by Jack Kinsella – Omega Letter Editor

One of the UN’s most reliable complaints (some might call them ‘excuses’) for why it regularly fails to meet its mandates is that it is broke.

The UN Relief Works Agency (UNWRA) stopped providing emergency food aid to more than 13 percent of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees it feeds in Gaza.

UNWRA says it has gradually reduced the number of Palestinian refugees to whom it distributes packages of basic foods to about 650,000 people, spokesman Matthias Burchard told The Associated Press. It has also had to further reduce rations, he said.

“Soaring food prices, transport and fuel costs are forcing us to reduce what we can give,” Burchard said.

Burchard said general underfunding and the increase in food prices have torn a hole of $117 million in the agency’s regular budget this year.

The UN makes the same excuses for the failures of its Human Rights Council, which itself is populated by some of the most egregious human rights violators on the planet.

Among its membership are; Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and, incredibly, Sudan.

Human Rights Watch recently excoriated the UNHRC for its mishandling of the human catastrophe in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Three years ago, in order to justify its inaction, the UN concluded that, while the government of Sudan and militias have acted together in committing widespread atrocities in Darfur that should be prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal, those crimes ‘did not amount to genocide’.

According to Human Rights Watch three years later, as many as 300,000 people have since been murdered, but the UN still refuses to call it ‘genocide’.

John Holmes, under secretary general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, said in a recent report to the UN Security Council; “of Darfur’s estimated six million people, some 4.27 million have now been seriously affected by the conflict.”

Holmes said that many of them have had to flee their homes, with 2.45 million people sheltering elsewhere in Sudan and 260,000 more in neighboring countries.

Approximately 100,000 civilians have been forced to flee this year, he said. Sixty thousand of them were displaced in West Darfur, which has recently seen an increase in violence.

The Islamist Sudanese government has decimated Sudan’s Christian population, but the UN has more important fish to fry.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of victims of the Burmese cyclone dying as a consequence of the military junta’s indifference to its people; in Zimbabwe, millions are fleeing the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe.

China is brutally repressing Tibetan religious groups, even as the world prepares to honor Beijing as host of the 2008 Olympics.

There are 192 member states within the United Nations — fully half of them are in violation of some part of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights at any given time.

The Council includes some of the world’s worst human-rights violators, such as China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, notes Niles Gardiner, the director of the Heritage Foundation.

It has just appointed as investigators Richard Falk (special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories), a Princeton emeritus professor who compares Israel to Nazi Germany and defends Ward Churchill, and Jean Ziegler (special rapporteur on the Right to Food), co-founder of the intriguingly named “Muammar Gaddafi Human Rights Prize.”

When pressed for an explanation, the United Nations responds by complaining of limited resources, lack of political will or of having inadequate peacekeeping assets to meet all the world’s trouble spots.

The UN has to carefully husband its limited resources for truly egregious violators, like Israel, for example.

The UNHRC is so concerned about Israeli violations of human rights that Israel is the only country on earth to be officially declared a permanent part of UNHRC’s agenda. About three quarters of the condemnations issued by the UNHRC are against Israel.

So the UNHRC is forced to expend its precious resources to ensure that Israel doesn’t commit genocide against the Arabs and use what little remains to address the world’s other serial human rights violators.

Which is why the UN has assigned a special “rapporteur” to investigate “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in that cesspool of human rights violations — known to the world as the United States of America.

In the past two decades, the U.S. has intervened militarily on behalf of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, none of which is exactly American — by race or religion.

When the tsunami hit Thailand in 2004, U.S. aid flooded the country — though some of the beneficiaries included those who applauded Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on America. A U.S. Navy ship was anchored off the coast to dispense badly needed emergency goods. U.S. aid workers are still there today.

In Burma, a country that bears virtually no cultural, racial or ethnic similarities to the U.S., we have aggressively sought to save lives following Cyclone Nargis.

American planes and ships filled with emergency aid and workers have been forced to wait while the murderous Burmese regime lets its people die.

But they will have to wait. The UN Human Rights Commission has to prioritize according to need, keeping in mind it has limited resources to work with.

With that in mind, UN Special Rapporteur Doudou Diene of that bastion of human rights in West Africa, Senegal, arrived in the United States to investigate its record of xenophobic racism.

There are no special rapporteurs charged with investigating South Africa, whose Durban Conference on Racism exposed some of the most disturbing examples of institutional anti-Semitism seen since the 1930’s.

Where is the special rapporteur for Zimbabwe, where white farmers are routinely killed and their land confiscated?

Where is the special rapporteur for the Islamic world?

It is a capital offense to convert to Christianity in Saudi Arabia. There is not a single Jew in the country — being a Jew in Saudi Arabia is a crime. Why no investigation of the Palestinian Authority, which defines its territory based on whether or not any Jews live there?

Or Burma? Or China? Hey, what about a Special Rapporteur to investigate human rights abuses in Russia?

No soap. The UN has limited resources to spend investigating human rights abuses, particularly those related to race. So it chose to investigate the United States for instances of institutional xenophobic racist tendencies.

Right now, the most probable Democratic nominee for the President of the United States is black. So is the current Secretary of State, whose predecessor, Colin Powell, was both former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (And black.)

The US Ambassador the the United Nations, Zalmay Khaliizad, is an ethnic Afghan and a Muslim.

The governor of Louisiana, bastion of the “Old South” is of ethnic Indian origin. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is an ethnic Hispanic. The governor of Massachusetts is black — the governor of New York is both black and disabled; he’s blind.

Eight US states have women governors — and Hillary Clinton’s campaign doesn’t seem to be suffering from the fact she is a woman, despite claims by her campaign to the contrary.

The UN’s chosen special rapporteur, Doudou Diene (Let’s call him Doo-doo), has an established track record of uncovering institutionalized racism in such rogue states as Canada, Japan, Denmark and Switzerland.

So Doo-doo plans to visit Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico and uncover institutionalized racism there.

Among the hate crimes the UN feels more worthy of investigation than the rape of Darfur or the repression of Tibetan monks are the display of hangman’s nooses and police brutality against minorities.

I am not one to say such things don’t go on in America — they do. They end up making headlines, people get arrested, charged and convicted, and often end up with ‘enhanced’ sentences much longer than those specified by sentencing guidelines.

They DON’T end up swept under the rug by a brutal and repressive regime — despite the claims of the insanely racist race-baiter Jeremiah Wright.

If they did, then Reverend Wright wouldn’t know about them — and if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be allowed to ‘denounce’ them — from the podium of the National Press Club!

The assignment of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Racism in the United States is a transparent effort by the United Nations to influence the US presidential elections in favor of the Democrats.

Decades ago, House Speaker Tip O’Neill was credited with making the observation that “all politics is local” — and in a sovereign USA, he was right. Since 2000, all that has changed.

Presidential elections are a global affair — indeed, a number of countries, including Canada and some in Europe, have complained that they should have a say in who the next ‘leader of the free world’ should be.

The 2004 election was a global affair, with the Left, (particularly in Europe and Canada) going all-out in their support for John Kerry. When Kerry lost, the London Daily Mirror’s headline asked: “How Can 5,9054,087 People Be So Dumb?”

Now, the world is enamored of Barack Hussein Obama, an ultra-left liberal of whom little else is known except he doesn’t wear a flag pin, whose pastor hates both whites and America, whose wife has been ashamed of America for all her adult life, and whose own background includes flirtations with Marxism, the Nation of Islam and Black Liberation Theology.

And suddenly, the UN can’t find any better place to expend its limited resources than to investigate institutional racism in America. And so, we breathlessly await the Doodoo Report.

I have every confidence it will live up to its name.

 

Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
      Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness;
      Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!