Om FN

[simon]

Glenn Beck om FN:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feOVwbCcHVs&NR

[Vegard Martinsen]

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadAr ... p?ID=24114

The World’s Worst Organization
By Michael Radu
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 29, 2006

Americans frequently express dissatisfaction with the United Nations. Their reasons are numerous: dragging its feet on Darfur; the corrupt practices exposed in the Oil-for-Food scandal; refusing to accept meaningful management and financial reforms; electing Iran as vice-chair of the Disarmament Committee and placing Cuba on the Human Rights Council, among numberless other foibles and failures.

All of these complaints are justified, but they confuse the symptoms with the disease. The problem is not what the UN does but what it is, or, more accurately, what it is not. It remains based on the premise that there is such a thing as an “international community,” when, in fact, there is no such thing, certainly not in any meaningful sense.

Born in the wake of WWII, the UN possessed fatal defects from birth. The popular assumption among Western elites that the failed League of Nations could be revived in a new and improved version was shown to be utopian when Joseph Stalin conditioned his participation on the Soviet Union having three members: itself, Belarus, and Ukraine, the latter two being provinces of the Soviet empire.

There followed the charade of five permanent members of the Security Council – the US, the declining imperial powers Britain and France, the rising one led by Stalin, and the irrelevant China of Chiang Kai-shek. What was the moral, political and legal unity of those five, not to mention other founding “powers” like Guatemala or Saudi Arabia that supposedly constituted the “community of nations”?

With respect to the structure of the organization, there has always been a complete disjunction between the members’ rights, benefits, and responsibilities, beginning with funding.

The finances of the United Nations are the only concrete application of Karl Marx’s description of communist Utopia: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Thus, the United States foots 22 percent of the UN bill, Japan 19.63 percent, Germany 9.82 percent, France 6.50 percent, the United Kingdom 5.57 percent, Italy 5.09 percent, Canada 2.57 percent, Spain 2.53 percent, and Brazil 2.39 percent—which is to say that 9 countries, constituting 4.7 percent of total membership, pay 76 percent of the UN budget. The U.S and Japan (the latter not even a permanent member of the Security Council) pay over 40 percent of the costs. (If you are a New Yorker, the people who work at the UN owe the city nineteen millions in parking fines.) China and Russia, incidentally, pay 2.053 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively. Ultimately, the entire UN financing system is nothing but a global form of wealth redistribution that entails, as one observer said, taking money from the poor in the richest countries to give it to the richest in poor countries.

Nor it is just wealth that is transferred but influence as well, with the General Assembly, International Criminal Court, and all other UN agencies being strongly influenced, if not controlled, by those who have the least to contribute and most to benefit. That this trend continues, and indeed grows, is yet another real life manifestation of Dr. Johnson's definition of second marriage: the triumph of hope over experience.

With the decolonization of Africa in the early 1960s, a new wave of weak, artificial states dependent on international welfare arose – the Sierra Leones and Somalias of today, all subsisting on the dubious legitimacy provided by UN membership, and the funds coming from it, all of whom found power in the General Assembly, where they established the so-called Non Aligned bloc (meaning non-aligned with the Western money providers), now the Group of 77 (in fact over 120). It was a process easily manipulated during the Cold War by Moscow and paid for by the West.

Nowhere are the UN’s defects more obvious than on security issues, the domain of the Security Council. There the interests of the US, China and Russia and the idiosyncrasies of Paris are supposed to mix in a brotherhood seeking world peace, which of course they do not.

Hence the inevitable results: if an issue is sufficiently marginal, a decision is made, money is wasted in fixing it, usually temporarily and in terms of PR more than reality, and we get Cambodia in 1993 (I was there – the election losers, with guns, stayed in power), or East Timor later.

If the issue is of regional importance, and UN “solutions” have failed, a way is found outside the system – and we have Kosovo and Bosnia, where NATO rather than New York imposed a still shaky outcome. And when the issue is obviously serious and does threaten world peace, no solution is found – and we have Iran, North Korea, Saddam Hussein, all attended by innumerable meaningless resolutions, presidential statements, and expressions of the “international community’s” opinions.

The problem is that, beyond the rhetorical and ritualistic banalities of global bureaucrats, there is no substance in the “international community” – and so we have the spectacle of repeated UN condemnations of terrorism matched only by the organization’s longstanding inability to even define the term.

Given these realities, known to all, it remains a mystery that so many are still disappointed in the UN’s performance, or, worse, blame the United States, George Bush or the “neocons.” Worse still, the same elites, and far less well-intentioned Third World anti-Western regimes, persist in proclaiming the UN as the source of international law, which led Kofi Annan inevitably to declare the war in Iraq “illegal.”

Like the institution it bases its legitimacy on, “international law” is “evolving” – human rights fundamentalists à la Amnesty International really love the word – further and further away from real life and common sense. As a result, we end up with bans on landmines, attempts to ban small arms, a nuclear non-proliferation treaty openly flaunted, and so on.

All of this is furthered by the little-noticed fact that “progressive” UN-recognized Non-Governmental Organizations, especially their “human rights” and environmentalist versions, not only participate in decision making but, given their financial power and government support, have more influence than most member states.

True, there is a World Health Organization, a Universal Postal Union, and a few other organizations in the UN system that either do a commendable job or cannot realistically be replaced by anything better, and are needed and deserve support. But on all security and economic matters the United Nations proves, on a daily basis, that it is nothing but the reflection of a violent and disordered international system, no different from its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations. To expect it to “work” is to forget Albert Einstein’s definition of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.

Does that mean that the United States should give up on the UN? That is a tempting notion, albeit advocated far too often by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, such as isolationists like Pat Buchanan, and, one suspects, by a majority of Americans. However, the fact is that the United Nations Organization has long become a “cultural habit” – and not just on the East Side of Manhattan or, more understandably, in Malabo, Port Vila and Antanarivo, but also, indeed more so, in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and London and, let us be honest, Washington, D.C. So we are stuck with it -- so far.

Stuck with it does not, however, mean subject to its whims. Congress should examine in detail exactly what we taxpayers are paying for. We should do a much better job in educating the public on the real nature of the UN – wherein the non–working recipient decides the amount of his allowance from the hardworking parent. Would any American parents accept those terms in dealing with their teenagers?

Blaming Kofi Annan for being true to the UN is unfair to him and avoids our own responsibility for taking seriously the people on the United Nations Plaza, New York. We should just treat them as unpleasant guests that, for now, we have to pay for, and nothing more.

[QIQrrr]

NEW YORK — How big do you have to be to earn the wrath of the United Nations and Internet giant Google?

If you're journalist Matthew Lee, all it takes are some critical articles and a scrappy little Web site.

Lee is the editor-in-chief, Webmaster and pretty much the only reporter for Inner City Press, a pint-sized Internet news operation that's taken on Goliath-sized entities like Citigroup since 1987.

Click here to view the Inner City Press Web site.

Since 2005, he's been focusing almost entirely on stories that deal with internal corruption inside the U.N., posting several stories online almost daily.

Les hele

[QIQrrr]

En annen interessant artikkel fra Fox (februar 2007):

At the United Nations, the Curious Career of Maurice Strong

Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.

But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.

From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.

Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career. He has spent decades migrating through a long list of high-level U.N. posts, standing behind the shoulder of every U.N. secretary-general since U Thant . Without ever holding elected office, he has had a hand in some of the world’s most important bureaucratic appointments, both at the U.N. and at the World Bank. A Canadian wheeler-dealer with an apple face and pencil mustache, Strong has parlayed his personal enthusiasms and connections into a variety of huge U.N. projects, while punctuating his public service with private business deals.

Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong’s creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors.

Officially, Strong cut his ties to the U.N. Secretariat almost two years ago, as federal investigators homed in on the discovery that back in 1997, while serving as a top adviser to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he took a check for almost $1 million that was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime. The check was delivered by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted last summer in New York Federal Court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials on behalf of Baghdad. Strong denied any wrongdoing and said he would step aside from his U.N. envoy post until the matter was cleared up.

Since then, Strong has receded, as he often does, into the shadows. He is currently spending most of his time in China. His name flickered recently through the speaker lineup for a gala dinner for clean technologies in San Francisco, but the organizers say he then canceled because “he has so much going on” in China.

China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-‘30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong’s China. Maurice Strong’s presence in Beijing, however, raises awkward questions: For one thing, China, while one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, has been profiting from the trading of carbon emissions credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.

Strong has refused to answer questions from FOX News about the nature of his business in China, though he has been linked in press reports to planned attempts to market Chinese-made automobiles in North America, and a spokesman for the U.S.-based firm that had invited him to speak in San Francisco, Cleantech Venture Network, says he has recently been “instrumental” in helping them set up a joint venture in Beijing. Strong’s assistant in Beijing did confirm by e-mail that he has an office in a Chinese government-hosted diplomatic compound, thanks to “many continuing relationships arising from his career including 40 years of active relationships in China.”

And from China, Strong has to this day maintained a network of personal and official connections within the U.N. system that he has long used to spin his own vast web of non-governmental organizations, business associates and ties to global glitterati. Within that web, Strong has developed a distinctive pattern over the years of helping to set up taxpayer-funded public bureaucracies, both outside and within the U.N., which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects.

Les hele

Jeg er redd det krever mer enn en heltidsstilling hvis målet er å grave seg til bunns i dette ormebolet.

(Sitter man på interessant materiale om FN: post gjerne her.)

[Demian]

WWW.UNWATCH.ORG gjør en god jobb.
"UN Watch is a non-governmental organization based in Geneva whose mandate is to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uhWgZu6tcZU

[QIQrrr]

For the professional peddlers of anti-Americanism, haters of free enterprise, and true believers in global government, there is only one place that it really pays to perform: the United Nations. Dette skriver Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North - sakset fra Townhall.com:

UN-American

By Oliver North - Friday, September 19, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Millions of American boys have dreamed of hitting a grand slam or pitching a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium because baseball's greatest have performed there. Talented musicians and singers aspire to New York's famed Carnegie Hall, for they know it represents the pinnacle of their profession. For gifted physicians and medical researchers, the Mount Everest of medicine is the Mayo Clinic.

But certain institutions can bring out the worst in people. For the professional peddlers of anti-Americanism, haters of free enterprise, and true believers in global government, there is only one place that it really pays to perform: the United Nations.

The U.N. headquarters, in Manhattan, has become the venue of choice for "diplomats" and foreign leaders to condemn America, our values and our virtues. Since the 1960s, star billing has been promised to any dictator or despot who takes to this "world stage" for the purpose of denigrating the United States and our bounty, wealth and power. When they show up for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, it is guaranteed that their horrible harangues will be broadcast around the planet.

Soviet tyrant Nikita Khrushchev was one of the first to grasp this opportunity, and he did so repeatedly. Since then, totalitarians Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Robert Mugabe, Daniel Ortega, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Idi Amin and Hugo Chavez have used the U.N.'s bully pulpit to denounce the United States. Next week's gathering of the U.N. General Assembly promises more of the same.

Just to make sure that no one has any doubts as to how things are going to go in the days ahead, the members of the General Assembly selected Miguel d'Escoto -- a prominent America hater -- as their president. When the 63rd UNGA convenes Tuesday, d'Escoto will "moderate" this year's assaults on the United States.

For those too young to remember the portly d'Escoto, he was one of the original founders of the communist-inspired Sandinista movement, which seized control of Nicaragua in 1979. His U.N.-published biography proudly proclaims that he "spearheaded the Nicaraguan Government's decision, in 1984, to bring to the International Court of Justice a claim against the United States for supporting military and paramilitary actions against the country, with the Court subsequently ruling in favor of Nicaragua."

Notably, the bio makes no mention of d'Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, being publicly reprimanded by Pope John Paul II during the pope's 1983 visit to Managua. Nor does d'Escoto's resume reflect his tenure as a paid asset of the Central Intelligence Agency in Chile. Apparently, the U.S. haters at the U.N. just missed those facts.

None of this has deterred the utopian d'Escoto from serving as the "warm-up act" for this year's Bash America Fest in the Big Apple. The visibly well-fed d'Escoto already has announced that this UNGA session should "go down in history as the 'Assembly of Frankness' for the sake of world peace and the eradication of poverty and hunger from the earth."

D'Escoto previously has referred to President Ronald Reagan as a "butcher," called President George W. Bush a "liar," and now promises that under his leadership, the UNGA will redress the "sad, but undeniable fact that serious breaches of the peace and threats to international peace and security are being perpetrated by some members of the Security Council that seem unable to break what appears like an addiction to war."

All this is but preamble to what we can expect to hear from the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Chavez. Both "leaders" will be there representing states that have been accused of supporting terrorism, drug running, human rights abuses, and -- in the case of Tehran -- pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Yet d'Escoto claims: "No state should appropriate the right to decide on its own which states are terrorists or sponsors of terrorism and which are not. Less still should states that are guilty of wars of aggression, the worst form of terrorism imaginable, presume to arrogate that right unto themselves and further, to unilaterally take action against those it has stigmatized."

When he goes before this august body next week, President Bush needs to encourage d'Escoto -- and the entire Blame America First crowd gathered in the General Assembly -- to read Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."

[QIQrrr]

FrontPageMag:

Islam was born as a religion spread through violence. There is a direct line from the prophet Muhammad to today’s Islamic terrorists, whose latest deadly attacks wreaked havoc in Mumbai, India. The ongoing effort in the United Nations and the politically correct media to disassociate Islam from terrorism is a sham.

Just days before the Mumbai attack, a United Nations Committee passed a resolution entitled “Combating Defamation of Religions”, which will be going to the General Assembly for approval in mid-December. It is one in a series of such resolutions pushed by the Organization of Islamic Conference. While ostensibly applying to all religions, it refers only to Islam by name. The text “expresses deep concern … that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” - Off the Table

[QIQrrr]

Besides Morales, the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro has been named “World Hero of Solidarity” and the late ex-president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, will be honored as “World Hero of Social Justice.”

Morales Named “World Hero of Mother Earth” by UN General Assembly

Latin American Herald Tribune, Caracas, September 6,2009

LA PAZ – The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Rev. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, on Saturday declared Bolivian President Evo Morales as “World Hero of Mother Earth” in a ceremony at the presidential palace in this capital.

With a medal and a parchment scroll, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization named Morales “the maximum exponent and paradigm of love for Mother Earth” in the resolution for his decoration that was read during the ceremony.

The document added that the decision was taken “after extensive consultation” among representatives of the General Assembly’s member countries.

D’Escoto recalled that Morales “was the one who most helped” the United Nations declare last April 22 as International Mother Earth Day, or “Pachamama” as Mother Earth is said in Bolivia’s Aymara Indian tongue.

For his part, the president said that the honor is not for Evo Morales, “but for our ancestors and the native peoples” that “have always defended Mother Earth.”

He added that he will continue trying to get the international community to acknowledge the rights of Mother Earth.

Besides Morales, the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro has been named “World Hero of Solidarity” and the late ex-president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, will be honored as “World Hero of Social Justice.”

“What we want to do is present these three people to the world and say that they embody virtues and values worth emulation by all of us,” said D’Escoto, who like the socialist Morales is a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

D’Escoto was elected president of the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly on June 4, 2008, and was Nigaraguan foreign minister during the first Sandinista government from 1979 to 1990.

[Rounin]

Haha, da må jeg ta en jeg jeg også:

Gaddafi vil oppløse Sveits
Den libyske diktatoren skal sende inn forslaget til FN 15. september.

I fjor ble Muammar Gaddafis sønn og gravide svigerdatter arrestert i den sveitstiske byen Geneve, mistenkt for å ha angrepet en værelsespike.

Nå spekuleres det i om denne episoden er bakgrunnen for at Libyas diktator ønsker fjerne den sentraleuropeiske nasjonen, skriver The Daily Mail.

- Sveits er en verdensmafia og ikke en nasjon, sa Gadaffi da han først lanserte forslaget under sommerens G8-møte i Italia.

- Landet består av et italiensk samfunn som bør returneres til Italia, et tysk samfunn som bør returneres til Tyskland og et fransk samfunn som bør returneres til Frankrike, skal han ha sagt, ifølge den britiske avisen.
- Bekymret

Gaddafi skal lansere det bisarre forslaget i forbindelse med at Libya overtar presidentskapet for FNs generalforsamling 15. september.

Sveitsiske myndigheter kaller det en kampanje mot sveitsiske interesser.

- Vi er bekymret for at Libya vil forsøke å bruke sitt årelange presidentskap for FNs generalforsamling til å skade Sveits' rykte, sa det sveitsiske parlamentsmedlemmet Christa Markwalder til en sveitsisk TV-kanal, ifølge The Daily Mail.

Hipp hipp!

[QIQrrr]

Times Online, September 13, 2009: The legitimacy of the $100 billion (£60 billion) carbon-trading market has been called into question after the world’s largest auditor of clean-energy projects was suspended by United Nations inspectors. SGS UK had its accreditation suspended last week after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the carbon-trading scheme, or even that they were qualified to do so. The episode will be embarrassing for European lawmakers in the run-up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen, where they will attempt to lure big polluters such as America and China into a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol. SGS is the second such company to be suspended – Norway’s DNV was penalised last November for similar infractions.
Carbon-trading market hit as UN suspends clean-energy auditor

[simon]

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks ... 280457.ece

SPØRSMÅL 5: Finnes det noen alternativer til FN?

JE: Nei, selv om George W. Bush trodde det da han igangsatte sin katastrofale invasjon av Irak.

HR: Nei. Noen leker med tanken om en «liga for demokratier», men hvordan definerer man hva som er et demokrati, og hva som ikke er det? Dessuten ville de fleste landene man måtte forholde seg til være uten en plass ved bordet. FNs valuta er dens legitimitet, at alle landene er representert. Og det er noe vi har et desperat behov for.

Jeg kommenterte dette svineriet. Det er sikkert plass til flere...

[QIQrrr]

U.N. climate meeting was propaganda: Czech president

Reuters, Tue Sep 22

Czech President Vaclav Klaus sharply criticized a U.N. meeting on climate change on Tuesday at which U.S. President Barack Obama was among the top speakers, describing it as propagandistic and undignified.

"It was sad and it was frustrating," said Klaus, one of the world's most vocal skeptics on the topic of global warming.

"It's a propagandistic exercise where 13-year-old girls from some far-away country perform a pre-rehearsed poem," he said. "It's simply not dignified."

At the opening of the summit attended by nearly 100 world leaders, 13-year-old Yugratna Srivastava of India told the audience that governments were not doing enough to combat the threat of climate change.

Klaus said there were increasing doubts in the scientific community about whether humans are causing changes in the climate or whether the changes are simply naturally occurring phenomena.

But politicians, he said, seem to be moving closer to a consensus on climate change.

"The train can't be stopped and I consider that a huge mistake," Klaus said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon organized the climate summit to help create momentum before a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen in December to reach agreement on new targets for reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

However, new proposals by China and a rallying cry from U.S. President Barack Obama did little to break a U.N. deadlock about what should be done.

Klaus published a book in 2007 on the worldwide campaign to stop climate change entitled "Blue Planet in Green Chains: What Is Under Threat -- Climate or Freedom?"

In the book, Klaus said global warming has turned into a new religion, an ideology that threatens to undermine freedom and the world's economic and social order.

[QIQrrr]

An Onion Parody, or a UN Human Rights Report: You Decide

Ron Radosh, October 20th, 2009

As I read the very latest UNHCR report, I could not believe that I was not looking at an Onion parody. It is but the latest outrage from a would-be human rights commission set up by the United Nations, and which to our nation’s embarrassment, President Obama has seen fit to have the United States sign up as a member.

As Martin Peretz points out, “America’s new membership on the Human Rights Council has had no results in the fairness of the process. Did anyone imagine it would? Well, I suppose the president did.” Peretz is right. And the current administration’s reversal of staying out of the farcical body is one of the affronts to dignity of our current Chief Executive.

As for the latest broadside, “The report therefore discusses, besides the human rights of women, the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures on men and persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and addresses how gender intersects with other prohibited grounds of discrimination, such as race and religion.” What this gobbledygook legalese means is that when the Israelis engage in counter-terrorism against terrorists and suicide bombers, they are threatening the rights of trans-gendered individuals. How? When a man dresses as a woman, the Israelis might embarrass an honest cross-dresser by subjecting him/her to a humiliating search, thereby interfering with the person’s sexual identity and human rights. They state:

The report identifies the ways in which those subject to gender-based abuse are often caught between targeting by terrorist groups and the State’s counter-terrorism measures that may fail to prevent, investigate, prosecute or punish these acts and perpetrate new human rights violations with impunity. These violations are amplified through war rhetoric and increased militarization in countering terrorism, both of which marginalize those who challenge or fall outside the boundaries of predetermined gender roles and involve situations of armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in which gender-based violence and gendered economic, socialcand cultural rights violations abound.

They add: “The report then draws attention to the fact that contrary to these international human rights obligations to ensure equality, some Governments have used the human rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals as a bartering tool to appease terrorist or extremist groups in ways that have furthered unequal gender relations and subjected such persons to increased violence.”

On page 19 the report says: “Enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion.” (my emphasis.)

Think about this one moment. We all know that Islamist and Arab regimes think nothing of stoning homosexuals to death, throwing them in jail, hanging them, or simply making life hell for them at every possible level. We also know that scores of gay Palestinians and Arabs do their best to flee to Israel, the only government that affords them human rights, allows them to exist freely, and even has an annual gay rights parade. Yet the special rapporteur on human rights of the UN is accusing Israel of violating the rights of gays, lesbians and trans-gendered people, by its counter-terrorism measures.

With this kind of political correctness gone amok, the Human Rights Commission and its Special Rapporteur have reached the level of complete absurdity.

For further analysis, read this news article by Adam Brickley of CNS News, titled “U.N. Report Says Counterterrorism Measures ‘Risk Unduly Penalizing Transgender Persons’”

[QIQrrr]

Fox News, November 30, 2009: Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog. The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to "the center of political and economic decision-making" around the world — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order. The positions argued in that paper now appear to be much closer at hand; many of them are embedded in a four-year strategy document for UNEP taking effect next year, in the immediate wake of the much-touted, 11-day Copenhagen conference on "climate change," which starts on Dec. 7, and which is intended to push environmental concerns to a new crescendo - Document Reveals U.N.'s Goal of Becoming Rule-Maker in Global Environmental Talks

[QIQrrr]

Fox News, April 20, 2010: The United Nations has quietly upped this year's peacekeeping budget for earthquake-shattered Haiti to $732.4 million, with two-thirds of that amount going for the salary, perks and upkeep of its own personnel, not residents of the devastated island. The world organization plans to spend the money on an expanded force of some 12,675 soldiers and police, plus some 479 international staffers, 669 international contract personnel, and 1,300 local workers, just for the 12 months ending June 30, 2010. Some $495.8 million goes for salaries, benefits, hazard pay, mandatory R&R allowances and upkeep for the peacekeepers and their international staff support. Only about $33.9 million, or 4.6 percent, of that salary total is going to what the U.N. calls "national staff" attached to the peacekeeping effort. Presumably, the budget also includes at least part of some $10 million that the U.N. has spent on renting two passenger vessels, the Sea Voyager (known to some U.N. staffers as the "Love Boat") and the Ola Esmeralda, for a minimum of 90 days each, as highly subsidized housing for some of its peacekeepers and humanitarian staff. The tab for the two vessels, which offer catered food, linen service and comfortable staterooms and lounges, is about $112,500 per day - U.N.'s Ballooning $732 Million Haiti Peacekeeping Budget Goes Mostly to Its Own Personnel