club of Terror, effectively run by, and in thrall to, tyrannies and corrupt despotisms which outnumber those member states that uphold human rights. The grotesque idea that such a body should be considered fit to arbitrate on international conflict — and even worse, be regarded as the ultimate arbiter of global legality and ethics — is the institutional reason why the world has ended up systematically rewarding aggression and ignoring or punishing its victims.

Some time ago, I wrote that the UN should be disbanded and replaced by a United Democratic Nations.

She also makes several references to work by Anne Bayevsky [this and this], which you might want to look at.

From the NYTimes,

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Syria would step up border patrols and work with the Lebanese army to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah.

And, of course, Kofi Annan expects everyone to accept this announcement. Furthermore, the NYTimes piece raises no questions and no doubts about the agreement, and it contains no skeptical quotes from anyone.

Typical.

Besides provide protection for Hezbollah while it re-arms itself? From the Debka Headlines
[h/t to Jack]:

UNIFIL-2, which will deploy in two stages starting early September, “will not be used along Lebanon’s long and porous border with Syria to stop any shipments of arms reaching Hizballah,” the UN secretary admitted Friday night from Brussels.

This confirms DEBKAfile’s report Friday that Israel has failed to obtain a pledge to enforce the UN embargo on arms for Hizballah’s rearmament from Iran and Syria.

Annan also stated: “Troops are not going in there to disarm – let’s be clear.” Disarming Hizballah, he said, is a subject for “political agreement among the Lebanese -” (a direct contradiction of UN Security Council resolution 1552)

Annan also spoke of “international guarantees” to secure Israel against further attacks. In other words, that is not UNIFIL’s job.

The UN Secretary General will go ahead with raising more international soldiers from Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, despite their refusal to maintain diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. He said he would take the best peacekeepers “wherever he can find them “– even if Israel does not accept this.

The Muslim contingents will supplement the 6,900 soldiers 12 European governments have pledged. Italy which succeeds France as leader of the force next February deploys the largest unit of 3,000 men, followed by France’s 2000 troops, Spain’s 1,000, Poland’s 500 and 250 from Finland.

But is that entirely consistent with this next bit, or are the next two paragraphs just double-talk?

French defense minister Alliot-Marie ... told the Wall Street Journal that Paris had obtained a very important clarification permitting its troops to use rubber bullets against “anyone standing in their way.”

Foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said the force would mark out “exclusion zones,” in which armed militias would be disarmed, as “the best way to remove Hizballah’s weapons.”

But read on to see what they apparently mean:

Neither French minister referred to the non-exclusion zones, from which it may be inferred that there, Hizballah fighters would be allowed to bear arms.

The Italian foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema, who can’t wait to plant a European military presence in the Middle East, is even more relaxed about holding Hizballah to UN resolution 1701. After all, he says, Europe does not regard Hizballah as a terrorist organization. He repeated Annan’s statement and declared Italy would not engage in disarming Hizballah fighters.

Hizballah spokesmen say that the “exclusion zones” issue is under study. DEBKAfile’s Beirut sources have learned that Iran’s Shiite proxy is considering opposing exclusion zones in Lebanon unless they are extended to northern Israel. This condition would hold up the UNIFIL-2 deployment in Lebanon until such time as Israel withdraws its troops - not only from Lebanon, but also from defensive positions on the Israeli side of the border including Galilee, two weeks after its civilian population endured a 4,000-rocket Hizballah blitz.

Addendum: From Michael Portillo, writing in the Times:

At the heart of this mess is France’s reluctance to tackle Hezbollah. Back in 2004 the security council adopted resolution 1559 demanding that the terrorist organisation be disarmed. Like many resolutions it is a declaration without serious intent. ... During recent days, as France has procrastinated, arms have been pouring in from Syria and Iran to re-equip the terror group. ...

There is now no suggestion that UN troops will attempt to disarm Hezbollah in accordance with UN policy. The question must be rather, to what extent will the French-led mission turn a blind eye to the group’s re-armament? If Hezbollah moves its Katyusha rockets back to the Israeli border, will the blue-helmeted Frenchmen stand in their way?

... Last week a former junior member of the Bush administration, Jeff Babbin, likened undertaking a military operation without the French to going on a deer shoot without an accordion — you just leave behind the noisy useless baggage.

... Chirac has been caught out. In the case of Lebanon, grandstanding was not enough. He has now stepped forward to do his duty with all the relish of a man slipping into a quicksand. French forces may be ineffective, or suffer casualties, or both. Washington cannot wait to see what happens next.

Kofi Annan has been a complete disaster as Secretary-General of the United Nations. He is due to leave in December, and let us hope he does no more damage before then. But do not get too hopeful.

From Claudia Rosett in the National Review Online [h/t to BenS]:

While Annan, Nasrallah, and the tyrants of Syria and Iran might have considered [the] round of U.N. diplomacy in 2000 a rip-roaring success, there were no victories there for the Free World. Afghanistan’s Taliban regime went on hosting al Qaeda, which was by then planning the Sept. 11 attacks on America. Syria completed its transition from the tyrannical President Hafez Assad to his despotic son Bashar Assad. Iran, of course, carried on with its totalitarian terrorist-sponsoring ways, as well as its nuclear-bomb program, and has now brought us the messianic Hezbollah-praising President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Kofi Annan got lunch, some photo-ops, and, of course, a Nobel Prize.

And, as we now know, just four months after Annan’s handshake with Nasrallah, Hezbollah in its “emerging political, economic and social role” went on in October, 2000, to kidnap three Israeli soldiers from inside Israel — murdering them all. UNIFIL’s contribution was to hand over at gunpoint to Hezbollah the bloodstained vehicles in which the Israelis were apparently kidnapped, conceal from Israeli authorities for months videotapes of the evidence, and then “observe” for more than five years as Hezbollah trucked in weapons from Iran and Syria, honeycombed southern Lebanon with fortifications and launched the recent bout of ruinous war with the July 12 kidnapping of another two Israeli soldiers, whom Hezbollah has yet to return.

Annan himself may be oblivious to the damage done to the real cause of peace by his favored brand of thug-hugging U.N. “diplomacy,” but the rest of us will be living with it long after he has retired. Right now, Annan has no more business talking with Hezbollah than he would have visiting the Iranian exhibition of holocaust cartoons that opened Monday in Tehran. Or should we brace for that as well?

As Rosett says earlier in the article,

If Annan before stepping down in December is truly desperate to produce a legacy more edifying than Oil-for-Food and Kojo’s Mercedes, he could better spend his remaining four months in office actually enforcing his “zero-tolerance” policy against child rape by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa. Or, unlikely though this is, he could try genuinely cleaning up the bribery-tainted and still secretive U.N. procurement department ...

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the National Review Online, says:

The only suspense remaining is whether the United Nations peacekeeping force or the Lebanese army will prove the most craven in giving Hezbollah a green light to rearm and terrorize.

He has much more to say that is insightful; it will be worthwhile to take thirty seconds and read the whole thing.

Toronto, Ontario, is hosting 24,000 delegates to a conference to discuss why conservative, uncaring gubmnts around the world are prolonging the AIDS epidemic. One of the signs commonly displayed asked for more money for health care workers.

The major theme captured by the media has been that Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper did not attend the conference but sent the Minister of Health to attend. Wonderwoman has a terrific response. Key points:

• Kofi Annan didn't attend. Why no media or other outrage about his absence? What about Chirac? Where's Putin? How much was Bill Clinton paid to show up?
• The crowd booed Bill Gates (who funded the entire conference [and I used to think he was smart]) when he started talking about the ABCs (abstinence,...., condoms) of AIDS prevention.

But of course the CBC is a media sponsor of the event and is carrying all the anti-Harper rants (while NOT showing the booing of Bill Gates!)

Rodney (Twinkle-toes*) Hide makes the following point about both the United Nations and Helen Clark's gubmnt in New Zealand:

The Herald’s Audrey Young sees a contradiction between saying Helen Clark is running “the most corrupt Government in New Zealand history” and then declaring her suitable to run the UN.

Say what?

I would have thought Don was just repeating himself.

*Rodney Hide entered a dance contest and won great respect for himself; see here for a painting he has done to commemorate the occasion. For more, see here.

Four UN peacekeepers were killed in Lebanon this week. Kofi Annan's reaction revealed his true feelings:

Mr. Annan said he was “shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces.

He has since backtracked (without apology) on this assertion.

In fact, though, the UN forces in Lebanon have behaved as if they are Hezbollah collaborators according to this piece in the NRO by Michael Krauss and Peter Pham. [h/t to BenS and Judith Binder]

What many seem to forget is that there already is a U.N. military presence in Lebanon — and one armed, at least on paper, with a robust mandate. Alas, the blue-helmeted “peacekeepers” are part of the problem, not the solution.

... When Israeli forces completed their pullout from Lebanon in early 2000, Foreign Minister David Levy reminded Annan that it was now up to Lebanon, in collaboration with UNIFIL, to live up to their obligations to deploy the Lebanese army in the south and to secure its border. That the present conflict is occurring is proof positive of the failure of the Lebanese government and of UNIFIL to even attempt to fulfill these obligations. The arsenal and forces that Hezbollah has amassed on Israel’s northern frontier were assembled under the eyes of UNIFIL. In fact, accusing the U.N. troops of “failure” would be inaccurate; “enabler” might be a more apt description.

... Nor has the situation changed much now that the conflict is “hot.” UNIFIL’s only apparent action this past week has been to voice concerns that its troops might get hit in the crossfire. This is indeed a risk — because UNIFIL has long permitted Hezbollah to locate its forces, including its missile batteries, in the very shadow of installations belonging to the “peacekeepers.” UNIFIL has thus turned into a very convenient and high-profile human shield for terrorists.

As Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper said, he hopes people will look into why the UN observers were hanging out so near Hezbollah rocket-launching sites.

Update: Issue 147 of the "Wednesday Watch" from unwatch.org has much more. Its conclusion:

Until the UN demonstrates that it can be more like Resolution 1559, and less like UNIFIL and the Human Rights Council, it will be difficult to imagine the organization bringing peace to Lebanon, or to the Middle East as a whole.

From UN Watch's most recent Wednesday Watch:

Syria Tells UN: Israel is Like Nazi Germany

As it does every year, the UN's annual World Health Assembly met last week in Geneva and decided to single out one of its 192 member states for condemnation: Israel. A similar ritual is scheduled soon at the annual meeting of the UN's International Labor Organization.

... Just in case anyone missed the intended message of what is only the latest installment of a systematic campaign at the UN, dating from 1975, to delegitimize and scapegoat the Jewish state, the Syrian representative, speaking at Thursday's WHA debate, made it crystal clear: the Israelis were acting like Nazis, he said.

... Only a few days later, again at the UN in Geneva, a preparatory session of the world body's new Human Rights Council heard the ambassadors of Pakistan, Syria, Malaysia, Lebanon and the PLO agree on one thing: the Council agenda needs a special item with which to condemn Israel. Occupation is a special category, you see.

Not all occupation, mind you — not the violent occupation of Lebanon by Syrian agents and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah, not the decades-long Chinese occupation of Tibet, not the Russian occupation of Chechnya — but only that occasioning a grievance against the Jewish state. Never mind that (unlike Syria, China, or Russia) Israel acquired the land in a defensive war, and that its immediate offer to surrender the areas for peace, pursuant to Security Council Resolution 242, was met with the Arab League's infamous September 1967 "three No's" conference in Khartoum. And never mind that Ehud Barak's Camp David offer of 97% of the claimed territory was met with another "No" from Yasser Arafat in 2000 — and the launching of a campaign of suicide bombings on a scale the world had not seen before... .

From the Weekly Standard:

When the hysteria over the Danish Muhammad cartoons was at its height last month, another cartoon circulated on the Internet depicting a Lego "Danish embassy" playset--complete with embassy ablaze, Danish flags going up in smoke, and little Lego Islamists carrying placards that read "Europe the cancer, Islam the Answer." In linking Lego toys, a symbol of Denmark and of childhood innocence, with the campaign of hatred against Denmark sweeping through the Arab world, the cartoonist was more prescient than we knew.

... In connection with its International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21, the Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights issued an antiracism poster. Under the headline "Racism takes many shapes," it featured a very red and very recognizable Lego building block.

Lego and the Danish foreign ministry immediately protested, and the agency had to cancel the poster. Afterwards, a U.N. spokesman disingenuously claimed that the use of the building block had been entirely accidental, and with a smirk apologized if this had hurt Danish feelings. Unfortunately for Lego, you can't sue the United Nations.

Remind me again why we support such a corrupt organization.

[h/t to BenS]

BenS recently pointed me toward U.N. Watch. From their "about us" statement,

UN Watch is foremost concerned with the just application of UN Charter principles. Areas of interest include: UN management reform, the UN and civil society, equality within the UN, and the equal treatment of member states. UN Watch notes that the disproportionate attention and unfair treatment applied by the UN toward Israel over the years offers an object lesson (though not the only one) in how due process, equal treatment, and other fundamental principles of the UN Charter are often ignored or selectively upheld.

One of the organization's recent pieces in its Wednesday Watch is pithy and to the point:

An alien observing the United Nations' debates, reading its resolutions, and walking its halls would conclude that a principal purpose of the world body is to censure a tiny country called Israel. [emphasis added]

Beginning around 1967, the full weight of the UN was gradually but deliberately turned against the country it had conceived by General Assembly resolution a mere two decades earlier. The campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel at every opportunity and in every forum was initiated by the Arab states together with the former Soviet Union, and supported by what has become known as an "automatic majority" of Third World UN member states. The result today is that the UN's political organs, specialized agencies, and bureaucratic divisions have been subverted in the name of a relentless propaganda war against the Jewish state.

Paradoxically, one of the greatest violators of the UN Charter's equality guarantee has been the UN body charged with establishing and enforcing international human rights, the Commission on Human Rights. This case study examines how this UN Commission systematically singles out Israel for discriminatory treatment, as an instance of the UN's denial to Israel of equality before the law. It also discusses the efforts of UN Watch, a human rights monitoring organization in Geneva, Switzerland, to combat this bias and restore the UN to its original purposes.

There is much more; see this.

Rebekah K. at Composite Drawlings also writes a weekly column for her local newspaper; fortunately, it is also available online for us all to read. In a recent piece, she praises the job John Bolton has been doing at the United Nations.

First, at the beginning of this month, Bolton told the UN — as they signed the Palestinian Resolutions which, among other things, condemn Israel for defending itself against terrorism and call for Israel to surrender even more land to the people who were trying to eliminate them — they were increasingly demonstrating their irrelevance.

... Following that scathing speech, he came out three days later (after another suicide bomber attacked and killed innocents in Israel) with a few choice words for the Security Council: "you have to speak up in response to these terrorist attacks. It's a great shame that the Security Council couldn't speak to this terrorist attack in Netanya, but if the Council won't speak, the United States will."

Bolton has been pressing the members of the United Nations to start cleaning up their acts, has demanded that those who sit on the Human Rights Commission have at least made an effort to protect basic human rights (no more China, shooting civilians for sitting in protest against local land-grabbing governments, no more Zimbabwe and its bulldozing homes of the poor, no more Cuba and imprisoning good people for having the chutzpah to contract AIDS, no more Iran or North Korea or any other nation whose record on human rights is blatantly abysmal). He’s informed the UN that the corruption which seems to flow from the top down must be cleaned up, or else we will find — or build — a new treaty organization which is willing act both responsibly and effectively.

... Dang, it must gall the folks who wanted him filibustered into oblivion! He came in fast and low, under the radar, and slipped in by interim appointment, and now there’s nobody to stop him from wreaking havoc on the heretofore smug, slimy oysters at Turtle Bay.