Tag Archives: international politics

Anti-Semiticism At the United Nations?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

According to Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, the United Nations Human Rights Council is number one opponent of Israel. By implication, this makes the UN a most anti-semitic institutions in the world. The following is the indictment proposed by Ambassador Ettinger.

On Friday, the HRC will conclude a month long deliberation by submitting four more resolutions condemning Israel.

The HRC heard testimony from a representative of the Assad regime, in formulating one of the resolutions, which denounces Israel for, alleged, violations of human rights on the Golan Heights. At the same time, the Assad regime has already murdered 8,000 Syrian dissidents and rebels, causing tens of thousands of refugees, some seeking asylum in Israel’s Golan Heights.

The HRC was privy to testimonies from Palestinian representatives, while an increasing number of Palestinians attempt to relocate to Jerusalem, in order to avoid the ruthless rule of the Palestinian Authority. The HRC never discussed intra-Palestinian violence, which has caused substantially more fatalities than those produced during Israel’s confrontation with Palestinian terrorism. It failed to act against the PLO/Hamas-led hate-education, brainwashing Palestinian children to become suicide bombers; rewarding Palestinian mothers for raising suicide bombers; executing rival Palestinians by throwing them off high-rise buildings; spraying them with bullets from the waist down; torturing, maiming and executing Palestinian opponents; abusing Palestinian civilians as human shields; physically abusing critical Palestinian journalists; suppressing Palestinian civil liberties; and systematically and deliberately targeting Israeli civilians for terrorism, missile launching and mortar shelling.

The HRC welcomed a report by Professor Richard Falk – who accused the US Administration for complicity and cover up in the September 11terrorism – on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” Prof. Falk – a Hamas sympathizer, justifying suicide bombing as a legitimate struggle – was appointed in 2008 to a six-year term as UN Special Rapporteur. Falk succeeded Professor John Dugard, who shares his worldview.

The HRC is assisted by an advisory committee, chaired by Morocco’s Halima Warzazi, who, in 1988, blocked a UN initiative to condemn Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare against Iraq’s Kurds. The vice-chair is Switzerland’s Jean Ziegler, who co-established the “Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights” and authored books accusing the USA of being responsible for global malaise. Another advisor is Nicaragua’s Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, former President of the UN General Assembly, an admirer of Ahmadinejad, a defender of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, a friend of Fidel Castro and self-hating Americans such as Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky.

Since June 2007, Israel has been the only country to be listed on the HRC’s permanent agenda. Out of the ten permanent items on the HRC agenda, eight are organizational and procedural, one deals with global human rights and “item seven” – “the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories” – is the only one that is country-specific. The outcome of the investigation is prejudged, not subject to review. Israel – the only Middle Eastern democracy – is the only UN member to be ostracized annually, while its enemies are exempt from scrutiny.

According to former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, “there are permanent members of the Security Council and non-permanent members, but Israel is the only permanent non-member.”

80% of all 2010 UN resolutions criticizing specific countries for human rights violations were directed at Israel. Only six other UN members faced human rights criticism at all, one of which was the United States. The HRC subjected the USA to harsh criticism – by Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Russia – for, supposed, human rights violations. The HRC criticized the elimination of Bin-Laden and Israel’s defense against PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.

Simultaneously, the HRC has ignored Islamic terrorism, which has afflicted Asia, Africa, Europe and the USA. No emergency sessions and inquiries were held and no resolutions were adopted.

55% of the HRC members are Muslim countries, which contribute little to the UN budget, but dominate policy-making. The HRC is formally the guardian of human rights, but its members – e.g., Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Cuba, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Djibouti, Senegal, Mauritania, Malaysia, Russia and China – deny their peoples fundamental civil liberties.

Of course, Arab ethnicity originates from the same ancient gene pool as the Jews. Although discrimination against Arabs is usually called Islamaphobia or injustice to Muslims or prejudice against Arabs, anti-Semiticism has been associated historically with the Jews. Because Jews make up a majority Israel’s population, the best label for the anti-Israel stance of the United Nations is anti-Semiticism.

Is U.N. anti-semiticsm to be explained merely as the result of a majority of Muslim nations represented on the UN Security Council? Another factor may be that Israel has yet to bow to the Arab/Muslim demand to submit to their rule of all Palestine or get out of the land. The two-state solution seems a useful tool to that end. Why else would Israel’s previous efforts to give back the land in accordance with UN Resolutions 181 & 242 have been thrown in the dust by Palestinian and Arab leaders when Israel made its reasonable demands to ensure the safety and prosperity of its citizens?

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US Bullying Angers Developing World and Leads to US Defeat at UN

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

By Timothy Herrmann and Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

(NEW YORK C-FAM) Negotiations for a final document at the UN Commission on the Status of Women were supposed to end more than a week ago. However, they dragged on for another several days and resulted in a stinging defeat for the Obama administration and anger on the part of the developing world.

The US was trying to impose its sexual and reproductive rights agenda and in a dramatic showdown, delegations scuttled a final document rather than accept the US proposal.

Delegations openly resented the US emphasis on sexual and reproductive rights, and were particularly offended at being strong-armed by the US during negotiations for the resolution on maternal mortality. However, the US was able to push that resolution through without toning down their sexual and reproductive rights emphasis.

In the maternal mortality resolution, the US delegation insisted on new language that delegations feared could advance a right to abortion. Delegates were also concerned about references to “age appropriate sexual education” that did not acknowledge the role of parents, as well as dubious references to “gender.”

Negotiations on the final document, called “agreed conclusions,” were extended a week longer than expected because consensus could not be reached. Delegations carried negotiations well into the early hours of last Thursday, when the commission concluded its session, but the US would not budge, causing the negotiations to fail.

Michelle Bachelette, the head of UN Women, spoke to the delegates at the closing of CSW. She was disappointed by the commission’s “inability to reach consensus.” Several delegations voiced their frustration with the ideological rigidity of the US and other delegations in the reproductive rights camp.

The delegate from Zimbabwe, speaking for the African Group, complained about the position of “only one delegation” that had caused the process to falter. She also clarified that the African Group believed the use of the word “gender” referred to male and female, as outlined in previous international documents, and emphasized the sovereign prerogative of African nations to do so.

The Iranian delegation made a statement lamenting that a “tender bridge (consensus) collapsed last night at around 1:00am…only because of the intransigence, hardball playing and lack of flexibility on the part of one side of the room over issues that were not germane to the text.” Iran reproached these parties for coming to the negotiating table with “a mindset of achieving all they want, with no flexibility.”

On the opposite side of the negotiating table was the ambassador from Norway, who bluntly criticized nations for not abandoning “moral values” or accepting radical versions of gender equality: “[W]e have seen how moral values have been evoked to deprive women of their human rights, their opportunities – and ultimately, for some – their lives! This is the real moral hazard of our time!” She later added that “Many will have to let go of some traditional convictions, also when they are based on religious belief or culture…That’s what’s called development.”

Timothy Hermann is a U.N. Representative of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) and Stefano Gennarini is writer for C-FAM as well. The above new article first appeared in Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM, a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.”

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How Population Control has Harmed National Security

Posted on December 30, 2011 by | Leave a comment

By Tom McFeely

(NEW YORK C-FAM) For decades, a basic tenet of the international population-control lobby has been that declining fertility rates will generate a more stable international order. But according to an impressive panel of scholars who have contributed to a new book, this scenario of “geriatric peace” is untenably optimistic.

Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics is a collection of nine research essays, published by Potomac Books and edited by C-FAM senior vice president Susan Yoshihara and C-FAM senior fellow Douglas Sylva. In the book’s foreword, demographer and political economist Nicholas Eberstadt applauds its contributors for tackling the “profound and as-yet unanswered questions” associated with population decline and international politics.

The prevailing assumption that relatively old countries are predisposed automatically to peace is not historically defensible, as Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics points out. In the last century relatively aged regimes like Nazi Germany and Serbia in the 1990s were notable for their aggression against younger neighbors, and in classical history democratic Athens reacted to the demographic shock of a devastating plague by initiating a series of costly and ill-judged military actions.

Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics begins with three chapters, written by Phillip Longman, James R. Holmes and Francis Sempa, that set forth an analytical framework for assessing the interaction between geopolitics and demographic decline. The rest of the book is devoted to case studies of six key global actors: Russia, Europe and Japan, which are all wrestling with below-replacement fertility rates; the rising Asian powers of China and India, whose futures will be differentiated by strikingly different demographic profiles; and the United States, whose “demographic exceptionalism” makes it the only major developed power to resist depopulation.

In Russia, births declined by a stunning 50% during the period 1987–1999. Murray Feshbach analyzes the effects of this baby blight in the context of military recruitment. Exacerbated by the widespread incidence of HIV and tuberculosis, the country’s severe shortage of fit young males “will lead to a more tenuous situation in Russian society, including the military, than the economic dimension would portend,” Feshbach predicts.

Japan has sought to ameliorate its own demographic challenge by substituting high-tech weaponry for soldiers. In the process, “the minimal defense capabilities that Japan should retain as an independent nation have already been forfeited,” according to one Japanese general. These limitations might also restrict Japan from contributing effectively to regional military alliances. If so, Toshi Yoshihara warns in his strategic analysis, this “could add tremendous volatility to alliance politics and trigger competitive great power dynamics at the regional level that could nevertheless have global reverberations.”

Faced with similar demographic constraints, Europe is seeking to exercise “soft power” (as opposed to military and economic “hard power”) through its domination of multilateral institutions, and also on continued high immigration. Whether the multilateralist approach will be effective is entirely unknown, Douglas Sylva notes, while Europe’s fertility rates are now so low it would require an immigration influx far beyond what the continent can accommodate.

Sylva suggests European policymakers instead consider a radically different approach of trying to advantage their own native-born “family-oriented women” to increase birth rates. Writes Sylva, “Doing so, of course, would force Europe to abandon some of its most cherished tenets of feminism and multiculturalism, a step for which there is little evidence to suggest any European governments are prepared to take, despite the geopolitical consequences.”

Tom McFeely writes for C-FAM. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.

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What’s Lacking in Israeli Politicians and Why?

Posted on January 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Paul Eidelberg

Year after year opinion polls indicate that 80-90 percent of the public in Israel regards the Knesset, hence Israeli politicians, as “corrupt.” What is primarily meant by “corrupt” is that Knesset Members are primarily animated by personal and narrow partisan interests rather than the public interest or the common good. David Ben-Gurion said as much in his Personal Memoirs where he deplored the lack of constituency elections in Israel, where Members of the Knesset are not individually accountable to the voters. Just think of the current break-up of the Labor Party. Who does Labor’s erstwhile chairman Ehud Barak now represent by forming the new Independent Party? A cute piece of self-aggrandizement! What a mockery of Proportional Representation, Israel’s inept mode of electing MKs.

But even a well-designed mode of election such as preferential voting, which would mitigate corruption, is not a substitute for virtue. And that is primarily what is most lacking in Israel—and of course elsewhere—namely, the lack of virtue in politicians. Remember when 29 MKs hopped over to rival parties before the 1999 elections?

If the Knesset is a virtual cesspool, as many citizens think, what is the cause of this despicable state of affairs? Do MKs succumb to self-aggrandizement only upon becoming members of Israel’s parliament? Haven’t they been habituated to good behavior in their childhood and subsequently by their education in the public schools and colleges of their country?

Ponder this: Plato’s Republic is first and foremost a book on education, perhaps the greatest ever written. The purpose of education is to cultivate good character, above all the cardinal virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and wisdom. Leaving aside Israel’s religious academies, do the public schools and colleges in Israel cultivate the moral as well as the intellectual virtue?.

It was not only the Lubavitcher Rebbe that warned religious youth not to study the social sciences and humanities in the colleges and universities of America, since these academic disciplines are permeated by moral relativism, a doctrine ensconced in Israeli universities. The late professor Allan Bloom exposed this pernicious doctrine in his book The Closing of the American Mind.

This is not merely an academic issue. Relativism erodes national identity and wholehearted dedication to a nation’s cause. This makes relativism a public issue which can’t be obscured by the mantra of “academic freedom.” Given this morally neutral doctrine, there are no rational grounds for preferring a regime of liberty to one of tyranny. In fact, a publication of the American Council of Learned Societies entitled Speaking for the Humanities maintains that democracy cannot be justified as a system of government inherently superior to totalitarianism; it is simply an “ideological commitment” that the West has chosen to make.

We need to emphasize the fact that universities more or less depend on governmental support, hence on the taxes of citizens. Academics have no right to use their classrooms as platforms for propaganda­—the pedagogy of Arab academics. They have no right to subvert the primary purpose of a university, which is to foster rational discussion and civilized debate in the pursuit of truth. Allow me to repeat part of a previous report of mine on Caroline Glick’s experience at Tel Aviv University.

Ms. Glick addressed some 150 political science students at TA University where she spoke of her experience as an embedded reporter with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division during the Iraq war. Any person not corrupted by relativism would favor, as she did, the U.S. over the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Yet the general attitude of her audience was expressed by a student who asked, “Who are you to make moral judgments?”

Now ponder this exchange between Glick and a student who spoke with a heavy Russian accent:

Student: “How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?”

Glick: “Because it is better to be free than to be a slave.”

Student: “How can you support America when the U.S. is a totalitarian state?”

Glick: “Did you learn that in Russia?”

Student: “No, here.”

Glick: “Here at Tel Aviv University?”

Student: “Yes, that is what my professors say.”

Ms. Glick spoke at five liberal—i.e. secular—Israeli universities. She learned that all are dominated by moral relativists who indoctrinate their students and ban “politically incorrect” publications. The deadly consequences are clear: “A survey carried out by the left-wing Israel Democracy Institute on Israeli attitudes toward the state [indicates that] … a mere 58% of Israelis are proud of being Israeli, whereas 97% of Americans and Poles are proud of their national identity.” Ms. Glick concludes: “Is it possible that our academic tyrants have something to do with the inability of 42% of Israelis to take pride in who they are?”

But this lack of a strong sense of national identity clearly underlies the government’s long-running policy of “territory for peace” and its ignominious desire to negotiate with Arab terrorists who have murdered and maimed some ten thousand Jews. What does this tell us about the leaders of this government? Simply this: they lack virtue.

Alas, I am beginning to feel almost like Nietzsche did back in the 1870s, when he recommended that most universities in Germany be closed down. Perhaps some of their multicultural counterparts in Israel and America should be transformed into domiciles for the homeless?

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