In “Inhuman Rights: The UN”s Human Rights Council, friend to Islamists and tyrants everywhere” in the Spring 2009 City Journal (thanks to Looney Tunes), my friend Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss discuss a topic that has appeared here many times: the corruption of the UN Human Rights Council and the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s actions to impose an Islamic supremacist agenda on the UN and the West in general.
In December 2006, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international group established in 1971 and representing 57 countries, hosted an emergency summit in Mecca. The event became infamous after two angry imams from Denmark presented a dossier of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that mocked the Prophet Mohammed. In the ensuing uproar, Muslims murdered several people in Europe and torched the Danish embassy in Beirut.
But the cartoon episode wasn’t the summit’s starkest example of Muslim outrage over free speech. The most critical decision that the OIC made in Mecca was to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward perceived insults to Islam. In its “Ten-Year Programme of Action,” the OIC announced that it would create an “observatory” to monitor acts of “Islamophobia.” It would also “endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments–”essentially the goal of its nonbinding UN resolution on “combating defamation of religions,” which the UN”s General Assembly adopted in March 2008. And it would “participate and coordinate effectively in all regional and international forums, in order to protect and promote the collective interests of the Muslim Ummah, including UN reform [and] expanding the Security Council membership.”
The goal was simple: to infiltrate and weaken secular democratic covenants and institutions from within, in a manner reminiscent of revolutionary Marxist groups” “entryism” into the British Labour Party in the seventies and eighties. The OIC”s plan for implementing its Islamist agenda hasn’t succeeded on all fronts, of course. But it has succeeded spectacularly on one: the United Nations Human Rights Council.
A subsidiary of the General Assembly, the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC) was reconstituted from the ashes of the previous Commission on Human Rights. The 60-year-old commission had long been criticized for ignoring atrocities and allowing membership to notorious human rights violators””most notably, Sudan at the height of the Darfur genocide. In 2006, the General Assembly, backed by then–secretary general Kofi Annan, voted to scrap the commission.
The HRC was formed that March by a UN resolution, though the United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands, and Palau voted against it. The U.S. at present does not occupy a seat on the council because of the Bush administration’s skeptical view that the HRC would prove just as ineffectual and biased as the former commission. Bush did license American aid to the HRC, but in September 2007 the U.S. Senate voted to cut that off, too.
In late March, however, the Obama administration announced that the U.S. would seek a seat during the upcoming HRC elections in May. According to Susan Rice, America’s ambassador to the UN, “The U.S. is seeking election to the council because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights.”…
Good luck with that.
Read it all.