The Human Rights of Slave-Owners

Why shouldn’t Saudi Arabia chair the United Nations Human Rights Council? After all, the UN is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Saudis are the principal funders of the OIC. It’s only fair that the sheikhs of the House of Saud should be the guardians of the world’s human rights.

I hope it happens, because nothing could spotlight more effectively the fraudulent nature of the international “human rights” industry. Even the most feeble-minded observer will realize that the functionaries of the U.N. have nothing whatsoever to do with human rights, regardless of the wording on the gilded signs of their meeting rooms in New York and Geneva. Nothing could do more to vitiate seventy years’ worth of scam and hype.

Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation from La Tribune de Genève:

Saudi Arabia covets the presidency of the Human Rights Council

Embarrassment among diplomats, fear and anger among NGOs. The Saudis want to chair the Human Rights Council.

It all began with a rumor that has spread and reached the corridors of the Palais des Nations. Saudi Arabia covets the presidency of the Human Rights Council impossible — unimaginable. However, this rumor is no longer a rumor. Faisal bin Hassan Trad, the Permanent Representative of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations, in Geneva since January 2014, is indeed campaigning in the Asian group to be its candidate for the renewal, which will take place by the end of the year.

Currently, the Council is chaired by the German Joachim Ruecker, whose qualities and commitment are unanimously lauded. Before him, it was an African, the Gabonese Nganella Baudelaire, who was not well-remembered among the NGOs, who were frustrated by his year as president.

The rotation rule requires that the next president of the Council of Human Rights come from the Asian group comprised of thirteen countries (Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, China, UAE, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Maldives, Pakistan, Republic of Korea, Qatar and Vietnam). Faisal bin Hassan Trad has a very good chance, and the battle promises to be close. The Europeans will all try to dissuade members of the Asia Group from this choice, considered in advance as disastrous for the IMAGE of the Human Rights Council. [emphasis added]

Arm-twisting by the Saudis

Saudi Arabia is twisting the arms of these other countries to be designated. If they succeed, it will be a disaster for the Council of Human Rights. “This could send us back to the worst times of the former commission who had sunk into disrepute,” says a Western diplomat on condition of anonymity.

On paper, nothing prevents Saudi Arabia from one day presiding over the Council of Human Rights. It is a full member, elected for a three-year renewable term by the General Assembly of the UN. But this prospect is already arousing embarrassment and discomfort among the Council and the beginning of anger among the defenders of human rights.

Saudi Arabia was one of eight countries not to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was adopted in 1948. Today, the Saudi monarchy continues to practice an expeditious justice far removed from Western democratic standards . Equality between men and women does not exist, homosexuals are sentenced to death, no religion other than Islam has a place, freedom of expression is a fantasy.

In recent years, the NGOs have repeatedly drawn the attention to the harshness and inhumanity of this regime. “The presidency is important. If elected, Saudi Arabia will have to display greater vigor in support of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism,” warns Jean-Claude Vignoli, director of the NGO UPR Information programs. This mechanism, which involves civil society’s passing review of each country, was never Saudi Arabia’s cup of tea.

Pressure on the Asian group

In Geneva, the spokeswoman for Amnesty International, Nadia Boehlen, is falling off her chair. “It is unthinkable!” she sighs. For this human rights activist, it is “totally ironic that a country which so blithely tramples human rights by practicing cruel executions” covets the direction of the body that has the responsibility “to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe. “

“It is essential that the Asian Group offer a credible candidate to represent them,” says John Fisher, director of the Geneva office of Human Rights Watch, who keep hoping for the emergence of applications that could prevent the Saudi attempt to get its hands on the Council. Meanwhile, he reminds us that “the president of the Council of human rights plays a key role” in “the promotion and protection of human rights for all.” Enormous pressure now weighs on the members of the Asia group. Some diplomats would have preferred that the approach by Saudi Arabia remain hidden.

30 thoughts on “The Human Rights of Slave-Owners

    • Republic of Korea is South Korea. They’re no more dependent on slave labor than Japan. I wouldn’t say with confidence that they’re any less dependent, though.

      But they’re both less dependent on slave labor than the U.S. economy.

    • May I say that India should not be included as an economy dependent on slave labor?

      The link you gave detailed the use of debt slavery in India and the horrific conditions the debt slaves live under. Yet, in India, debt bondage is illegal and the government acts against it, although obviously not vigorously enough. But, there is a world of difference between winking at slavery, as Saudi Arabia does, and being too ineffective to completely eradicate it.

      There is also a question as to whether an economy is actually dependent on slavery, or whether it benefits a subclass of exploiters who add nothing to the economy as a whole through slavery. An example is the sex-slaves who are forced into roadside brothels in India. That adds nothing to the economy, other than the transmission of disease. Also, were the government able or willing to effectively enforce the anti-slavery position (crowds of slavers in front of a firing squad would be a nice touch), it is likely that any sexual customers would be handled better and safer by people who choose to be in that industry.

      The argument was carried out in the US before the Civil War…was slavery really beneficial to the South? Some historians think that slavery would have died on its own, with the slaves bought out by the government, as occurred in Britain, which got rid of slavery peacefully and without great damage to the slaveholders. The slaves would be replaced by paid laborers, who would work better without the malevolence of a slave society.

      • You’ve covered a lot of information and history here.

        There were and are two distinct parts of the early colonies. They never had much in common but if you read, say, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall’s biography of his contemporary, George Washington, you’ll get a real sense of the times then. He has a good comparison of both northern and southern early colonies’ attempts at socialism – utter failure. You could put men in stocks, beat them, etc., but you couldn’t eradicate the primal need to provide first for one’s family. Both colonies gave up, and as soon as they did, they began to flourish.

        The Life of George Washington
        Not that we ever learn there’s no real “social” justice, merely justice.
        —————————
        Britain introduced slavery into its Virginia colony. The colony was a commercial enterprise and Britain + Massachusetts’ slave ships found the trade to be lucrative for a long time. After they “got rid of” slavery elsewhere, England kept the enterprise going in Virigina. Later,the newly formed US federation would’ve foundered if the north had tried to eradicate slavery…the revolt would have foundered and they all would have been hung.

        Thus did the fixed game continue, with both the US northern textile industry and the one in Britain demanding that CHEAP slave cotton.

        Every time you buy a shirt made in China, you’re supporting the slave industry. But try telling that to today’s descendants of America’s slaves. They think their case is unique and never happened as badly or as extensively as here. That’s why govt schools need to keep a chokehold on “education”.

        BTW, in the beginning slavery wasn’t necessary since so many thousands of people were working off their indebtedness. I wonder if that will return as I read that some huge percentage of people live from payday to payday – I mean middle class over-leveraged folks, not the poor living from govt handouts.

        As for the slavers in Arabia, that’s older than Islam. I don’t think it will ever be eradicated – though the races of people may vary. Slaving is what Arabs do to others because their tribal culture preaches that working with one’s hands is shameful. Think of all the money that has gone to Arab lands: they ought to be green paradises by now. But the oligarchies kept the money and kept the rest of their people in Muslim fatalism.

        • Slavery by nature is only economically viable when it is subsidized by the government…which is to say it is never economically viable. Generally speaking, slave-masters and their supporters are getting something other than a merely economic benefit out of it.

          It was a foregone conclusion that, without the Federal subsidy of slavery in the form of fugitive slave laws and elimination of legal burdens of proof in ‘recovering’ ‘escaped slaves’, slavery was doomed. That’s exactly why the South seceded when Lincoln won election as President, they didn’t fear that he would abolish slavery outright, but refusing to subsidize legal slavery would be just as fatal to the ‘peculiar institution’. Everyone knew it, especially the slave owners, since they had the most contact with the economic realities of how thin their margins would get if the Federal government made them play by the rules.

          • I agree with your statement that slavery is never economically viable for a society as a whole.

            I also tend to go with the idea that the south seceded more over the imposition of tariffs on manufactured goods than over the issue of slavery.

            I don’t agree that the south was afraid of Lincoln’s not enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.

            “By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven states had seceded but war had not yet broken out. That came a month later. Lincoln’s first inaugural address offered the slave states, a group that included states still within the Union, full enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln said that so long as the law was on the books, he would follow it. In a further effort to stave off war, he said “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

            http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/andrew-napolitano/napolitano-lincoln-enforced-fugitive-slave-act/

            “Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.

            Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track was laid. At its best, these tracks benefited the North. Much of it had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.

            With most of the tariff revenue collected in the South and then spent in the North, the South rightly felt exploited. At the time, 90% of the federal government’s annual revenue came from these taxes on imports.”

            http://www.emarotta.com/protective-tariffs-the-primary-cause-of-the-civil-war/

          • This old lie again.

            The South failed to industrialize sufficiently to cover its own manufacturing needs almost entirely as a result of slavery, both in terms of the barriers it posed to economic opportunity for immigrants and the competitive disadvantages imposed by slave state laws which favored plantations over other enterprises.

            The fact that Lincoln offered to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act as written as a concession to avert war is more proof not only that Lincoln firmly believed slavery to be the root cause of the war but that the slave states understood full well that they had been going well beyond what the law de jure permitted.

            From beginning to end, the war was about slavery and really nothing else. That isn’t a myth or an oversimplification, it is a mathematical reduction on the level of writing 1/2 instead of 654684961/1309369922. It all came down to slavery.

            Of course, the slave owners and their apologists made up many fine excuses to obscure the fundamental reason they were really plunging America into civil war. That’s par for the course, generally both sides lie about why they are really fighting a war. Usually one side lies to invent a reason to fight while the other lies to pretend that a better peace can be easily obtained without obliterating the other side.

            Lincoln told lies to make it seem like the wounds of war could be healed without rooting out and killing the traitorous slavers who started the war. The traitorous slavers told lies to deny they were fighting for the preservation of slavery.

          • Well, perhaps we can reason this out.

            Lincoln always offered to maintain slavery and enforce the fugitive slave act. He stated that slavery was completely safe with him. I don’t see how statements by Lincoln that he would maintain slavery are proof that he thought slavery was the main cause of war. Why didn’t he offer to remove the tariffs? Because slavery was really the issue he was prepared to give in on, rather than the tariff issue?

            By the way, when he made the statement I quoted, he was trying to prevent further secession. I agree that the war itself was started by Jefferson Davis…against the advice, by the way, of Robert Toombs, probably the most ardent slavery and secession advocate:

            “Toombs was the only member of Davis’ administration to voice reservations about the attack on Fort Sumter. After reading Lincoln’s letter to the governor of South Carolina, Toombs said memorably: “Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.”

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Toombs

            Lincoln stated over and over: his objective was to maintain the union, and not to abolish slavery.

            Anyway, to make myself clear, I agree with you that slavery is unfeasible and devastating economically and socially. I think the Civil War was unnecessary, and slavery would have withered soon on its own. I think the Confederate government, other than for slaves, was actually more respective of liberties than the federal government. Unfortunately, I can’t get away from the fact that it was the south that began the Civil War. Lincoln acted as a tyrant, but the first duty of any leader is to win the war.

            I don’t think it would have been a bad thing for the south to secede. As you pointed out, slavery was maintained in part by the complicity of the federal government, so why not remove that support? Canada and the US exist in almost complete harmony as separate, but culturally similar entities. It is quite functional to have strong border controls between Canada and the US, although I always feel completely at home in Canada.

          • Again, the reason that Lincoln thought promising to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (rather than lifting trade tariffs) would help avert the war was because he perceived (correctly, if inadequately) that the danger posed to slavery at the Federal level was why the slave states were seceding. The reason that he didn’t offer tariff relief is because doing so unilaterally would have been flatly illegal, and because nothing in the structure of those laws specifically discriminated against the South, the tariffs protected U.S. manufacturing industry from British and European mercantilism, and thus were essential to the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.

            The tariffs only adversely affected the slave states because the slave-owners wanted the products of advanced economies but didn’t want to allow their economies to modernize because they preferred to keep slaves. The slave-holders knew this perfectly well, they basically made it a significant part of their argument for how easily they would win the war that their poorer white population had been forced to help keep slaves in check rather than having factory jobs. Of course the poor whites were told that the war was about “Stet Rats” and unfair tariffs and rampant Federal corruption.

            But those were all lies and every educated, prosperous, politically influential man in the South knew it.

            Also, as I have said before, there were reasons that the people of the Free states were sufficiently fed up with the slave states to wage an unremitting and highly destructive war against them. The war might have paused, to be resumed on much less cordial terms later. It could not have ended unless the slave states had discontinued the tactics (both political and illegal) which they were using to force the Free states to support slavery.

            In other words, the war could have been avoided if the South hadn’t started it. That much is obvious at the outset. But they didn’t just start it at Ft. Sumter.

            It is true that Lincoln did not exercise perfect adherence to the Constitution. But most of the damage to state sovereignty and individual rights had already been done by the political advocacy (and direct criminal activity) of the slave states in their effort to preserve slavery by forcing the Free states to bear the burdens. And most of the damage since then has been done by slavery apologists and their ideological heirs.

            Like you.

          • By the way, I’m still a fan of tariffs, especially against heavily nationalized economies pursuing some variant or other of mercantilism. I think that protecting the essential manufacturing capacity necessary to an independent advanced economy is of critical importance, and the failure of the U.S. and Europe to do this over the last half-century is a major factor in the coming global economic collapse.

          • “And most of the damage since then has been done by slavery apologists and their ideological heirs.

            Like you.”

            Well, the strongest evidence of a weak logical case is to malign the opponent. You accuse me of being a slavery apologist with evidence as flimsy as your unsupported inferences on Lincolns true intentions.

            “Again, the reason that Lincoln thought promising to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (rather than lifting trade tariffs) would help avert the war was because he perceived (correctly, if inadequately) that the danger posed to slavery at the Federal level was why the slave states were seceding.”

            Evidence? Or, does this mythical Lincoln agree with you because you pulled him out of your hat?

            “The reason that he didn’t offer tariff relief is because doing so unilaterally would have been flatly illegal”

            I never said Lincoln should on his own fail to enforce tariff law. I said the Southern states seceded largely because of the tariff burden. Again, misconstruing an elementary argument implied a weak logical case.

            “The slave-holders knew this perfectly well, they basically made it a significant part of their argument for how easily they would win the war that their poorer white population had been forced to help keep slaves in check rather than having factory jobs.”

            Huh? This argument doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not aware that the slave-owners claimed they would easily win the war. I cited a statement by a very prominent slavery advocate, Robert Toombs, who specifically argued AGAINST the Fort Sumter attack because it would destroy the south.

            “Of course the poor whites were told that the war was about “Stet Rats” and unfair tariffs and rampant Federal corruption…But those were all lies and every educated, prosperous, politically influential man in the South knew it.”

            Again, you use an argument that you pulled out of your hat to prove your point.

            “Also, as I have said before, there were reasons that the people of the Free states were sufficiently fed up with the slave states to wage an unremitting and highly destructive war against them.”

            In point of fact, the north was highly fragmented over continuing the war. Lincoln ordered the closure of hundreds of newspapers which opposed the war. He send federal troops to prevent the Maryland legislature from considering secession. Lincoln was opposed in 1864 by McClelland, a peace candidate.

            Lincoln exercised the right of arbitrary arrest of opponents during the war.

            I’m only saying support for the vigorous prosecution of the war was maintained only through coercion and government force. I’m not making a judgement on war tactics, which is a completely different subject.

            “In other words, the war could have been avoided if the South hadn’t started it. That much is obvious at the outset. But they didn’t just start it at Ft. Sumter.”

            Actually, the South did start the war at Fort Sumter. Nowhere else. This is another unsupported statement you pulled out of your hat.

            As far as your support of mercantilism, that’s a different question. Perhaps you would be prepared to actually argue the question, rather than having to resort to ad hominem tactics. I don’t know.

          • You are clearly acting as an apologist for slavery. You are repeating the arguments of the apologists for slavery, you are obviously an heir of their apologetics. This is not a slander. It is a simple recognition of the sources of your argument.

            And your refusal to accept that the actions someone takes to try and avert conflict speaks to their beliefs about the causes of conflict is no longer worth answering.

            The Civil War itself, the open warfare against the United States of America as a whole, began with the attack on Ft. Sumter. But the numerous acts of violence against the Free states and their people for decades before the war were not insignificant, they were the reason that abolitionist feeling had become sufficiently strong to sway national elections and motivate hundreds of thousands to volunteer for service. It is also true that drafts were instituted, resulting in many of the abuses of government authority during the war. But overall the vast majority of the men who actually fought in the Union Army were motivated by a desire to abolish slavery.

            The idea that politicians can magically resort to coercion if there is no substantial support for their rule among the people who actually do the fighting is…well, a commonplace among the historically illiterate. No amount of historical facts memorized (or invented) can overcome such a profound deficiency in cognition. Suffice to say, McClellan, an enormously beloved general, lost the military vote (and that was his margin of defeat), entirely because he promised to make peace.

            Yes, there were those living in the North who found slavery acceptable, just as there were those living in the South (including William Tecumseh Sherman, at the outbreak of the war) who regarded war to defend slavery as either immoral or untenable. That makes no material difference in the fact that, if the political and cultural leadership of the South had been willing to let slavery die out for economic reasons, the war would never have been fought. If they had even been willing to adopt one of several proposed programs of emancipation for military/diplomatic reasons, the South might have resolved the war on favorable terms of independence.

            In short, the leadership of the South repeatedly were offered the choice of winning independence or defending slavery, and they chose slavery every single time.

            The war would never have started except for slavery, and it would never have ended without emancipation, and all attempts to deny this basic historical truth are nothing more than apologetics for slavery.

            Your further inability to distinguish support for mercantilism from resistance to mercantilism is par for the course, exactly what I should have expected of you by now.

          • Well, chiu,

            I do admit to some difficulty following your arguments. For instance, you say:

            “You are clearly acting as an apologist for slavery. You are repeating the arguments of the apologists for slavery, you are obviously an heir of their apologetics. This is not a slander. It is a simple recognition of the sources of your argument.”

            In other words, if I use the arguments that apologists for slavery use, I am an apologist for slavery. In other words, A = B, C = B, therefore A = C.

            But, when it comes to mercantilism, you advocate the use of tariffs, but claim to be opposed to mercantilism:

            ” The Mercantilism theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, are an almost universal feature of mercantilism policy. ”
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

            It sounds to me like you use different types of logic, depending on the point you want to make.

            “The idea that politicians can magically resort to coercion if there is no substantial support for their rule among the people who actually do the fighting is…well, a commonplace among the historically illiterate. No amount of historical facts memorized (or invented) can overcome such a profound deficiency in cognition.”

            This is another unsubstantiated argument you use against me that you pull out of your hat.

            “That makes no material difference in the fact that, if the political and cultural leadership of the South had been willing to let slavery die out for economic reasons, the war would never have been fought.”

            This is another unsubstantiated argument, which begs the question of whether the war was about tariffs or slavery…or perhaps both.

            So far, your argument is, the south decided to secede because they wanted to maintain slavery, could not do so without federal support, so Lincoln assured them he would maintain federal support for slavery, and they seceded.

            All in all, I agree with your assertion that without federal support, slavery would have died a natural death in the south…and without the 600,000 deaths and tremendous destruction involved in the war. I do sympathize with the southern secession, but recognize they started the war, so they have to live with it.

            I think it might have been better to not try to merge the very different interests and economies of the north and south, and think overall, we would have have a stronger resistance right now to alien cultures like Islam with separate countries, each with a tradition of liberty.

            In fact, you recall the series in Gates of Vienna, where El Ingles made the case that a polity with too great a divergence of interests and principles is inherently unstable.

  1. My first bone of contention is why the West was so quick in signing onto something like the Declaration of Human Rights, a document that was clearly meant for those countries that needed such a document in place as protection for their own peoples, when nearly every Western nation at that time had either a constitution or a bill of rights that guaranteed those ‘rights’.

    Why was the declaration considered to be so important at the time and what incentive was there from the UN for the then individual Western nations to sign onto that declaration? Did none of the politicians realize the potential sabotage that declaration would have on their own law of the land?

    The other problem I have with the UN is that there is no accountability for the many things the UN has gotten wrong. In fact, the UNs list of bad decisions or just plain cowardice in the face of aggressive nations over the past 70 years has far exceeded its predecessor, the League of Nations, the original NGO that was eventually considered too ineffective to live up to its charter in just under 30 years, yet here we have the UN, the most dysfunctional NGO ever devised, now being manipulated by a cabal of countries with their not so secret aspirations, who practice the complete antithesis to the Declaration of Human Rights and have no intention of ever adopting Western ideals on human rights.

    The Arabs are the worst of the worst, yet their money for some more than compensates for their anti-Western aspirations.

    • Nemesis,

      I think your comment is very excellent. There is no point to putting individual, civilized countries under the auspices of a supra-national human rights body. It constructs a future mechanism to interfere with true human rights, as defined by free peoples.

      The primitive countries will develop human rights when they wish to develop the intellectual and economic strengths of their people. The Human Rights Council, and the UN, will have nothing to do with that.

  2. For Saudi Arabia to have this position would be the worst travesty in YEARS. They can’t even spell human rights, for God’s sake.

    Even China would be better, although they are not noted in human rights, either but they are not as blatantly outrageous as the Saudis.

    The world is doomed.

  3. This, once again, reveals the absurdity of the United Nations.
    I just so wish that a consortium of nations would just stand up and say NO.

    I wonder what it will take them to get to NO.

    • Babs, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hold sway over most countries economies the UN will reign supreme. There are no politicians let alone political parties of note that are prepared to divorce from the UN anywhere.

    • No, he doesn’t want to be one. That’s the problem. He just wants to disguise himself as one.

  4. Oh human right! How many people have been slaughtered in the name of humanity and freedom. e.g. Yugoslavia.
    Western human rights are all about resettling muslims in the west and replacing the indigenous people, and the rulers don’t care. Replacing western history, curricula, textbooks, by textbooks praising and paving ways to islamize the west.

    West’s / EU ‘s human rights : No illegal muslims will be sent back. Solution: Every EU country is forced to accept unlimited number of muslims for eternity or until violence erupts everywhere. Disasters are awaiting us. How can EU crap no see disasters coming. Soon. Did politicians behave like this in the 1930s and the result WWII?

    Are there any human rights for Jews who are murdered and maimed in Europe? Just issuing statistics about number of incidents does not help in any way.

    • You are forgetting the centuries of muslim(turks&arabs) oppression by way of forcible conversion to Islam, slavery and rape of Christian Yugoslavs.

  5. Bring it on! Would nicely follow in the footsteps of Ghadaffi’s Libya – also once head of the UN human rights council. And perhaps make for some nice memes about the type of “human rights” the UN now stands for: the right to stop women driving cars, ban Jews from entering your country, ban Bibles etc.

  6. Marvelous news. I sincerely hope that the UN elects Saudi Arabia to the presidency of its Human Rights Council.

    Any informed person understands that the UN is a morally bankrupt, bloated bureaucracy, the sole actual purpose of which is to provide lucrative sinecures for Third World elites and sundry First Worlders.

    It is thus entirely fitting that a vile theocratic absolute monarchy that holds regular public executions (usually of Asian female household servants) floggings and amputations, legally renders all women second class citizens, prohibits churches and church services, prohibits non-Muslims from entering Mecca at all, bans Jews from entering the entire country and is run by and for the benefit of 1,500 or so obscenely wealthy kleptocratic “princes” hold the presidency of a UN entity dedicated to upholding human rights. Maybe then those in the West that believe the UN pursues some noble purpose will see the light.

    • I agree it’s tempting to support Saudi Arabia as president of the Human Rights Council. But, I think we should resist the temptation of supporting the weakness of our ideological opponents, and instead defeat them on logical grounds in open debate. Besides, you might be surprised at how readily most of the world accepts such a disgraceful assignment, and thus, you’re actually in a worse position than before.

      As an example, I would not support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for the democratic nominee. She might be the weakest candidate, due to her very obvious ethical emptiness. I prefer to see a viable Democratic candidate with an honest argument. Let’s have a debate, not just campaign strategies.

      And also, there is a considerable risk Hillary would win the presidency. We would be severely damaged by another 4 years of an amoral, American-hating President.

      • I grant you there is something in this:

        “Besides, you might be surprised at how readily most of the world accepts such a disgraceful assignment, and thus, you’re actually in a worse position than before.”

        However the UN is so far gone, so malignant an influence on world affairs and such a waste of US/UK/German/Japanese money that one must welcome the absurdly offensive appointment of some Saudi as a “human rights” champion in order to further tarnish the rotten edifice.

        For the life of me I don’t understand why Reagan and Thatcher didn’t make permanent their suspension of (essential) funds to the UN in the 1980’s and bring about its demise. They could have made their own two nations the kernel of an international “Association of Democratic Nations”; an invitation only outfit of countries with well entrenched democracy where the rule of law runs. Apart from Europe, Oceania and North America one can see Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan joining. To the cries of “elitism” the League could counter: become democracies and you too …

  7. The Council of Sharia Rights. Finally, they are at their goal.

    They called it The Human Rights, the Cairo declaration of 1990, but what it is, is a declaration based on Sharia rights. They copied the Human Rights declaration, just like they at the time somehow, copied the Books, The Bible.

    The confusion is completed, by having the Mecca guardians guard the Human Rights Council.

    What’s next?

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