The New American – by Alex Newman
Despite the troubles in her country, “Elizabeth,” as she became known, was an otherwise happy 13-year-old girl living in the Ivory Coast. Then the United Nations’ “peacekeeping” troops arrived in her town wearing their bright blue helmets — ostensibly to “keep the peace.” Rather than protecting the villagers, however, the UN forces kidnapped and brutally gang-raped young Elizabeth.
“They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me,” Elizabeth recounted to the BBC in 2008. “I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing…. I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.” Even though the atrocity, unlike most, drew some media attention, no action was taken against the UN troops.
But Elizabeth is merely one child victim of the UN among countless others — mostly in Africa, but all over the world, too. Just in the Ivorian town Toulepleu, for example, a poll conducted by the non-profit Save the Children revealed that eight out of 10 minor girls admitted to regularly being raped and forced into sexual acts by UN soldiers. Similar horror stories have emerged from virtually every nation occupied by the global body’s “peace” armies.
More recently, UN troops in Haiti came under fire when a group of them videotaped themselves savagely gang-raping a teenage boy. The UN brushed it off, along with the global outcry that followed. “We know that while there is justifiable outrage, there are also some who would use this for political ends,” UN deputy envoy to Haiti Nigel Fisher told the Associated Press.
Again, though, it was hardly an isolated incident, with UN “peace” forces accused by reputable sources of systematically raping children across the nation — some as young as seven years old, according to the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. The overwhelming majority of UN troops are never punished for the horrific crimes, with the global body generally blaming “troop contributing countries” for refusing to hold anyone accountable.
In addition to systematic sexual exploitation of civilians and even young children, UN forces also regularly slaughter innocents. In 2011 in the Ivory Coast, the UN overthrew the Christian president by bombing his forces from the air and backing Islamist militias on the ground to put in power a dictatorial Muslim central banker, who promptly shut down the press and arrested his critics. Thousands of innocent Christians were brutally slaughtered by the UN and the militias it was backing during the regime-change operation, many hacked to death. The reason for the intervention: The UN did not deem that country’s elections honest, even though the nation’s Supreme Court decided that the Christian president had won.
The UN also set the stage for the bloodbath that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, when UN “disarmament” bureaucrats forcibly disarmed civilians, many of whom were later exterminated in a government-backed genocide.
Our Rights, Their “Rights”
Many, if not most, UN atrocities were perpetrated under the guise of bringing what the global body refers to as “human rights” to target populations. Of course, the notion of “human rights” sounds great — after all, what could be wrong with rights for humans? Unbeknownst to average Americans and humanity as a whole, though, is that the UN means something very different when it discusses “human rights” than, say, the unalienable, God-given rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
In the American system, rights such as self-defense, free speech, religious liberty, trial by jury, privacy, property, and gun ownership are endowed by the Creator upon every individual — a truth that America’s Founding Fathers viewed as “self-evident.” Because individuals’ human rights come from God, then, they cannot be legitimately infringed upon by any government. In fact, according to the Founders, government was instituted for the express purpose of protecting those God-given rights from infringement.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” explains the American Declaration of Independence, which formally gave birth to the independent United States of America. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” As Alexander Hamilton put it in 1775: “The sacred rights of mankind … are written … in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Under the UN’s version of human rights, however, “rights” are purportedly defined and granted to people by governments, treaties, and international organizations. Even more troubling, perhaps, is that they can be restricted or abolished by government at will under virtually any pretext, as the UN’s own “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” openly admits. And in no case may those alleged “rights” be used against the UN.
Consider Article 29 of the declaration, which claims that “everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.” Yet, separately, the same article claims that everyone has “duties to the community” and that “rights and freedoms” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” For perspective, that would be like the First Amendment saying Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless that speech is being used to criticize Congress or otherwise makes Congress unhappy.
Obviously, the two views on human rights are incompatible at a basic level. The two visions are actually almost opposites.
Indeed, abundant evidence of how the UN views “human rights” can be found with a brief examination of the composition of the “Human Rights Council,” the highest “authority” within the UN system on the issue. In November of 2013, the outfit selected the most barbaric regimes on the planet to sit on the body. Among the mass-murdering regimes selected to sit on the UN’s self-styled “human rights” entity, for example, were the communist dictatorships enslaving the people of China, Cuba, and Vietnam. The socialist regime in Namibia was selected for the council, too, joining the brutal socialist autocracy ruling Venezuela that recently disarmed law-abiding citizens with UN help.
Also appointed were the hardline Islamist tyrants ruling over Algeria and Saudi Arabia, which considers converting to Christianity a capital offense and continues to publicly behead “apostates” and others, ISIS-style. If the genocidal mass-murdering maniac ruling Sudan had not withdrawn his bid in the face of a global outcry, his seat on the council was all but assured.
Having the world’s most savage human-rights abusers sitting on the UN “human rights” apparatus is hardly a new phenomenon. Less than a decade ago, the UN Commission on Human Rights, which preceded the council, was chaired by none other than brutal Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Though the UN “human rights” regime has received widespread ridicule and condemnation, Obama rejoined it in 2009. Considering the “human rights” track records of many of the UN’s member regimes, it would stand to reason that there is plenty of work remaining in advancing true human rights. Incredibly, however, the global body, widely described by critics as the “dictators club,” has revealed that it aims to focus in particular on one nation: the United States.
Millions of North Koreans have wasted or are wasting away in concentration camps; Chinese women are commonly forced to suffer UN-assisted abortions for defying the communist regime’s “one-child policy”; and UN troops are regularly accused of sex crimes and murder around the world.
Yet the UN finds it in its best interests to focus on fixing the United States — specifically targeting the governance and freedoms provided in the U.S. Constitution. The primary weapon of attack: “human rights.”
Target #1 — The Judicial System
The UN exploits instances of perceived human rights abuses to shoehorn its way into the American political conversation. Most recently, as Americans across the political spectrum expressed sadness over the tragic death of Eric Garner, and debated whether Garner or a New York City police officer was to blame for Garner’s death — with one side saying the police officer choked Garner to death and the other saying Garner’s behavior caused police to manhandle him — UN boss Ban Ki-moon demanded “greater accountability” for police.
The UN regularly interjects its opinions into the American scene when race becomes a political issue. Besides the Garner incident, the UN has also recently made an issue of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, exploiting the deaths of those black men to push its own agenda. One of the UN’s main whipping boys — and an area where it wants to assert control — is the American justice system, which the UN insists would be more “just” if UN rules were followed.
Numerous UN human rights “experts” and international bureaucrats took turns attacking U.S. law enforcement, and the justice system itself, for reflecting racism. UN special rapporteur on minority issues Rita Izsak said about Garner and Michael Brown: “I am concerned by the grand juries’ decisions…. The decisions leave many with legitimate concerns relating to a pattern of impunity when the victims of excessive use of force come from African-American or other minority communities.”
Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, chief of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, claimed that the recent U.S. cases add to “existing concerns” about America. Among other “concerns,” Fanon-Mendes-France pointed to what she described as “longstanding prevalence of racial discrimination faced by African-Americans, particularly in relation to access to justice and discriminatory police practices.”
UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism Mutuma Ruteere, meanwhile, demanded “action” to deal with what he called “discriminatory practices,” including “racial profiling,” by local American police. “Such practices must be eradicated,” he said, styling himself America’s new police overseer.
Separately, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns also joined in, claiming what he called “international law” — rather than domestic and state law in the United States — better defines when lethal force can be used in self-defense. “The laws of many of the states in the U.S. are much more permissive, creating an atmosphere where there are not enough constraints on the use of force,” Heyns complained. “A comprehensive review of the system is needed — the enabling laws, the kinds of weapons the police use, the training they receive and the use of technology such as on-body cameras to ensure accountability.”
Finally, on November 25, the UN Human Rights Council condemned the United States over alleged racism and police brutality. “I am deeply concerned at the disproportionate number of young African Americans who die in encounters with police officers, as well as the disproportionate number of African Americans in U.S. prisons and the disproportionate number of African Americans on Death Row,” complained UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein of Jordan.
The UN’s human rights czar also claimed in a UN press release that the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson for shooting Michael Brown “spotlighted broader concerns about institutionalized discrimination across the United States.” Ironically, he also admitted right after his claim that he had not seen the evidence presented to the grand jury that it based its decision on. That means Hussein was “unable to comment on whether or not the verdict itself conformed to international law,” the UN said in a press release.
To put it flatly, Americans should see through the UN-aggrandizement and posturing and reject any attempts to allow the UN to make inroads in the U.S. justice system, mainly because the UN’s assertions don’t make sense when scrutinized to any degree.
Like Hussein, all of the UN mouthpieces make negligent assumptions about the U.S. justice system. Each assumes that the judicial system is flawed because the end results found that the deceased blacks were culpable in their own deaths, but in each of these high-profile cases, the decisions of guilt or innocence were made by the deceased men’s peers, who had access to all available evidence, not by judges or police boards having an obvious bias. All the accusations also essentially assume that America, a country with a mainly white populace that elected a black president twice, is racist. And each assumes that any residual racism can be stamped out through having special rules for minorities.
People who hold beliefs such as the UN’s actually want to undo the rule of law, as Professor Walter E. Williams, who happens to be black, has pointed out. He uses a baseball analogy to show how ludicrous it would be to treat blacks in the justice system different from whites:
Let’s ask ourselves what the characteristics of laws in a free society should be. Let’s think about baseball rules (laws) as a way to approach this. Some players, through no fault of their own, hit fewer home runs than others. In order to create baseball justice, or what’s sometimes called a level playing field, how about a rule requiring pitchers to throw easier pitches to poorer home run hitters? Alternatively, we could make a rule that what would be a double for a power hitter is a home run for someone who doesn’t hit many homers.
Some pitchers aren’t so good as others. How about allowing those pitchers to stand closer to home plate? Better yet, we could rule their first two pitches as strikes, regardless of whether they are or not. In the interest of baseball justice, we might make special rules for some players and not for others. That would level the playing field between old players and young players, black players and white players and fast runners and slow runners. Umpires would become arbiters of baseball justice.
He makes the point that the only way society can work relatively harmoniously is if everyone — white, black, red, brown — is treated exactly the same under the law.
It’s noteworthy that according to the U.S. Constitution, policing is a government function that belongs at the state and local level where officials are directly accountable to the people — not in Washington, D.C., and certainly not at the UN, where brutal dictatorships help call the shots.
Interestingly, when the Communist Chinese regime, which sits on the UN Human Rights Council, savagely massacred peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square, the UN boss at the time noted that the global outfit’s charter prohibits interference in the internal affairs of member regimes. The charter has not been changed since then.
Target #2 — The Right of Self-protection
Before the Brown and Garner incidents, the UN exploited the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida by “white Hispanic” neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman to fan the flames of racial hatred and attack supposedly lackluster U.S. “human rights” — this time targeting Americans’ right to self-protection.
Speaking at a press conference, then-UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, a South African, loudly demanded an “investigation” of the killing and the prosecution of Zimmerman — even as local, state, and federal investigations to determine the facts were ongoing. She also expressed “concerns” about the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law that allows would-be victims to defend themselves.
“As High Commissioner for Human Rights, I call for an immediate investigation,” she told the press, apparently unaware that three separate investigations were already well under way. “Justice must be done for the victim. It’s not just this individual case. It calls into question the delivery of justice in all situations like this.”
She demanded that the law “operate equally in respect of all violations,” while also expressing shock that Zimmerman had not yet been arrested. “I will be awaiting an investigation and prosecution and trial and of course reparations for the victims concerned,” Pillay added, seemingly unaware that in America, people’s right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in front of a jury of their peers is the law of the land.
The next year, when a jury — again, made up of the deceased man’s peers — found Zimmerman not guilty, the UN on September 3 called on the Obama administration to “nullify” Florida’s popular stand-your-ground law, citing the Trayvon Martin case. Also, in a 2014 report on human rights abuses in the United States, the UN stated: “In particular, it [the United States] should: (a) continue its efforts to effectively curb gun violence, including through the continued pursuit of legislation requiring background checks for all private firearm transfers … and (b) review Stand Your Ground Laws to remove far-reaching immunity and ensure strict adherence to the principles of necessity and proportionality when using deadly force in self-defence.”
Stand-your-ground laws, adopted by about half of U.S. states so far, declare that individuals have no duty to retreat from an attacker, and that they may use any level of force — up to and including lethal force — if they reasonably believe they face an imminent and immediate threat of serious bodily harm or death.
Again, the UN is trying to short-circuit Americans’ common sense and chide them into acting on feelings, merely to empower itself. Question: Are there really any Americans who truly want to make it illegal for a victim to fight back when the victim feels he faces serious bodily harm or death?
Of course, the president cannot “nullify” anything legally, let alone state laws — especially not on orders from the UN and its autocratic members. However, the global bureaucracy claimed in a press release that the U.S. government was actually “required” to obey its mandates.
In a UN press release, Mutuma Ruteere, the UN special rapporteur on racism, in reference to the popular stand-your-ground law, which, ironically, was not invoked by the Zimmerman defense team, claimed: “States are required to take effective measures to review governmental, national and local policies, and to amend, rescind or nullify any laws and regulations which have the effect of creating or perpetuating racial discrimination wherever it exists.”
In UN speak, “states” are national governments, which the UN presumes have unlimited power to defy constitutional restrictions in submission to global bureaucrats.
The UN even errantly suggested that U.S. states’ protections of self-defense rights somehow constitute “discrimination” against blacks — even though studies in Florida showed blacks were more likely to successfully use the defense in court and that a majority of those killed in stand-your-ground cases have been white. “We call upon the U.S. Government to examine its laws that could have discriminatory impact on African Americans, and to ensure that such laws are in full compliance with the country’s international legal obligations and relevant standards,” said Verene Shepherd, chief of the UN Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent.
Stand-your-ground, of course, is a state law outside the purview of the federal government.
Shepherd also cited various UN agreements, including the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” the “International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” and “many other international human rights law treaties,” inaccurately suggesting that they confer some sort of extra-constitutional powers on the federal government to meddle in state affairs and restrict individual rights.
Treaties, of course, do not grant the federal government any new powers and must be made “in pursuance” of the Constitution to be valid.
In a similar vein, in other cases, the UN has used human rights to attack the Second Amendment.
When a police officer, who apparently mistook a toy gun for a real weapon, shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Ohio boy, on November 22, 2014 within seconds of seeing the boy, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein stated: “In many countries, where real guns are not so easily available, police tend to view boys playing with replica guns as precisely what they are, rather than as a danger to be neutralized,” adding that Rice’s killing “placed the issue of gun-related deaths in the U.S. back into focus.”
In fact, the UN has been in an all-out push to take control of Americans’ firearms, working with the Obama administration to enact the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty. As Joe Wolverton, J.D. has written for The New American, the treaty has as its end almost complete civilian disarmament:
For those unfamiliar with the text of the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, here’s a brief sketch of the most noxious provisions:
• Article 2 of the treaty defines the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions. The right to own, buy, sell, trade, or transfer all means of armed resistance, including handguns, is denied to civilians by this section of the Arms Trade Treaty.
• Article 3 places the “ammunition/munitions fired, launched or delivered by the conventional arms covered under Article 2” within the scope of the treaty’s prohibitions, as well….
• … Article 5 mandates that all countries participating in the treaty “shall establish and maintain a national control system, including a national control list.” This list should “apply the provisions of this Treaty to the broadest range of conventional arms.” …
Finally, the agreement demands that national governments take “appropriate measures” to enforce the terms of the treaty, including civilian disarmament. If these countries can’t get this done on their own, however, Article 16 provides for UN assistance, specifically including help with the enforcement of “stockpile management, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes.” In fact, a “voluntary trust fund” will be established to assist those countries that need help from UN peacekeepers or other regional forces to disarm their citizens.
Of course, here, too, the UN’s “logic” comes up short. Both the U.S. National Academies of Science and the Centers for Disease Control — both run largely by anti-gun elites — examined gun control laws and could not find a single one that reduced violence. At the same time, studies have found that guns are used over a million times a year for self-defense — most often a person merely has to show a would-be attacker that he is armed to defuse a potentially violent situation.
Target #3 — Local, State, and National Laws
The UN sees itself as the arbiter of all U.S. laws and regulations — local, state, and federal.
In 2012, for example, with the full connivance of the Obama administration, the UN-linked “Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe” sent “election monitors” to the United States to supervise voting.
Also in 2012, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, claimed that Americans must return vast tracts of land to Native Americans — including the iconic Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Such a move, he claimed, would help put the U.S. government closer into compliance with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
In its most recent report on alleged “human rights violations” in America, the UN lashed out at the U.S. government for deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes. It slammed the purported lack of taxpayer-funded healthcare and welfare for illegal immigrants, as well the inability of felons to vote because of state laws. It even recommended that the U.S. government ignore the Constitution’s limits on federal power and pass federal legislation banning corporal punishment of children — including spankings by parents in the home used as a disciplinary tool.
In all, the report, authored by 18 UN self-styled “human rights experts,” identified more than two dozen supposed U.S. “human-rights violations” — only one of which is a legitimate concern: Obama’s mass-murder-via-drone program, which is already a severe violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Then in 2014, after voters in Alaska, Oregon, and D.C. voted against marijuana prohibition, the UN jumped into action yet again. “I don’t see how [nullifying the global war on the controversial plant] can be compatible with existing [UN drug] conventions,” complained former Soviet diplomat Yury Fedotov, who currently serves as executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The UN also lashed out in 2012, screeching about how the Obama administration should overturn the decision of voters in Colorado and Washington State who voted to nullify federal and UN-mandated pot prohibition.
All the “violations” echoed a common theme: They make lawmaking a process based on elitist whims, rather than on the desires of the people who are governed, and they call for the elimination of common sense, to be replaced by an almost-never-ending list of international laws. This theme was illustrated perfectly amid water shut-offs to seriously delinquent accounts in Detroit.
As billions of people who are oppressed under UN member regimes struggled to live on less than $2 a day, the UN’s “human rights” brigades visited Detroit on multiple occasions in 2014 — where the average welfare benefits amount to almost $30,000 per year — to call for a federal “affordability standard” for water and the enforcement of the “human right” to free water.
In all, three UN “human rights experts” made demands on Detroit. “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” they complained to the world in a press release. “The households which suffered unjustified disconnections must be immediately reconnected,” the experts demanded. If Detroit officials refused to obey, the UN claimed city authorities’ actions would be a violation of global “law.”
According to the UN screed, UN human rights law makes it the U.S. government’s “obligation” to “provide urgent measures, including financial assistance,” to ensure free access to certain goods and services. They focused on “water and sanitation,” “adequate housing,” and “extreme poverty.” Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN special rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, was the most outspoken. “Disconnections due to non-payment are only permissible if it can be shown that the resident is able to pay but is not paying,” Albuquerque said in a UN press release. “In other words, when there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections.” She also urged the city, state, and the “national government” to “adopt a mandatory affordability standard.”
Of course, the race card was played. Leilani Farha, who styles herself the UN “expert on the right to adequate housing,” suggested — without evidence — that racism might be at work in Detroit. “If these water disconnections disproportionately affect African Americans they may be discriminatory, in violation of treaties the US has ratified,” she claimed in the press release. She also demanded a “legal mechanism” to dispute the affordability of water bills.
But where does such thinking end? Should everyone get free food, clothes, cars, gasoline, housing, phones, etc.? (After all, they’re all necessities nowadays.) Who will supply the wealth if everything is free? Hasn’t the world seen this in action before? Hasn’t the distribution of wealth as directed from the top ensured equal poverty, rather than prosperity, wherever it has been tried: the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.?
Like communist and socialist dictators worldwide, the UN justifies its existence partly based on the dangerous notion that taxpayer-funded goods and services can be considered “rights” to be enforced by the coercive power of government. The dictatorial vision is readily apparent: Real rights are freedom from government coercion; UN “rights” require government coercion.
Target #4 — Treaties and Agreements
The UN does not intend to remain a toothless giant, spewing out commands that virtually no one listens to. If Americans violate UN “human rights,” the UN intends to prosecute them in its own court. In fact, it’s already trying to do just that. In December, the International Criminal Court released a report saying it was examining the actions of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan to determine whether a full investigation and possible prosecution is warranted for war crimes. ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda purports to have jurisdiction over Americans despite the fact that the U.S. government never ratified the agreement creating the Hague-based UN court.
In the report, the ICC claimed to have a “reasonable basis to believe” that a wide range of potential UN-defined crimes were perpetrated in Afghanistan. Among the alleged crimes: murder, imprisonment, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, intentional attacks on civilians, and “treacherously” killing or wounding a combatant adversary.
Special emphasis is placed on alleged ill treatment of detainees by U.S. forces, which the ICC said were documented in declassified U.S. government reports. It also said the techniques were approved by “senior” U.S. commanders in Afghanistan.
“Certain of the enhanced interrogation techniques apparently approved by U.S. senior commanders in Afghanistan in the period from February 2003 through June 2004, could, depending on the severity and duration of their use, amount to cruel treatment, torture or outrages upon personal dignity as defined under international jurisprudence,” the report argued. In addition, the UN “prosecutor” said there was “information available” supposedly showing that U.S. interrogators perpetrated other abuses beyond even what was approved by U.S. officials — severe beatings, suspension by the wrists, and threats to shoot or kill, for example.
The next step, of course, if the court finds that U.S. military members violated UN rules, is to prosecute U.S. service members.
Incredibly, globalists of various varieties have even suggested that the court could prosecute American presidents such as George W. Bush. In other words, if the internationalist establishment gets its way, a dictator-dominated UN court with purported universal jurisdiction could someday begin prosecuting Americans for vague and undefined crimes ranging from “aggression” to “gender persecution.” The ICC does not use a jury system, putting U.S. troops at the mercy of autocratic anti-American regimes and their lackeys.
Dr. Charles Rice, who is now professor emeritus at Notre Dame Law School, called the ICC “a monster” that essentially “repudiates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence and cancels the 4th of July.” Especially troubling, he said, is that the court acknowledges no boundaries to its supposed authority. “In our system, law is supposed to be a rule of reason which, in a sense, controls the state and compels the state to operate under the law,” Dr. Rice explained. “What are the limits on the ICC? There are none. It’s insane!” The U.S. Constitution and federal laws already provide a solid foundation for alleged criminals and war criminals to be prosecuted in U.S. civilian and military courts, as appropriate.
Other Attacks on the Civilized World
Countless other examples of escalating UN interference in U.S. domestic affairs could be cited. But the American people and their liberties are not the only ones in the cross hairs. In recent years, numerous civilized countries have come under UN “human rights” attack for outlandish “violations.”
Canada, for example, was lambasted by the globalist entity in 2012 for low taxes and not enough welfare. As hundreds of millions of people around the world teetered on the edge of starvation, UN special rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter squandered large amounts of taxpayer funds on an 11-day “investigation” of Canada.
The controversial bureaucrat insisted the situation in the wealthy northern nation was “unacceptable,” saying officials must immediately develop what he called a “national right-to-food strategy,” as well as increase the minimum wage. Ironically, De Schutter also claimed that Canada’s poor are becoming obese from a lack of food choices.
In 2014, meanwhile, the UN “human rights” machine was busy attacking the United Kingdom, with one of its self-styled “experts,” a Brazilian socialist, suggesting that efforts to control ballooning welfare spending were a supposed “human rights” violation. And, according to the UN, authorities in the U.K. must build more and better taxpayer-funded housing, including extra rooms for welfare recipients, to comply with “obligations” under international law.
Switzerland was lambasted for having too many stay-at-home mothers, which the UN claims violates “gender equality,” another component of “human rights.” Japan, meanwhile, is under growing pressure from the dictators club to infringe on free speech by adopting “hate speech” bans targeting critics of the political class. Under the guise of “sexual and reproductive rights,” the UN is also openly demanding legalized abortion around the world. And on it goes.
End the UN
The UN casts itself as the international guardian of human rights. Yet, if the UN were given the monopoly of power it needs to forcibly impose its will on other nations, it would not wield this power to protect rights but to extinguish them. Of course, the idea of the UN imposing its will on a country as rich and powerful as the United States may seem laughable — until it is realized that the threat springs not nearly so much from the UN itself as it does from the power elites who want to transfer power to the UN to build global governance controlled by themselves. (The Obama administration said in its proposed 2015 budget that it wants to further supersize U.S. funding for the international outfit.) It is therefore no laughing matter that the UN is becoming increasingly blatant and open about lecturing the United States about its human rights record while calling for federal and international intervention and standards.
However, there is still hope. The pressure to have the U.S. government permanently withdraw from the dictators club entirely is growing fast — especially as the UN becomes increasingly brazen in its assaults on America. That would set the globalists back decades at least. Legislation to restore American sovereignty by withdrawing from the UN has been regularly introduced in Congress for decades, most recently by Representative Paul Broun. In the meantime, though, the GOP-dominated House of Representatives can and should refuse to send the UN another American penny.
Photo: AP Images
Coming to a town near you..soon. “Gentleman prepare to defend yourselves.”