Straining Out A Gnat

What international law amounts to:

Sudan won an uncontested election Tuesday to the United Nations (news - web sites)' main human rights watchdog, prompting the United States to walk out because of alleged ethnic cleansing in the country's Darfur region.

Millions of non-Muslim black Africans “ethnically cleansed” by the Muslim Sudanese in power in that land and this is their earthly reward?

Sudan's envoy immediately shot back that the U.S. delegation was "shedding crocodile tears," and he accused the United States of turning a blind eye as Iraqi prisoners were mistreated and civilians were harmed in battle.

Welcome to the world of moral equivalence, in which, abuse of a few prisoners by a few members of a vast military and the genocide of millions amount to the same thing.

Sudan's deputy U.N. ambassador, Omar Bashir Mohamed Manis, said the United States had no right to accuse anyone of human rights violations, after allegations of abuses in Iraq (news - web sites) including mistreatment of Iraqis held in U.S.-run prisons

Images of the Iraqi prisoners "are fresh in the minds of all justice-loving people around the world," he said.

Let’s see you punish the perpetrators of your crimes the way we have punished and will punish the perpetrators of ours and then we’ll compare notes, you stinking, mealy-mouthed, mass-murdering hypocrite!

Let one group of the protected slaughter the other en masse and it’s “ho hum” from the arbiters of international justice. But let a few members of the US military commit criminal acts that don’t result in death and do result in punishment for the perpetrators and it’s the flocking crime of the century.

Perhaps the UN doesn't expect much from "savages." Maybe it thinks the world would be a better place with fewer "savages" in it. Perhaps it's rewarding other "savages" for doing its dirty work. Just speculating.

(Thanks to LGF)

Comments

[Jane]

Join the protest: click here http://ga0.org/campaign/darfur
to send multiple emails to the US, UN, & EU leaders to protest the atrocities in the Sudan.
More links and posts at my blog.

[Thief]

I'll do you one better. The same people who pop their corks on the U.S. breaking international law keep SLAVES. Were that I kidding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61457-2004May2.html
http://www.thiefsden.net/archives/000179.html

[Fausta]

Juliette, excellent post.
Thief, you are right, and just yesterday I was posting about slavery. There's a site I recommend, http://www.iabolish.com/index.htm Web portal of the American Anti-slavery group, featuring the escaped former slave, Sudanese Francis Bok.
I'll go to Jane's blog & add to the protest.

[Jane]

Fausta, thank you. There's 900,000 people
driven from their homes and the prediction is 600,000 will die within a year. As the Sudan
is targeting them with Arab militias, bombs and admistrative power, blocking both monitors and aid, the Sudan today was elected tothe UN HR
commission. The version of the iAbolish link above is to a mulitple email to UN US &EU
leaders.

[John Anderson]

Even Saddam, when it was his "turn" to be on the Disarmament Comittee, had the sense to turn it down.

This was quite deliberate. A group of nations are allowed to propose the candidates for selection for four seats: they waited until the last possible moment, then only offered four choices when it was too late to get more added.

[StinKerr]

Yet people debate on the U.N.'s "credibility".

With things like this there's nothing to debate. There's no credibility. I once thought that the "Get us out of the U.N." crowd was an extremist faction, but they're beginning to look more and more sane every day.

[Teresa]

Now why oh why would this analogy pop into my head? Silence of the Lambs anyone? It's like Hannibal Lecter (hope I spelled that right) getting pissed off because Clarise takes a swing at a murderer she has in custody and knocks him over.

Call the Sudan envoy - Hannibal
Call the US - Clarise

Know that "Clarise" will get into big trouble for her actions, and Hannibal will be on the sidelines screaming "how could you DO that!!!"

Crazy isn't it. And we're supposed to support these people???

[Charles Hammond Jr.]

Call me a Bircher if you wish, but I think we should just leave. We gave the U.N. a FEW too many chances to fix itself. If it won't fix itself, and refuses our advice, why waste tax dollars?

Moral Equivilence is based off Moral Relativism. That said, you'd be surprised that Moral Relativism is based of a pretty absolute standard when you get to it's core: anything goes, because nothing is right and nothing is wrong.

We should leave the U.N. and it's broken set of morals while ours is still in one piece.

[Another Thought]

This is the same UN that John Kerry worships.

Kerry's idea of foreign policy is simply having the UN on speed dial.

The UN is proving itself to be worse than incompetetent; it is proving itself to be an enabler of evil. Oh, wait, I forgot...according to the UN there is no such thing as evil in this world.

I too used to think those who advocated withdrawal from the UN were extremists and now that is beginning to sound pretty good to me.

[Another Thought]

I remember in high school taking part in a few "Model UN" exercises, where students pretended to be UN delegates from various countries.

It was there that I was first exposed to the phrase "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The UN is an enabler of evil through its doctrine of moral equivalence. The UN basically treats dictatorships and democracies as equals, and that is plain wrong. Oh, wait, actually, the UN treats democracies like the US and Israel worse than it treats dictatorships.

[Another Thought]

The really scary thing is that one of the major candidates for president, John Kerry, is promising that as one of his first acts if elected he will go back to the UN on bended knee and ask for forgiveness.

So Kerry would go to this corrupt and morally bankrupt institution, praise it, renounce America before it, and in essence subjugate American foreign policy to this less than pure organization.

Kerry would be a recipe for disaster. We MUST do everything we can (legally) to keep him out of the White House.

What is unbelievable is the information that is beginning to leak (via a whistleblower)that the Rwandan Massacre was not, as the world thinks, a spontaneous eruption of tribal warfare. The plane crash that killed the president was not the spark that set it off. Rather, it had been planned, the plane was sabotaged, and the crash was the SIGNAL to put the plan in motion. Less than a month later, it was over, nearly a million people murdered. Let it sink in awhile, then do your own investigation as to what Kofi Annan knew, and when he knew it. If the above IS true, then what will we do about it?

[tja]

I think Kerry is wrong for looking to the UN, but who is Bush turning to to pull his fat out of the fire - Barhimi/UN.

[baldilocks]

tja: Please explain.

[Christopher Taylor]

Instapundit has a good article about how CNN and other news organizations (and guys like Scott Ritter, former UN WMD inspector) withheld information about atrocities and torture in Iraq. Now they cover it 24 hours a day and without any concern about being thrown out.

That in its self is important to look it: it's news when someone is tortured in Iraq now, and further they'll cover this without fear of reprisal and being thrown out (the stated reasons for not reporting things by CNN).

Now all we have to wait for is comparative reporting about what it was like before and how it is now. Don't wait too long though, you'
ll turn blue.