Obama weakens America 157
At the same time as the US president, Barack Hussein Obama, is smoothing the way for Islam to become a power in the world, he is weakening the defenses of the United States.
This is from Front Page, by Alan W. Dowd:
As the sequestration guillotine hangs over the Pentagon, Congress wants to know what the administration’s plan is in the event that a deal isn’t struck to avert a staggering $500 billion in automatic spending cuts to the U.S. military. These cuts, it pays to recall, would come in addition to the $487 billion the Pentagon has already carved from its spending plans over the next 10 years. The cuts would be disastrous, and making such cuts without any sort of plan or roadmap would compound disaster with irresponsibility. Could it be that the president may actually want the Pentagon’s budget to be cut by another $500 billion—or put another way, to shrink over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion?
Before scoffing at that possibility, recall that the Pentagon was the first place President Obama turned when the debt crisis emerged as a political issue. “We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities and our role in a changing world,” Obama said in 2011.
Recall, too, that the president halted F-22 production at 187 planes, far short of the planned 381; cut the nation’s strategic nuclear forces by 30 percent and has floated proposals to cut the deterrent arsenal to as low as 300 warheads (about the size of China’s); withdrew from Iraq, over the objections of his top commanders and diplomats; under-resourced Afghanistan, then undercut the mission he gave his commanders by announcing a withdrawal deadline; handcuffed U.S. foreign policy to the lowest-common-denominator approach approved by Moscow; and famously “led from behind” in Libya, letting America’s oldest, closest allies in NATO know that the scope, scale and duration of America’s involvement would be limited. (Early in the war, the allies were stunningly told that the availability of essential U.S. strike aircraft “expires on Monday.”) …
To meet the president’s targets, the Navy has been ordered to cut the number of surface combatants from 85 ships to 78, stretch the “build time” of new aircraft carriers from five to seven years, and had to seek a special congressional waiver to deploy just 10 carriers (rather than the legally-mandated 11) while the USS Gerald Ford is built and other flattops are retired or refurbished. Pressed by budget-cutters, the Air Force plans to reduce its fleet by 286 planes. The active-duty Army will be cut from 570,000 soldiers to 490,000; the Marines from 202,000 to 182,000. The administration has slashed $810 million from the Missile Defense Agency, cut spending on ground-based missile defense by 22 percent and reduced the number of warships to be retrofitted with missile-defense capabilities by seven. A DOD report on weapons-acquisition plans for 2013 reveals spending cuts in combat drones, F-35 fighter-bombers, F/A-18 fighter-bombers, V-22 heli-planes, UH-60 helicopters, KC-46 refuelers, M-1 tank upgrades, Stryker armored vehicles, aircraft carriers, submarines, and a number of satellites and space-based sensors. Remember, all of this is before sequestration.
For perspective, compare these numbers with some from the not-too-distant past. In 1991, the total active-duty force was 2 million; today, it’s hovering around 1.3 million—and falling. In 1991, the U.S. deployed 15 aircraft carriers, some 300 bombers and nearly 4,000 fighters; today, the U.S. deploys 10 carriers, 162 bombers and roughly 2,000 fighters. At the height of the Reagan buildup, the Navy boasted 587 ships. The size of today’s fleet is 285 ships. Current recapitalization rates will not keep up with plans to retire ships, leading to “a Navy of 240-250 ships at best,” according to former Navy Secretary John Lehman.Although the defense budget grew by $300 billion in the decade after 9/11, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments notes that just 16 percent of that increase was earmarked for modernization—and that a dozen new weapons systems were terminated and many systems had their numbers cut below end-strength goals (e.g., the F-22). “The aggregate effect is that a significant portion of DOD’s investment in modernization over the past decade did not result in force modernization.”
To get a sense of the modernization crisis, consider that the Air Force now plans to keep flying B-52 bombers through 2040. The first B-52 took to the skies in 1954. The CH-47 helicopter celebrates its 50th birthday this year, and the Army plans to deploy the heavy-lift chopper past 2040.
This benign neglect of the military might make sense if peace were breaking out. But we know the very opposite to be true. America is still at war in Afghanistan. Terrorist networks like al-Qaeda still have the ability to strike and are increasing their influence in the Horn of Africa and in Yemen. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is less stable and more paranoid than ever, as is nuclear-armed North Korea. Iran is racing ahead with its own nuclear-weapons program and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. The Arab Spring revolution has triggered a civil war in Syria. What happens if/when Assad starts firing off chemical weapons? What if the revolution spreads to the oil-rich Arab monarchies? And what path will the new governments in Egypt and Libya ultimately choose?
These, it could be argued, are not even our principal worries. As the U.S. declaws itself, China is boosting military spending by 11 percent this year, capping double-digit increases in nine of the past 10 years.According to the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military power, Beijing is pouring increasing sums into advanced cruise missiles, conventional ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, counter-space weapons, cyberspace capabilities, upgrades to its bomber fleet, 79 surface combatants and 50 submarines. These assets are “designed to enable anti-access/area-denial missions.” In other words, their mission is to deter and if necessary destroy the [US] Pacific fleet.
Similarly, Russia—in the midst of a planned 65-percent increase in military spending—is making claims in the Arctic, occupying parts of Georgia, blocking international action in Iran, providing arms and cover to Syria, buzzing North American airspace, and carrying out provocative maneuvers and weapons deployments in areas bordering NATO states. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has unveiled plans to deploy 2,300 new tanks, 600 new warplanes, 400 new ICBMs and 28 new subs—all in the next 10 years….
Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey warns of a Pentagon with “fewer options and a lot less capacity,” adding “we wouldn’t be the global power that we know ourselves to be today.”
Maybe that’s by design. It seems a smaller military may serve a larger objective for the president—namely an America that is less assertive; an America less able to act independently, and hence more deferent to and dependent on the UN; an America with fewer military resources, a shorter reach, slower reflexes and a smaller global role.
An America more defeatable.
The terrorist conference 259
Did you hear the one about a crowd of terrorists holding a conference in the name of counter-terrorism? Sponsored by the Obama administration? What’s painfully funny about it is that it really happened.
Diana West writes at Townhall:
The Washington Free Beacon reported this week on the continuing omission of Israel from a U.S.-sponsored organization called the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF). At a recent forum meeting in Spain, Maria Otero, U.S. undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, delivered a speech titled “Victims of Terrorism,” but, in her roll call of victims, she didn’t mention Israel. The conference at which she spoke was described as a “high-level conference on the victims of terrorism,” but Israel wasn’t a participant.
It bears repeating because it is so fantastic: At an international conference devoted to victims of terrorism, the world’s leading victim or, better, leading target of terrorism — Israel — was nowhere in sight, or mind.
Welcome to the GCTF — U.S. counterterrorism’s new “normal.” This 30-member organization got its official start last September as a “major initiative” of the Obama administration when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced its launch in New York.
It was quite an occasion; Hillary curled her hair. Seated next to her Turkish co-chairman, ensconced amid ministers from Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates …
All of which are or have been breeding-grounds of terrorists, and some of which – Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan – are or have been active state sponsors of terrorism …
… and 18 other miscellaneous member-states plus the European Union, she then said the magic words: “From London to Lahore, from Madrid to Mumbai, from Kabul to Kampala, it’s innocent civilians who have been targeted …”
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon? Poof, gone. And that’s the point: This new counterterrorism organization, with its related counterterrorism center coming soon to Abu Dhabi, is Judenfrei. Not coincidentally, it is also heavily Islamic. Eleven member-states — slightly more than one-third of the organization’s membership — also belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 56 Islamic countries working to impose Islamic law (Shariah) on the world. Six of those 11 members additionally belong to the Arab League. Both groups have defined “terrorism” to exclude Israeli victims (sometimes U.S. soldiers), and “terrorists” to exclude groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It is no wonder the Arab-Islamic members would now unite in “counterterrorism” without Israel.
What is both shocking and shameful, however, is that the U.S. would, too. It shows that the U.S. has implicitly but clearly accepted the Arab League/OIC definitions of terrorism and terrorists. …
Their implied definition of terrorism is: “Israel defending itself”. Their implied definition of terrorist: a Jew.
Under the Bushes … while Israel was not permitted to fight alongside coalition forces, at least it was still recognized for withstanding more than 60 years of Islamic terrorist attacks. Today, under the auspices of the Obama administration, Israel no longer rates mention even as a victim. “Big Satan” has thrown “Little Satan” to the sharks. Which says two things about Big Satan. Our institutions now see the world from the Islamic perspective, and, as far as the sharks go, we’re next.
And this is from politicalmavens.com by Rachel Raskin-Zrihen:
So, there’s this Global Counterterrorism Forum comprised of 32 countries, including the United States, Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes the European Union, nine European countries, 10 Arab/Muslim countries and three Asian ones.
This group was formed last year, under the United States’ leadership, for policymakers and experts in the counterterrorism field to share insights and best practices.0
Great idea, right?
Inexplicably, however, not included in the forum is Israel, easily in the top three on the list of the world’s most frequent terror targets and likely the most skilled at fighting the scourge. …
Inexplicably? Not at all. It could not be more obvious: Obama loves Islam and hates Israel.
Since no explanation has been offered by our government, we are left to speculate about why this is happening, and I suspect that were they to deign to explain their actions, Obama Administration officials would likely say it’s about getting the nations where the terrorists are spawned to help fight them, without pissing them off by inviting the Jews. It’s the only thing they can say, really. But I’m not buying it. And I’m not the only one.
After it was learned that the United State’s “best friend and closest ally” was excluded from this forum, our country’s officials assured those expressing concern that “a way would be found” to include it.
I find it peculiar, since we created the forum and Israel is among our closest allies and an expert on the issue, that a special way must be found to include it, different from the way the others came to be on the panel, but, evidently, it does.
However, it’s been a year and nothing has changed. Maybe they thought no one would notice.
But, at least two U.S. Senators did notice and wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who attended this forum, and demanded to know why this glaring omission remains uncorrected.
Also, the Simon Wiesenthal Center took exception to the blatant insult, not to mention the stupidity of failing to include the player with the most direct experience with the phenomenon and the best track record at fighting it, and fired off an urgent letter of protest to Ms. Clinton.
The center’s founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, reportedly wrote of his awareness that Turkey and some others “oppose an Israeli presence,” but notes that – SO THE EFF WHAT?
Are we trying to fight the most deadly dangerous threat to humanity to ever have slithered out of hell, or are we trying to appease the Arabs?
Answer: Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to appease the Arabs.
Rabbi Hier also said that “having a Global Counterterrorism Forum and not including Israel, is like having a global technology conference and excluding the United States of America.” And, noting “there is no one with more experience at combating terrorism or educating civilians about it, than the State of Israel,” he said, “I think the time has come for the United States to make it very clear why Israel continues to be excluded.”
Me, too. But, I’m not sure we’ll get an honest answer, or, if we do, we’re prepared to hear it.
The first, and most obvious explanation, is that the Arab/Muslim contingent “objects” to the Jewish state’s inclusion. In other words, the bully objects to the victim’s presence at a discussion ostensibly designed to stop bullying.
Bullying is too mild a word, of course, but her point is good.
It’s a phenomenon similar to the so-called Anti-Racism conference in Durban, South Africa, which was actually an officially sanctioned, international Jew-and-Israel-bashing free-for-all, with a name that really only served to add insult to injury.
It’s another act of bullying, right in our face, and we – and by we I mean the United States and the rest of the free, normal-thinking world – is afraid to set the crazies off by defying their demands. …
This is unfortunate, obviously, because it’s proof certain that terrorism is working to cow even the world’s greatest powers.
In the light of this, the appointment of an Israeli as the UN Security Council’s top counterterrorism lawyer is simply astounding.
The Washington Post reports:
The United Nations has promoted a former Israeli government attorney to a job as the Security Council’s top counterterrorism lawyer, making him the only Israeli national serving in a senior security position within the U.N. Secretariat … David Scharia has been appointed legal coordinator for the Counter-Terrorism Committee executive directorate, where he will oversee a team of 12 international legal experts who advise the 15-nation Security Council on its counterterrorism efforts. The appointment would not typically be notable were it not so uncommon for Israelis to reach the upper levels at the United Nations. … Of the more than 44,000 international employees within the United Nations, only 124 are Israeli, according to the U.N. None serve in the top ranks of the most sensitive political jobs, which are responsible for maintaining international security, mediating peace deals and coordinating humanitarian assistance.
Why suddenly is an Israeli appointed to such a job at the UN?
A plausible explanation may be that the UN fears a cutting off of funds by the US Congress. (See here and here and here and here.)
Our preference would be for Congress to cut off all funds to the disgusting UN. The UN should be wiped off the face of the earth. See our post Why the UN must be destroyed, June 12, 2012.
Blatant cowardice, patent courage 46
A Jewish organization caved to Muslim pressure and cancelled a talk to be given by Pamela Geller, who is one of the bravest warriors against Islam in America.
It was a cowardly and stupid thing to do.
Also, it means that law-enforcement is not trusted as it used to be in the US.
The videos come from Atlas Shrugs:
She gave her banned speech elsewhere:
A UN failure a triumph for humankind 126
These statements were made in speeches at the 2012 UN Earth Summit in Rio. We have taken them from a collection at Climate Depot:
Climate Depot’s Executive Editor Marc Morano:
Failure here is good for the world’s poor people. Failure is the only option for this conference if you care about the environment and poor people. Carbon based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet. James Lovelock, the father of the modern green movement [and founder of the cult of Gaia] says “sustainable development” is “meaningless drivel”. I’ll go further and say we need to redefine sustainable development as oil, gas, coal — energy that works and energy that lifts people out of poverty.
CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker:
While we stand here, 1.4 billion people are suffering in poverty… Any hope they have of rising out of poverty is being threatened by the negotiations here at Rio+20. … There is no imminent eco-disaster. We must not sell the potential prosperity of the poor for the dirty rags of sustainable development. Human beings must come first. In fact, history has shown that the environment is best protected when humans prosper. It is no coincidence that the regions of the world with the best air and the purest water are the also the ones that have the most advanced economies and used conventional development to get there. On the other hand, the poor cannot afford to care for the environment when every day is a matter of survival. Nature suffers when people suffer.
CFACT President David Rothbard:
People are not pollution. People are not a disease. People are the greatest natural resource on the Earth … The way to help the environment is to lift people up out of poverty. Unleash their abilities through political and economic freedom. Not a top down approach, not one environmental crisis after another designed to have people give over more of their political rights, more of their economic freedom to unelected bureaucrats or government regulators. But allowing people to flourish so that people and nature can flourish together.
Lord Christopher Monckton:
Having failed with “global warming” … they have now come up with “sustainable development”. This means pretty much whatever you want to mean.You can say it is about gender equality and women’s empowerment – mentioned at least 5 times in pre-session draft negotiating texts. It’s about all kinds of fashionable left-wing Marxist and other socialist causes. It is not in fact about the environment and it is not about development.
The Rio+20 Earth Summit – we’re happy to say – failed in its own terms: a failure for the anti-human cohorts of Big Green and the Church of Gaia.
But if it marks an end to the concocting by Big Green of “one environmental crisis after another designed to have people give over more of their political rights, more of their economic freedom to unelected bureaucrats or government regulators”, and a redefining of sustainable development “as oil, gas, coal — energy that works and energy that lifts people out of poverty”, then its failure can be counted as a triumph for humankind.
The UN must be destroyed.
Beggar nations 119
It’s later than he thinks.
This picture of President François Hollande of France comes from Townhall, illustrating an article by Daniel J. Mitchell, with the caption:
Compared to his foolishness on tax policy, Hollande is a genius when it comes to determining what time it is.
The author has been so bemused by watching European countries taking all the wrong steps to save themselves from bankruptcy, that he “endorsed the explicit socialist [Hollande] over the implicit socialist [Sarkozy] precisely because of a morbid desire to see a nation commit faster economic suicide.”
“Well,” he writes, “Monsieur Hollande isn’t disappointing me.”
He gives examples of the idiotic steps the new president is taking to ruin his country by raising taxes.
And here are some highlights from the article (which is worth reading in full):
While France is driving into a fiscal cul-de-sac, Italian politicians have constructed a very impressive maze of red tape, intervention, and regulation. …
But let’s not forget our Greek friends … the country that subsidizes pedophiles and requires stool samples from entrepreneurs applying to set up online companies. …
Thanks to the International Monetary Fund, the rest of us are helping to subsidize these Greek moochers.
And speaking of the IMF, I never realized those overpaid bureaucrats (and they’re also exempt from tax!) are closet comedians. They must be a bunch of jokers, I’ve concluded, because they just released a report on problems in the eurozone without once mentioning excessive government spending or high tax burdens.
The tax-free IMF bureaucrats do claim that “Important actions have been taken,” but they’re talking about bailouts and easy money. …
Even though the problems in Europe are solely the result of bad policies by nations governments, the economic pyromaniacs at the IMF also say that “the crisis now calls for a stronger and more collective effort.”
By which they mean –
Let’s translate this into plain English: The IMF wants more money from American taxpayers (and other victimized producers elsewhere in the world) to subsidize the types of statist policies that are described above in places such as France, Italy, and Greece.
Greece, Spain, and yes, France and Italy too, and not omitting Ireland and Portugal, are like beggars intent on getting enough alms to keep themselves alive for one more day.
Like beggars, did we say? They are beggars. They have reduced themselves to beggary. The beggar-nations of Europe. To give them alms is to sponsor beggary.
The IMF and the World Bank – both of them institutions in the UN system – are the charity-workers who come to your doors, Americans, rattling their collection boxes, to support the poor … what?
“Pedophiles? Early retirees? Muslim immigrants? Biannual vacation-takers? National health service patients?”
“Yes. Just put the coins in the box and don’t be judgmental!”
Big Green finds a new excuse 74
The Synod of the Church of Gaia has found a new excuse for trying to impose international communism on the world under the dictatorship of the UN.
This is from Townhall, by Paul Driessen and David Rothbard:
The UN Conference on Sustainable Development is underway [20-22 June, 2012] in Rio de Janeiro. This time, 20 years after the original 1992 Rio “Earth Summit,” thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and environmental activists are toning down references to “dangerous man-made climate change,” to avoid repeating the acrimony and failures that characterized its recent climate conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban.
Instead, “Rio+20” is trying to shift attention to “biodiversity” and alleged threats to plant and animal species, as the new “greatest threat” facing Planet Earth. This rebranding is “by design,” according to conference organizers, who say sustainable development and biodiversity is an “easier sell” these days than climate change: a simpler path to advance the same radical goals.
What are those radical goals? Same old, same old. They don’t change.
Those goals include expanded powers and budgets for the United Nations, UN Environment Programme, US Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies, and their allied Green pressure groups; new taxes on international financial transactions (to ensure perpetual independent funding for the UN and UNEP); and more mandates and money for “clean, green, renewable” energy.
Their wish list also includes myriad opportunities to delay, prevent and control energy and economic development, hydrocarbon use, logging, farming family size, and the right of individual countries, states, communities and families to make and regulate their own development and economic decisions.
Aside from not giving increased power to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and activists, there are two major reasons for stopping this attempted biodiversity-based power grab.
1) There is no scientific basis for claims that hundreds or thousands of species are at risk. …
No bird or mammal species in recorded history is known to have gone extinct due to climate change. …
2) The greatest threats to species are the very policies and programs being advocated in Rio.
Those policies would ban fossil fuels, greatly increase renewable energy use, reduce jobs and living standards in rich nations, and perpetuate poverty, disease, death and desperation in poor countries. …
The Rio+20 biodiversity and sustainability agenda means artificially reduced energy and economic development. It means rationed resources, sustained poverty and disease, and unsustainable inequality, resentment, conflict, and pressure on wildlife and their habitats. …
Soon after that the authors go off the rails, raving about “Our Creator”, a mystical being who, they imagine, “endowed” us with “a world of riches”.
But the greater part of the article is worth reading.
Why the UN must be destroyed 204
The UN must be destroyed because (to put it very mildly, coolly, and objectively):
- It does no good to anyone
- It does much harm to many
- It is unreformable
- It was a colossal mistake of wishful thinking from its beginning
- It is kept going only because it is a gravy train for its bureaucrats and diplomats at enormous expense to tax-payers, especially Americans
A documentary film made recently by Ami Horowitz and Matt Groff, UN Me, exposes the worst incidences of its uselessness and corruption, violent and cruel actions, and refusals to do what it purportedly came into existence to do.
The following extracts are from an excellent article on the film by Bruce Bawer at Front Page. (It is well worth reading in full.)
UN Me begins by according us a few brief glimpses of the sheer sloth that characterizes the whole shebang. Old UN hands describe the short working days, long lunches, and frequent midday naps that characterize the everyday life of many of its functionaries. Wandering the halls of UN headquarters in New York shortly after 5 PM on a weekday, Horowitz … encounters a virtual ghost town: almost everybody has long since cleared out for the day. This institutional torpor is, he makes clear, emblematic of the whole worldwide enterprise. …
Horowitz reminds us that countries like Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and China have sat on the UN Human Rights Commission – and, later, on the Human Rights Council that was meant to be an improvement on that comically corrupt agency.
In 2010, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
At one point in the film, Horowitz asks Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and director of the UN’s 2009 anti-racism conference in Geneva, why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people, was named keynote speaker at that event. That question, she replies in a small voice, is “not for me to answer.” (No, you don’t get far at the UN by providing honest answers to reasonable questions like that one.)
Horowitz informs us that Article 6 of the UN Charter actually “calls for the expulsion of any nation that consistently violates the principles of the charter.” Yet no member country has ever been expelled under Article 6. Shashi Tharoor, UN information chief, cheerfully explains that it’s best to have everybody “under the same tent.” …
The film covers some of the more egregious scandals involving UN peacekeeping … anecdotes about peacekeepers in various countries who, in their interactions with the people they were there to protect, acted like thugs, got rich trafficking drugs, spent their time whoring, and sexually abused minors. Peacekeepers in the Congo committed literally thousands of rapes. At least one ran a pedophilia ring.
We’re shown video of UN bureaucrats solemnly vowing that errant peacekeepers will be caught and punished. But in fact almost no UN peacekeeper has ever been held accountable for anything.
In Côte d’Ivoire, peacekeepers actually fired on peaceful, unarmed protestors.
They were standing together, men women and children, singing happily when UN sharp shooters fired on them. One of the few times the “peacekeepers” have actually used their arms.
But was anyone punished? No; that’s just not the UN way. When Horowitz, in a sit-down interview with Abou Moussa, head of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire, asks about the episode, Moussa gets up and leaves.
The film moves on to the absurdity that is the International Atomic Energy Agency – which, tasked with preventing nuclear-arms proliferation, has actually helped North Korea, Iran, India, and Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes. Since, as the film notes, the IAEA can only perform inspections in countries that invite it to do so, it spends more than 80% of its $380 million annual budget inspecting facilities in – believe it or not – Germany, Japan, and Canada. …
Iran carries on towards making nuclear weapons. The UN and its agencies can do nothing about it, nor would if they could. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is one of the most honored, ecstatically applauded gasbags in the UN General Assembly, he who has homosexuals hanged and women stoned to death. Ahmadinejad is the perfect personification of the spirit of the United Nations Organization.
Then there’s terrorism. After 9/11, the UN passed Resolution 1373, which was supposedly designed to fight terrorism. It would appear to be as toothless a measure as was ever ratified by a deliberative body. Horowitz interviews Javier Ruperez, whose title is – get this – Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council. Asked what the committee actually does to fight terrorism, Ruperez speaks blandly of the production of reports. Member countries, you see, are asked to file reports indicating whether or not they’re aiding terrorists. The directorate, or committee, or whatever it is also sends inspectors for, oh, a week or so to various countries to find out whether anything fishy is going on there. None of this, of course, actually accomplishes anything. Asked whether the UN has official lists of terrorist groups and of countries that support terror, Ruperez says no: “This is not the practice of the UN.” …
Another question: how does the UN define terrorism? This, Ruperez declares, is still a “pending matter.” …
The UN will not define terrorism because the General Assembly is dominated by terrorism-sponsoring states.
Next up: the Oil for Food scandal – which, as Claudia Rosett, the top-notch UN expert and eloquent UN critic, tells Horowitz, was absolutely “designed to produce corruption.” Allegedly, the objective of the program was to provide food, medical supplies, and so forth to the Iraqi people in exchange for oil; in reality, a bunch of UN big shots, up to and including Security Council representatives … lined their pockets with kickbacks. But, again, the UN did nothing – it was, as Rosett says, “the biggest scam in the history of human relief,” but nobody was fired or jailed. As always, the UN proved that nothing could be more alien to its institutional culture than the idea of accountability.
The Rwanda genocide gets its own sad chapter in UN Me. The head of the UN peacekeepers in that country, General Romeo Dallaire, actually wanted to do the right thing. But when he asked Kofi Annan, then in charge of all UN peacekeeping forces, for authority to take relatively modest action to prevent a looming genocide, Annan said no. Why? Because it was more important to protect the UN’s “image of impartiality” than to protect people from genocide. UN forces were even ordered to withdraw from a school where they were the only thing standing between Tutsi refugees – many of them children and old people – and Hutus with machetes. Result: a brutal massacre for which – yet again – no UN personnel were punished.
Live footage of what happened there is one of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.
While this nightmare was unfolding in Rwanda, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary-general of the UN, was on a European tour, which he refused to cancel in order to deal with Rwanda.
He had urgently to attend a string of universities bestowing honorary degrees on him for being such a benefactor of mankind.
When he did return to New York, he denied that Tutsi were being exterminated. … Horowitz and Groff even got Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, on camera smoothly asserting that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide, it’s best not to “allocate the blame to one actor or the other.”
Horowitz also interviews Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who was invited by the UN to examine the situation in Darfur and who ended up livid at the UN’s palpable discomfort with her undiplomatic conclusions and its failure to act on her urgent recommendations. …
At film’s end, Horowitz and Graff pose a simple question: what, given all these unpleasant facts, does the UN stand for? The answer, alas, is clear. It stands for itself – period. Like many other pointless bureaucracies, it is about perpetuating its own existence and enhancing its own image – and about seeking to squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass. It’s also … about providing hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.
Please watch the film!
Destroying American wealth and sovereignty by diktat 219
The gruesome thing with which the UN is now pregnant, and which Obama is ready to midwife, is even worse than Agenda 21*.
One of the biggest issues in the November election is whether we will continue or stop President Obama’s move toward restricting U.S. sovereignty and rushing down the road to global governance. One would think that the obvious failure of the European Union and disdain for the euro would put the skids on global integration, but no such luck.
So writes Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall, in an article that ought to alarm American voters:
Obama has such delusions of his own power that he thinks he can do by executive order whatever he cannot get Congress to approve, even Harry Reid’s Democratic Senate. Obama’s most recent executive order starts off with the extravagant claim that it is issued “by the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.”
On the contrary, the president is not vested with the authority asserted in Executive Order 13563, which locks us into a worldwide regulatory system and thereby gives up a huge slice of U.S. economic and environmental sovereignty. The proclaimed purpose is to globally harmonize regulations on environmental, trade and even legislative processes.
This executive order is larded with globalist gobbledygook about the obligation of our regulatory system to “protect public health, welfare, safety and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.” Those pie-in-the-sky goodies are designed to benefit “an increasingly global economy,” rather than the United States.
The executive order specifies that this new “international regulatory cooperation” will function “particularly in emerging technology areas.That’s an open door for dangerous mischief in sensitive areas that the new global busybodies might get into, and it will probably give Communist China the opportunity to steal more of our technology.
The crux of the purpose for this tremendous assumption of presidential power is to establish a “regulatory plan” and “reforms” of “significant regulations that address unnecessary differences in regulatory requirements between the United States and its major trading partners.” Wow! Will we be harmonizing U.S. regulations with Communist China, one of our biggest trading partners?
Obama’s close circle of communist cronies and advisers are round about the cauldron going, chucking human body parts into it, making fair foul and foul fair.
Do you remember Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar who became famous for saying that the government “owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission,” and … that dogs are entitled to have lawyers to sue humans in court? He has recently emerged to publish an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal enthusiastically supporting Obama’s global regulatory harmonization. Maybe [he] will try to harmonize our dog-food regulations with China, whose dog food just sickened 1,000 U.S. dogs. Maybe [he] will find a way to harmonize U.S. production of electronic parts for our military aircraft with the 1,800 cases of counterfeit parts Communist China sold to our military.
Obama’s executive order creates a “working group” to issue a “regulatory plan” and “guidelines” that will “operate on consensus.” That’s the favorite United Nations procedure of reducing the power of the United States in international confabs. …
The next step of the global governance lobby is likely to be a push for U.S. acceptance of the United Nations’ demand for a global tax on all financial transactions “to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises and to protect basic human rights.” That’s on the agenda for the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro this month known as Rio-plus 20.
Don’t expect any benefit to the United States. The real purpose is to reduce our standard of living by transferring U.S. wealth to dictators all around the world.
The present socialist government of the US cannot be content merely to confiscate money from Americans who have earned it and spread it among others who have not. Socialism in one country – National Socialism – would never be enough to satisfy the likes of Obama, Sunstein, Van Jones, Anita Dunne, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the coven. The lasting aim of Evil-Doers International, of which they are leading members, is to confiscate the wealth America has earned and spread it among the savage tyrannies whose representatives squat in the UN, their predatory prehensile hands forever outstretched for alms.
It is the UN that must be destroyed.
* For the evils of Agenda 21, see our posts: World Communist government begins, May 13, 2012; Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.
Public relations in Saudi Arabia 5
Watch how a Muslim immigrant worker is humiliated in Saudi Arabia.
Press the cc button for English translation.
Will the release of this video cause angry protests to break out among the Muslims of Europe, do you think?
Will the UN take up the worker’s cause?
Will US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vice President Joe Biden express their outrage in a televised speech?
Will pigs grow wings?