Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 12:45pm

Human Rights Through The Looking Glass

United Nations Human Rights

 

The UN is an increasingly Orwellian organization.  One of many, many examples is their outgoing High Commissioner on Human Rights, Navi Pillay of South Africa.  Austin Ruse gives us her background:

 

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to name abortion advocate Navanethem “Navi” Pillay of South Africa as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) this week despite reservations from the United States.

According to the New York Times, the United States has privately raised concerns about Pillay’s nomination to the top human rights post because of her strong support for abortion. Pillay is a founding member of the international non-governmental organization Equality Now, a group that has spearheaded campaigns for abortion access in Poland and Nepal. Pillay remains on the board of the organization which receives major funding from pro-abortion foundations including George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.

Go here to read the rest.  So, being in favor of snuffing out unborn kids is now a “human right”.  George Orwell was not so much a writer as a prophet.  As the chief human rights bureaucrat since 2008, Pillay has been pushing to have governments around the world criminalize the pro-life cause.  Go here to read about her efforts.  Ms. Pillay is a walking stereotype of the contemporary left in the causes which she embraces and those she opposes,  and in her firm conviction that those who oppose her agendas must be shut up by government power, so long as that power is wielded by her ideological think-a-likes.  Human rights for thee so long as thou agree with me, sums up her philosophy.

 

The attitude of Ms. Pillay in regard to the Gaza War is therefore predictable and Christopher Johnson, a non-Catholic who has taken up the cudgels so frequently for the Church that I have named him Defender of the Faith, gives a recent statement by her on the subject a fisking to remember:

Manhattan real estate is an incredibly valuable commodity. So whenever this country wakes the hell up and withdraws from the United Nations (or, at the very least, pushes through the idea of moving the world headquarters of that ridiculous institution to Geneva, Switzerland and permanently off American soil), what should be done with the Rockefeller family’s former Turtle Bay property?

The United Nations’ senior human rights official said on Thursday she believed Israel was deliberately defying international law in its military offensive in Gaza and that world powers should hold it accountable for possible war crimes.

Oh right, right, right, Hamas is bad too.

High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also said that Hamas militants in Gaza have also violated international humanitarian law by firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel, sometimes from densely-populated areas.

Except that we don’t really believe that.

Israel has attacked homes, schools, hospitals, and UN premises in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions, Pillay said, a week after her Human Rights Council resolved to open a commission of inquiry into Israel’s alleged crimes against humanity.

“Therefore I would say that they appear to be defying… deliberate defiance of obligations that international law imposes on Israel,” Pillay told a news briefing. “This is why again and again I say we cannot allow impunity, we cannot allow this lack of accountability to go on.”

We all know the real criminal here.

She also criticized the United States, Israel’s main ally, for failing to use its influence with the Jewish state to halt the carnage.

“Many of my remarks have been directed to the United States since they are a party with influence over Israel to do much more to stop the killing, to bring the parties to the negotiating table. I’ve called also for an end to the blockade and an end to the occupation.”

Pillay said that she was appalled at Washington consistently voting against resolutions on Israel in the Human Rights Council, General Assembly and Security Council.

Here’s one blatantly obvious war crime for you. Israel refuses to share its self-defense technology with people who wish to exterminate it.

“They have not only provided the heavy weaponry which is now being used by Israel in Gaza but they’ve also provided almost $1 billion in providing the ‘Iron Domes’ to protect the Israelis from rocket attacks,” she said. “But no such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling.”

Seriously. I’m open to suggestions. Turn the UN into office space and/or a branch of the New York Public Library? Make the UN complex into an Orthodox synagogue and a particularly traditionalist Christian megachurch? Or should we just plow the place under and give it back to the Lenapes with our profuse and abject apologies.

Go here to read the comments.  For bottom feeders of the left like Ms. Pillay the source of evil in the modern world is the United States and Israel.  Why any sane administration, that of course leaves out the current administration, wastes another dime supporting the UN when it is run by enemies like Ms.  Pillay is a mystery.  Charles Lichtenstein under Reagan got it right long ago:

The United States [Federal Government], which opposed the [New York and New Jersey] legislation, offered the Soviet Union landing rights at a military base so its foreign minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, could fly in for the General Assembly meeting. But the Soviets refused. When the United Nations committee met to review the situation, the Soviet delegate, Igor I. Yakovlev, said the ban on landing “raises the question of whether the United Nations should be in the United States.” A furious Mr. Lichenstein replied that if member states felt “they are not being treated with the hostly consideration that is their due,” they should consider “removing themselves and this organization from the soil of the United States. We will put no impediment in your way,” he continued, “The members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations will be down at the dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.”

Lichtenstein got the sun in the wrong place, but otherwise his sentiment was spot on.

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bill bannon
bill bannon
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 7:18am

Pope Benedict seemed to have a weird blindness in this area when he unprophetically wrote in Caritas in Veritate:
” 67. In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth…. for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.”
If the UN had real teeth, it would put a blockade around Catholic and non Catholic countries that forbid abortion until they caved in on abortion and down the road…gay marriage.

http://www.whichcountry.co/countries-where-abortion-is-illegal/

This Church happy talk about international authority is dreaming by Popes that most humanitarian employees are in their occupations because they are selfless….errr no, it’s not like the priesthood… some are there because they had to pick a major in college and economics was boring as was engineering so they chose political science, history or English Lit. Many go into governmental or humanitarian institutions because security is there. If you are in capitalist occupations like say…sales for John Deere tractors and you don’t close enough sales per quarter, you get a Dear John letter from John Deere headquarters. Civil Service workers when I worked with them could arrive late everyday of the week and you couldn’t fire them if Jonny Cochrane was on your side showing that the gloves did indeed fit.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 7:36am

Donald,
Bingo.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 7:36am

B16 and JP2 seem naive to the cunning of the world. They are such good men and they hope others are too. Also comments about Islam seem naive.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 8:23am

In his 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, Pope Paul VI said, “ Such international collaboration among the nations of the world certainly calls for institutions that will promote, coordinate and direct it, until a new juridical order is firmly established and fully ratified. We give willing and wholehearted support to those public organizations that have already joined in promoting the development of nations, and We ardently hope that they will enjoy ever growing authority. As We told the United Nations General Assembly in New York: “Your vocation is to bring not just some peoples but all peoples together as brothers. . . Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a world authority capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political planes?”
No doubt, these popes believed that nothing less than such concentrated power could overcome the obstacles to the progress they desired. Those who seek the only the common good must be prepared to wound every separate and particular special interest and to defy public opinion and the feelings of the masses.
If one believes that rulers need to be enlightened, rather than restrained, then few are more easily enlightened than many.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 9:02am

Michael PS,
We in the US recently had a president that was getting oral sex from an intern while on the phone to a Senator and whose wife supports abortion choice and might win the next election. We have a president with similar if not worse abortion views. We have no concept of rulers, few or many, on the verge of enlightenment.

Art Deco
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 9:44am

It is indicative of the sheer inertia of the United States Government (with regard to any task other than distributing bon bons to Democratic Party clients) that the San Francisco treaty was not torn up long ago and that filthy organization given notice to vacate American soil. There are about three-dozen international organizations which might engage in useful co-operative ventures in specific areas of endeavour (e.g. civil aviation or postal services or international credit extension). The United Nations is not one.

Tamsin
Tamsin
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 2:06pm

@bill, a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth ? Personally, I’d prefer to strengthen the concept of nations of families, because I doubt the ability of governments to substitute for families. For as long as man is born of woman.
.
And, there is urgent need of a true world political authority ? I’m not getting the point of Popes calling for one world[ly] authority, bigger and better than ever before. Will we build a tower together? ha ha just kidding.

Mary De Voe
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 4:16pm

People of good will for the common good and general welfare are having their good will violated and their tax money abused by an organization that neither provides equal Justice or equal human rights.
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Created equal, the individual is endowed with unalienable human and civil rights.
Equal Justice is predicated on the principle that each and every person is endowed with and entitled to all human rights. The individual person cannot be disenfranchised or discriminated against by any law imposed ex post facto, after the fact of human rights inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. Human rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence cannot be eradicated. Unalienable human rights take precedence to any alienable, finite rights brought into existence to manipulate, infringe and disenfranchise any one human being. The newly begotten human being, as science has proven through DNA, is an individual substance of a rational nature, a Person.
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The individual human being is at the core of unalienable human rights, equal Justice and the acknowledgement and provision of human rights in freedom and democracy. The group mentality, the herd, the tribe, the communist party, the nation at the United Nations, is the vehicle for denying individual human beings every unalienable human right, human rights endowed by “their Creator”.
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Only an infinite God is capable of endowing unalienable human rights. Finite rights endowed by the United Nations may be altered and removed by the United Nations, as is evidenced by the prescription of illegal, immoral, unjustified dictates being imposed to circumscribe human rights and prohibit freedom, using tax money; nothing less than totalitarianism.

Mary De Voe
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 4:24pm

“B16 and JP2 seem naive to the cunning of the world. They are such good men and they hope others are too. Also comments about Islam seem naive.”
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Peace on earth to men of good will. B16 and JP2 have no authority to submit Catholics to evildoers.

Barbara Gordon
Barbara Gordon
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 5:02pm

The enemies of the Catholic Church, who are not Catholics, use the calls of a pope for a one world government, comments in support of strengthing UN control, pro-Socialist, pro-Communist, and pro-wacko environmental policies to greatly damage the reputation of Catholics here in the US.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Sunday, August 3, AD 2014 6:31pm

“And, there is urgent need of a true world political authority ? I’m not getting the point of Popes calling for one world[ly] authority, bigger and better than ever before.” Tamsin

Me too. And what happened to that idea of subsidiarity that the Church has always encouraged.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, August 4, AD 2014 7:19am

Anzlyne asks, “And what happened to that idea of subsidiarity that the Church has always encouraged.”
Lord Acton argued that the inclusion of different nationalities in one state is the greatest guarantee of subsidiarity and this would be especially true of am international authority.
“Private rights, which are sacrificed to the unity, are preserved by the union of nations. No power can so efficiently resist the tendencies of centralisation, of corruption, and of absolutism, as that community which is the vastest that can be included in a State, which imposes on its members a consistent similarity of character, interest, and opinion, and which arrests the action of the sovereign by the influence of a divided patriotism… It provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the subject the restraint and support of a combined opinion. In the same way it promotes independence by forming definite groups of public opinion, and by affording a great source and centre of political sentiments, and of notions of duty not derived from the sovereign will. Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organisation. All those portions of law which govern the relations of men with each other, and regulate social life, are the varying result of national custom and the creation of private society. In these things, therefore, the several nations will differ from each other; for they themselves have produced them, and they do not owe them to the State which rules them all.”

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Monday, August 4, AD 2014 7:36am

The three Orwellian contradictions that defined “DoubleThink”: War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength and Freedom is Slavery . . . now add to that, courtesy of the fascist, secular humanist Left, Death is Life.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Monday, August 4, AD 2014 8:23am

I understand Acton was talking about a union of sovereign nations. There is a big difference between that and the obliteration on nations under the authority of one huge system of order.
The aforementioned San Fransisco Conf. Brought up the concern about at least regional or group interests. There was a liberal idea about parenting a few years ago that encouraged children to “color outside the lines.”
I wNt to say this about that: Lines are important.
Subsidiarity depends upon them.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Monday, August 4, AD 2014 8:52am

Anzlyne wrote, “I understand Acton was talking about a union of sovereign nations…”

No, he was talking of different nationalities living in one state, his examples being Austria (in those days the Dual Monarchy, with German, Italian, Magyar and Slav populations) and the United Kingdom, with its English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish components.

“In Austria there are two circumstances which add to the difficulty of the problem, but also increase its importance. The several nationalities are at very unequal degrees of advancement, and there is no single nation which is so predominant as to overwhelm or absorb the others. These are the conditions necessary for the very highest degree of organisation which government is capable of receiving. They supply the greatest variety of intellectual resource; the perpetual incentive to progress, which is afforded not merely by competition, but by the spectacle of a more advanced people; the most abundant elements of self-government, combined with the impossibility for the State to rule all by its own will; and the fullest security for the preservation of local customs and ancient rights. In such a country as this, liberty would achieve its most glorious results, while centralisation and absolutism would be destruction.”

As was common at the time, he uses “nation” to mean race or ethnicity, although, in practice, the criterion is language.

Mary De Voe
Monday, August 4, AD 2014 8:55am

Sovereignty is self-discipline which harmonizes with Justice and Truth. Only sovereignty is sovereignty. The golden orb held by Jesus Christ, the King and another suspended from a chain around Our Lady’s neck are the symbols of the sovereign self…disciplined and accomplished. Each human being has a sovereign self.
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The sovereign personhood blessed by our Creator and endowed at the infusion of the rational, immortal, human soul into the newly begotten human being at the fertilization of the human egg by the human sperm makes us human. The sovereign personhood of the individual human soul constitutes the sovereignty of the individual from the very first moment of his existence and is the compelling interest of the sovereign state to protect and provide for the newly begotten individual. The sovereign personhood of the individual human soul constitutes the sovereignty of the state, every state, every government, every sovereign nation and every sovereign monarchy.
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The sovereign personhood of our Founding Fathers brought this sovereign nation to birth with The Declaration of Independence and our Constitution that are inscribed with the acknowledgment of our Creator and Endower of unalienable rights, spiritual and civil. One of these rights inscribed in the Preamble, the unchangeable purpose of our Constitution is: “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our (constitutional) posterity”, that is, for citizens to have and to hold our constitutional posterity, all future generations.
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To surrender our sovereignty as a sovereign nation and the acknowledgment of our sovereign personhood to an entity that refuses to acknowledge almighty God as the Endower and Creator of sovereignty and the sovereign person is to plunge ourselves into annihilation. Without acknowledgement of the human being, composed of body and soul, with sovereign personhood, man, the human being, is relegated to the position of beast of burden to the state, or to the government or entity that imposes this atheism on the unwilling society of sovereign persons.
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This was tried and failed at Auschwitz concentration camp. There is no need to try it again, as there as sufficient photos and proof of its failure.

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