Most of the coverage from last week’s meetings at the United Nations focused on leaders of rogue nations. But the most important speech was one given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a tough speech and one worth watching. It’s also a speech that historians may look back upon years from now as very prophetic. Take time to watch it all.
In its continuing slide into irrelevancy, the United Nations Security Council called for a ceasefire in Gaza and never once used the H-word. Now that could mean that they don’t thing Hamas has anything to do with what’s going on in Gaza, or they realize that asking Hamas to honor a ceasefire is pretty much pointless given their history.
Then again, there’s always the third option; they’re just blaming Israel, like they always do. That would be the safe bet.
The "Durban II" UN conference on human rights dealing with racism is set to meet next March. The first meeting of this type in 2001 became so obsessive about Israel that Colin Powell pulled the US out of it. In a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week, they suggested we not even show up this time. A little harsh? Premature, perhaps?
Consider this:
"Durban II," planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing. The draft declaration says Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians amounts to no less than "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide and a serious threat to international peace and security." We’ll spare you the rest.
Israel will be the main obsession, but it’s not the only target. The draft declaration also goes after the West’s freedom of speech and antiterror laws under the guise of protecting religion (read: Islam) from "defamation." The entire West will be in the dock for allegedly persecuting Muslims. "The most serious manifestations of defamation of religions are the increase in Islamophobia and the worsening of the situation of Muslim minorities around the world," the draft reads. "Islamophobia" is a term used to brand any criticism of Islam as a hate crime.
The Islamic terrorists who have killed hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists get a free pass. Instead, the draft calls for a media code of conduct and "internationally binding normative standards . . . that can provide adequate guarantees against defamation of religions." If this sounds like censorship, that’s because it is.
Well, can’t we just reason with them? If we don’t show up, we can’t make a change, right?
But we may not be able to make a change anyway, given who’s in charge.
The conference is being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, like its discredited predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, has been taken over by the world’s main abusers of human rights. The Organization of Islamic Countries, the most powerful voting bloc at the U.N., put Libya in charge of preparing Durban II, assisted by such other pillars of the international community as Iran and Cuba.
Yeah, those stalwarts of human rights and tolerance. The inmates are in charge of the asylum. The UN continues to be an exercise in futility, giving evil regimes legitimacy regarding their actions, under the cover of "international cooperation".
In fact it was so bad, that the name of the body was changed 2 years ago to avoid the (well deserved) bad PR it was receiving for doing exactly what this body is doing; making human rights abusers arbiters of human rights violations. And how well has that worked out? The blog UN Watch has been watching.
In its two years of existence, the Arab-controlled council has systematically undermined the cause of human rights and eviscerated the UN’s few existing tools that work. Human rights monitors in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, Congo (DRC), have all been scrapped. Genocide by Sudan has been ignored, with the monitor of that country’s atrocities now on the chopping block as well. Watch the March 2009 session, when the Sudan mandate is set to expire.
Violations by 189 other countries have been equally ignored, while Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism was encouraged. A full 80% of all country censures were directed at one nation, Israel. The list goes on and on.
Never in the history of international human rights has one of its own institutions inflicted so much damage.
On what basis will time be a healer? On the contrary, with each session, another remaining country monitor gets eliminated, more Islamic resolutions are adopted to curtail free speech in the name of “defamation of religion”, and human rights as a whole suffers.
The UN is fatally broken. Its own attempts at fixing the problems simply keep the status quo. If it is to survive, it must be remade from outside, or simply abolished. The suggestion of a league of democracies has, I think, a much better chance at succeeding than the UN.
Some define madness as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I give you Exhibit A.
The United Nations continues to get stonewalled by Iran, and intends to commit the situation to further study. In the meantime, there’s good evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is more than just for “peaceful purposes”.
Iran is continuing to stall on UN investigation into its disputed nuclear programme, refusing to provide access to documentation, individuals or sites which could reveal the true nature of its activities, the UN atomic watchdog said Monday.
Furthermore, the Islamic republic is defying international demands to suspend uranium enrichment, a process that can be used to make the fissile material for an atomic bomb, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.
The United States warned Iran could now face possible new sanctions in the wake of the IAEA’s findings.
The agency complained that it was making little headway in its investigation into allegations that Tehran had, in the past, been involved in studies to make a nuclear warhead.
The IAEA “regrettably has not been able to make any substantive progress on the alleged studies and other associated key remaining issues which remain of serious concern,” said the restricted report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
Watch in amazement as John McCain condemns Russia for having the temerity to cross an international boundary — “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”
We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.
So James Taranto’s prediction has quickly come true. Which got me wondering; how many dozen UN resolutions does it take before an invasion is OK by international standards, and how many resolutions was Russia enforcing when it invaded the Republic of Georgia?
[tags]Mathew Yglesias,John McCain,Russia,James Taranto,Best of the Web Today,United Nations,Republic of Georgia[/tags]
Hezbollah is planning on hitting Israeli targets anywhere in the world they can find them.
Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against "Jewish targets" somewhere outside the Middle East.
Intelligence officials tell ABC News the group has activated suspected "sleeper cells" in Canada and key operatives have been tracked moving outside the group’s Lebanon base to Canada, Europe and Africa.
[…]
Suspected Hezbollah operatives have conducted recent surveillance on the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, Canada and on several synagogues in Toronto, according to the officials.
Latin American is also considered a possible target by officials following Hezbollah’s planning.
Being a terrorist organization, they have just one thing on their mind; death.
"They want to kill as many people as they can, they want it to be a big splash," said former CIA intelligence officer Bob Baer, who says he met with Hezbollah leaders in Beirut last month.
"They cannot have an operation fail," said Baer, "and I don’t think they will. They’re the A-team of terrorism."
And what about "The Great Satan"? How about Israeli interests in the United States?
Baer says his Hezbollah contacts told him an attack against the US was unlikely because Iran and Hezbollah did not want to give the Bush administration an excuse to attack.
So then, a terrorist organization, even one where suicide bombing is a major weapon, can still be deterred if there is a credible threat of force. And specifically because of the actions of the Bush administration, this organization (that Michael Chertoff, quoted in the article, says that "they make al Qaeda look like a minor league team") doesn’t want to attack us and we in the United States are safer than, say, an unnamed neighbor to the north who only wants to send their military in when there’s little chance of getting into an actual fight.
I’d rather be feared by the terrorists than get more in France’s good graces. It isn’t enough to simply have a military if you never intend to use it. Osama bin Laden, after we tucked tail and ran out of Somalia when things got the slightest bit hot, came to the conclusion "that the American soldier was just a paper tiger". This emboldened him for the 9/11 attacks, but what he failed to realize is that the "paper tiger" had already finished his 2nd term.
This is not to say that any and every conflict must be entered full force, or that diplomacy makes us less safe. That is not the case. But the anti-war crowd would do well to note Hezbollah’s reticence to come after us. If we’d let Saddam Hussein have Kuwait, or if we’d not responded when he shot almost daily at our planes enforcing the cease-fire, or if we’d ignored the fact that so much of his known WMDs were unaccounted for, or simply rattled the plastic saber of UN resolutions a hundred more times (and have them ignored just as many times), Hezbollah, based on this analysis, would have been more likely to attack us on our soil. Saddam had been subject to the world’s frowns and the UN’s sternly worded letters for over a decade. Diplomacy had had much more than its fair shot at coming to a peaceful conclusion.
Pundits, bloggers and presidential candidates on the Left over the years have said that the Bush Doctrine has not made us safer. The reality is, out of fear of us and due to stepped up anti-terrorism measures, the US and US interests have been safer from terrorist attacks than any 5-year period in a long time. No attacks. And (to torture an analogy) an ounce of an act of terrorism prevented, due to the bad guys’ fear, is worth a pound of spies.
I would urge America not to elect another paper tiger in November. We don’t need to embolden terrorists.
[tags]Hezbollah,terrorism,Bush Doctrine,Saddam Hussein,Iraq,United Nations,war,paper tiger,Osama bin Laden[/tags]
Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy notes a few studies showing that the carbon offset program set up by the United Nations is what amounts to a scam.
Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN’s main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.
[…]
A working paper from two senior Stanford University academics examined more than 3,000 projects applying for or already granted up to $10bn of credits from the UN’s CDM[clean development mechanism] funds over the next four years, and concluded that the majority should not be considered for assistance. "They would be built anyway," says David Victor, law professor at the Californian university. "It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts." . . .
Should we really be shocked that a left-wing scheme to "do something" turns into a Make Money Fa$t scam? (Hint: No.) It’s just become another tax, which, one wonders, if that wasn’t the plan all along.
[tags]environment,United Nations,global warming,climate change,carbon offsets,Stanford University,David Victor,clean development mechanism[/tags]
From a press release from UN Watch.
To the sound of cheers, and by an overhwelming [sic] majority of 40 out of 47 votes, the UN Human Rights Council today elected Jean Ziegler, the co-founder of the "Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize," as an expert advisor representing the Western world. And for its new Palestine expert, the council chose Richard Falk, who, like Ziegler, accuses the U.S. of being responsible for many of the world’s ills and describes Israel in Nazi terminology.
Well, at least Ziegler is an award-winner, eh? UN Watch comments in the press release:
"Even within the benighted UN Human Rights council, today was a dark day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring agency. "The very credibility of the UN human rights system is now at stake."
No, sorry, this move won’t change any minds. For those of us who already understand that the UN is irreparably broken, their reputation is long gone after watching this sort of nonsense for a very, very long time. For UN apologists, however, nothing is too foolish or insane to change their minds. For them it’s just a matter of "fixing it", which is typically just defined as rearranging the deck chairs while it sinks.
[tags]United Nations,human rights,Jean Ziegler,Richard Falk,Muammar Khaddafi,UN Watch[/tags]
…to, of course condemn Israel. But first, some background.
ASHKELON, Israel (AP) – Residents of this beachside city are still coming to terms with being on the front lines of Israel’s battle against Hamas militants.
A dozen long-range rockets slammed into Ashkelon over the weekend, marking a significant turning point in the conflict and compelling Israel to strike back hard.
"Until yesterday, I never would have believed that I would see the things I saw," said Rachel Shimoni, 66, as she stood amid shards of glass, blown out of the front window of her clothing store. "All of a sudden, the reality has changed."
Palestinian militants fire rockets nearly daily at Sderot and other Israeli border towns near Gaza. But by reaching Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people about 11 miles north of Gaza, Hamas raised the stakes considerably. It is one of the largest cities in southern Israel, home to Mediterranean beaches, a college and strategic installations like an electric plant and a water purification plant.
Gaza militants have managed to hit the outskirts of Ashkelon in rare instances in the past, but the latest fighting was the first time they’ve been able to do it on a regular basis.
The intent is clear; Sderot is small potatoes, so with the help of Iranian rockets, the Palestinians have upped the ante and can now fire at a larger population center.
Rockets have been raining down in souther Israel for 2 years, and when does the UN start the loud condemnations? On the very day when Israel returns fire.
GAZA (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Israel for using "excessive" force in the Gaza Strip and demanded a halt to its offensive after troops killed 61 people on the bloodiest day for Palestinians since the 1980s.
Addressing an emergency session of the Security Council in New York after four days of fighting in which 96 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians,
And, oh yeah, …
Ban also called on Gaza’s Islamist militants to stop firing rockets.
But that call didn’t come until Israel defended itself. Odd, that. But now, what should this august body do?
Diplomats said the Security Council was unlikely to adopt a Libyan resolution that condemns Israel’s killing of civilians but makes no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire.
Can you say "blind spot"?
The United States, Israel’s closest ally and a veto-wielding member of the Council, made clear its understanding of the Israeli position, while regretting loss of life on both sides.
"There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defense," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
European diplomats said they believed the world body should at least make some comment on bloodshed which some say jeopardizes the new U.S.-backed peace talks between Israel and Abbas, who holds sway now only in the occupied West Bank.
The UN once again demonstrates the term "self-parody" as they consider the possibility that they should make some comments on the bloodshed, again, after 2 years of rocket fire from Gaza. Good morning, fellas, hope the noise of the bombs didn’t disturb your slumber.
And speaking of self-parody…
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: "If Israeli aggression continues, it will bury the peace process."
Yes, well, it depends on your definition of "peace". For the Arab world, and apparently for the UN as well, "peace" simply means bombing Israel with impunity. It is this sort of inaction and selective action that has convinced me that the UN is utterly broken.
[tags]Israel,Gaza,Middle East,Sderot,Ashkelon,Palestinians,United Nations,Hamas,Iran,Ban Ki-moon,Gordon Johndroe,Mahmoud Abbas,Saeb Erekat[/tags]
That’s all they can stands, they can’t stands no more. (Apologies to Popeye.)
ASHKELON, Israel – Israel’s deputy defense minister warned on Friday of a disaster in the Gaza Strip after Israel activated an air raid system to protect a major city from increasingly threatening Palestinian rocket barrages.
As Israeli troops, tanks and aircraft went after Palestinian rocket operations, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai told Army Radio that Israel had "no other choice" but to launch a massive military operation in Gaza.
For over 2 years, ever since the good-faith move out of Gaza by the Israelis, the Palestinians have been flinging rockets from Gaza into southern Israel almost daily, mostly at Sderot. But now, thanks to the ever-insistently-"peaceful" Iranians, the attacks are getting worse.
Israel evacuated its troops and settlers from Gaza in late 2005, but the rocket fire has persisted and this week became more ominous as Iranian-made rockets slammed into a major city.
Communities right over the Gaza border have taken the overwhelming brunt of the rocket attacks from Gaza, but militants firing longer-range Iranian rockets struck hit the town of Ashkelon several times on Thursday. One sliced through the roof of an apartment building and three floors below, and another landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl.
The world gasps in shock whenever Israel retaliates in defense of their own people, aiming at military targets, but yawns in apathy when the Palestinians indiscriminately chuck explosives at civilians. And at the UN, it’s all Israel’s fault.
Maybe, but only because they didn’t retaliate earlier. Letting the bully continue to act out, without consequence, doesn’t stop the bullying.
[tags]Israel,Middle East,Gaza,Palestinians,Hamas[/tags]
Given this statement…
“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda.”
…what subject is it referring to? Global cooling in the 1970s? How about global warming of the 2000s? Don Sensing has a poll going about what people think this refers to. One of the seven is the right answer, but the statement applies just as easily to the other six. Alarmism spurs research grants, “carbon credits”, and all sort of cash transfers,so it’s no wonder that there’s a tendency to make things worse than they are.
In this case, the statement is referring to the AIDS epidemic. While there’s no doubt it is a scourge, the UN is revising it figures down; way down.
The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.
AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.
The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.
Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.
“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”
But…but…I thought the scientific community didn’t work this way. If the science is settled, it’s settled, not bought. Right?
Right?
[tags]AIDS,global warming,United Nations,Helen Epstein[/tags]
All that negotiation and all those harshly worded reports from the UN have brought us to this point.
Iran has installed 3,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium – enough to begin industrial-scale production of nuclear fuel and build a warhead within a year, the UN’s nuclear watchdog reported last night.
The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will intensify US and European pressure for tighter sanctions and increase speculation of a potential military conflict.
The installation of 3,000 fully-functioning centrifuges at Iran’s enrichment plant at Natanz is a “red line” drawn by the US across which Washington had said it would not let Iran pass. When spinning at full speed they are capable of producing sufficient weapons-grade uranium (enriched to over 90% purity) for a nuclear weapon within a year.
The IAEA says the uranium being produced is only fuel grade (enriched to 4%) but the confirmation that Iran has reached the 3,000 centrifuge benchmark brings closer a moment of truth for the Bush administration, when it will have to choose between taking military action or abandoning its red line, and accepting Iran’s technical mastery of uranium enrichment.
Those who wish to avoid war at any cost are seeing the fruits of their, er, labor. Given their behavior up to this point, why do we think they’ll change their minds after another resolution or IAEA report? If you want to complain that Bush is driving us to war, the reality of who is doing the driving may come as a surprise to you. Not that it should, but I’m sure it will.
[tags]Iran,Mohamed ElBaradei,United Nations,IAEA,International Atomic Energy Agency,Natanz[/tags]
…for a strained definition of “peace”.
Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.
…
During its announcement, the Nobel committee cited the winners “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
…
“Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel committee, said in making the announcement.“Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming.”
The Nobel committee praised Gore as being “one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians.”
He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” said Mjoes
What this has to do with peace is not even hinted at by the CNN report. For that we have to go to the official Nobel Prize site press release. In the 5 paragraph statement, there is but one line about how this has anything to do with advancing peace.
Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.
The bold part is the one line of strained connection to peace, while the italicized “may”s chart the path the Nobel folks take to get there. “A just might happen, and then perhaps B could take place, and that means that people might fight about it.”
To top it all off, Gore hasn’t actually done much to stop global warming (certainly not in his own home); he got the award, in the Nobel committee’s words, for his efforts “to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” In other words, he’s been zipping around in private jets telling the rest of the world to slow down.
Well, if simply calling attention to something that might, given a certain set of circumstances, lead to fighting, may I start the nomination process for 2008?
The Voice of the Martyrs is a non-profit, interdenominational organization with a vision for aiding Christians around the world who are being persecuted for their faith in Christ, fulfilling the Great Commission, and educating the world about the ongoing persecution of Christians.
VOM is doing something about violence that is going on now, not simply raising awareness of something that might happen. For all their talk of hating torture, I’m sure the Left in this country could rally around this as much as for Gore. The Nobel folks already have the precedent of sending a political message with their choices, as they did with Jimmy Carter’s prize, and this would send an anti-torture message. How about it?
Yeah, well, hold not thy breath. The Nobel “Peace” Prize has become just another Leftist accolade. They’d give it to the late Yassar Arafat before VOM.
Oh yeah. They did.
[tags]Nobel Peace Prize,Al Gore,United Nations,IPCC,The Voice of the Martyrs,torture,global warming,environment,Ole Danbolt Mjoes,Christianity,persecution[/tags]
