RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you want to understand why no rational person should take the United Nations seriously, consider the following three facts: Last week, the World Health Organization, a UN agency, named Israel the first country in the world to be awarded its highest ranking for medical emergency response teams deployed overseas. In other words, the organization deemed the Israel Defense Forces its first responder of choice for any disaster worldwide. Two weeks ago, the daily Israel Hayom reported that the UN’s peacekeeping service asked Israel to train its peacekeepers in emergency field medicine; the seminar is expected to take place in the coming weeks. And every year, this same UN labels Israel the world’s worst violator of health rights, the only country deserving of a country-specific condemnation.

So if you take all three of those decisions seriously, you’re forced to conclude that the UN thinks the world’s worst violator of health rights is the ideal choice to be first on the scene in any medical disaster worldwide and also to train the UN’s own peacekeepers. The UN, by an overwhelming majority, regularly passes resolutions that even its own professional staff knows to be nonsense. Its latest condemnation of Israel for ostensibly violating health rights, for instance, passed in May by a vote of 107-8 with eight abstentions.

And lest anyone thinks there might be some way to square this circle, no, the contradiction can’t be resolved by assuming that Israel’s disaster relief efforts are somehow divorced from its regular medical practices. Over the past few years, for instance, thousands of Syrians wounded in that country’s civil war have willingly come to the Golan Heights and handed themselves over to an enemy army (Israel and Syria are still officially at war) in order to obtain medical care from Israel that they can’t obtain elsewhere. That’s the same Golan Heights where, according to the resolution, Israel is regularly violating Syrians’ health rights.

I just heard the penal sentence demanded by the Public Prosecutor: a penalty of 5,000 euros.

Speaking about one of the biggest problems of our country – the problem with Moroccans – is now punishable, according to the elite. And, hence, we are slowly but surely losing our freedom of speech. Even asking a question is no longer allowed. Even though millions of people agree. And Moroccans have suddenly become a race. So if you say something about Moroccans, you are now a racist. Nobody understands that. It is utter madness. Only meant to shut you and me up.

While in other countries the people send the elite home, here they want to silence an opposition leader. The Netherlands is running the risk of becoming a dictatorship. It looks like Turkey. The differences between the Netherlands and Turkey are getting smaller. The opposition is silenced.

I was elected by nearly a million people. That number will be even higher on March 15th next year. And it is my duty to talk about the problems, even when the politically-correct elite led by Prime Minister Rutte prefers not to mention them. Because looking away and remaining silent is not an option.

I have to say it like it is.

What is the use of political cowards who no longer dare to speak the truth? Who are silent about the problems in our country? Who pander to the government? Who cowardly look the other way?
Nothing at all! Putting one’s head in the sand is cowardliness.

And if you must keep quiet about problems, because simply asking a question has become punishable, the problems will only grow bigger. Then, the Netherlands will become a dictatorship of fearful and cowardly politicians.

There is a cure for the hysteria gripping foreign capitals and diplomatic salons after a Trump win: soul-searching. For the explanation of why Americans demanded a fresh start can be found as much in the chambers of international diplomacy as it can in Washington corridors.

The United Nations provides a useful vantage point by which to understand the Trump phenomenon.

On September 5, 2016, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein claimed there were similarities between Donald Trump and ISIS. He labeled Trump a “populist” and opined “the propaganda of Da’esh uses tactics similar to those of the populists.” On October 12, 2016 al-Hussein directly weighed into the U.S. elections and told reporters, if elected, Donald Trump “would be dangerous from an international point of view.” Evidently, it never occurred to a Jordanian prince that most American listeners would wonder first about his qualifications to lecture them on freedom of speech, democracy and human rights.

If Americans had been looking for human rights guidance from the United Nations, however, they would have encountered other impediments.

In late October, the UN General Assembly elected Saudi Arabia to the UN’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council. Iran is an elected member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Sudan supervises NGO applications for UN-accreditation and participatory rights from its berth as Vice-Chair of the UN’s Committee on NGO’s. Is a disconnect between multilateral authority figures and the chosen standard-bearer of American values really so difficult to figure out?

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also made a steady stream of veiled swipes at the Republican candidate and his party’s platform over the course of the campaign. Speaking about climate change on May 18, 2016 at a US campus commencement address, he ordered students: “Don’t vote for politicians who deny the problem.” On September 20, 2016 he told the General Assembly: “I say to political leaders and candidates: do not engage in the cynical and dangerous political math that says you add votes by dividing people and multiplying fear. The world must stand up against lies and distortions of truth…”

But Americans know the facts intrude. UN peacekeepers who arrived in Haiti in 2010 gave the population cholera, killed ten thousand people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. Ban’s response has been to deny the problem: circle the wagons, claim diplomatic immunity, and deny scientifically-proven culpability and reparations. Moreover, throughout the Secretary-General’s tenure he has propagated the cynical fiction of zero tolerance of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, while presiding over a culture of impunity for repeated violations of the world’s most vulnerable women.

The liberal stranglehold on college textbooks and curricula clearly has at least some influence on the thinking of college students and graduates, and this influence shows itself in the attitudes younger Americans have toward important political issues. A typical college student in the United States spends four or more years listening to information and arguments that support a leftist agenda, while being sheltered from data and arguments that might militate in favor of more conservative positions. Since people quite naturally base their beliefs on the available information, a four year diet of information hand-picked by leftists will inevitably have some effect.

This liberal monopoly on the flow of information allows college faculties to promote all kinds of politically correct beliefs, including some that don’t stand up well to actual scrutiny. The gospel of man-made global warming is one such belief. The best way to convince students of the truth of the theory is to “protect” them from all the evidence that undermines it.

Similarly, positive attitudes toward the United Nations are best encouraged by the suppression of information. University professors, like most liberals, are eager to portray the UN as a force for Good; and the best way to do that is by concealing a lot of embarrassing data.

Critics of the UN point to its endemic corruption, its domination by totalitarian governments, and its lack of positive accomplishments. Admirers of the UN praise if for the utopian theories on which it was founded, and try to keep the critics from getting a chance to speak.

Fortunately for the UN, its admirers get to write most the mainstream college textbooks.

The View from the Ivory Tower

A typical freshman history textbook says that the Franklin Roosevelt administration “believed that the United States could lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy, and ever-increasing living standards. New institutions like the United Nations and World Bank had been created to promote these goals.”1 In describing the constitution of the UN, the same book states “There would be a General Assembly…where each member enjoyed an equal voice – and a Security Council responsible for maintaining world peace.”2 Another textbook says “Roosevelt envisioned a strong international organization led by the world’s principle powers…The new organization would work to disband empires…The world after victory would be a world of nations, not of empires or blocs.”3

A Democracy of Dictators

The UN was constituted, right from its inception, to subordinate the interests of any one nation to the will of the majority of nations. In theory this constitution would promote equality and justice, but in actual practice an assembly where “each member enjoyed an equal voice,” as the textbook puts it, and where most of the member nations are totalitarian, forces the world’s democratic nations to accept minority status.

It’s a sad fact that only about a third of the world’s nations can be properly described as politically “free.” By giving equal voting power to every nation, the UN effectively becomes a democracy of dictators. And since the totalitarian nations tend to be Socialistic in their economic structures, hence desperately poor, the UN is frequently a tool that poverty-stricken totalitarian regimes can use to extract financial aid from freer and more prosperous nations.