The UN is a sick joke

[Dogpatch]

h/t Eye on a Crazy Planet

Robert Mugabe named ‘international tourism ambassador’ in latest UN absurdity

Michael Ross May 28, 2012 – 8:34 AM ET

For cognitive dissonance, see under: The United Nations. It’s no longer just a platform for countries with less-than-negligible human rights records to bash Israel and other democratic nations, or the dispatcher of envoys like Kofi Annan to Syria (under whose watch some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered) or the patronizing professional busy-body Olivier De Schutter, a Belgian “UN special rapporteur on the right to food,” to lecture Canada. The UN is now an expert on tourism to Africa and deciding who is best suited to promote it.

The UN just announced that its favourite African megalomaniac, Robert Mugabe, and his Zambian sidekick, Michael Sata, have been appointed United Nations international tourism ambassadors in recognition of the promotion and development of tourism. The UN through the United Nations World Tourism Organisation will officially confer the status to the two presidents at a function to be held in Victoria Falls this week and officiated by the UNWTO secretary general Mr Talib Rifai. The honour comes even though the European Union and U.S. have imposed travel bans on Mugabe and many of his senior government officials due to widespread human rights abuses.

Read full story at
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... absurdity/

[styky]

Robert Mugabe named ‘international tourism ambassador’

You've got to be kidding

We should stop cutting cheques immediately

[backhoe]

I covered it years ago:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1096037/posts

[Edward Kennedy]

The dis U nited N utbars are criminal and the damned building needs to be bulldozed into the East River when all of these scum are present at work and any survivors machine gunned.

[backhoe]

The dis U nited N utbars are criminal and the damned building needs to be bulldozed into the East River when all of these scum are present at work and any survivors machine gunned.

No need to be so Draconian- just move them to Haiti and tell them

"When you have fixed this, give us a call for more money..."

The UN was a nice sounding idea 60 or 70 years ago. Like "for the children..."

All they are now is a rabble of dictator-enablers, woman & child molesters, and suckers up of "everybody else's money..."

They need to be kicked out of the US and polite company.

[styky]

Canada to withdraw from UN tourism organization over Mugabe appointment: Baird
http://www.680news.com/news/national/ar ... ment-baird

[skeena484]

Fortunately for Canada we have a Conservative government at the helm. This announcement by John Baird’s proves we are the most conservative government in the free world and the only country with the courage to stand up to these United Nations socialists and dictators. It’s a shame the leader of the United States of America from Kenya lacks the same resolve.

[RedDog]

I have no doubt evolving from the League of Nations after the second world war that the UN was a global requirement at that time following some very volatile years and millions upon millions of lost lives. In that wasteland of uncertainty I can clearly see a body was needed to "heal" within a global, humanitarian context.

That said, the UN today has morphed into a wealth transfer agent who seems hell bent to punish the west and extract whatever monies they can from it. It's time to suggest their role concerning us has concluded.

At the very least a number of western countries should withdraw on a fair gentleman's time frame of notice and I would also invite them to vacate New York City and American soil in a reasonable and fair timeframe, say five years. It's time to be relocated to someplace like The Hague or Luxembourg, or perhaps even Cape Town or Nairobi. Our association and participation should be ended with gratitude and best wishes.

[chainrock]

I have no doubt evolving from the League of Nations after the second world war that the UN was a global requirement at that time following some very volatile years and millions upon millions of lost lives. In that wasteland of uncertainty I can clearly see a body was needed to "heal" within a global, humanitarian context.

That said, the UN today has morphed into a wealth transfer agent who seems hell bent to punish the west and extract whatever monies they can from it. It's time to suggest their role concerning us has concluded.

At the very least a number of western countries should withdraw on a fair gentleman's time frame of notice and I would also invite them to vacate New York City and American soil in a reasonable and fair timeframe, say five years. It's time to be relocated to someplace like The Hague or Luxembourg, or perhaps even Cape Town or Nairobi. Our association and participation should be ended with gratitude and best wishes.

I believe we at least should have the option of voting on whether Canada should opt out of the UN, at the time of the next general election.

[Julian]

I believe we at least should have the option of voting on whether Canada should opt out of the UN, at the time of the next general election.

When the government wants your opinion they'll tell you what it is.

That is the reality of Canadian Party politics.

[chainrock]

I believe we at least should have the option of voting on whether Canada should opt out of the UN, at the time of the next general election.

When the government wants your opinion they'll tell you what it is.

That is the reality of Canadian Party politics.

sadly true, we don't elect a government which reflects our values, just the lesser of two or three evils.

[RedDog]

I'm just not clear how we're being directly served in any tangible way by the UN. We spend millions upon millions in assorted foreign aid endeavours not connected to the UN and don't seem to need them for that. Indeed, humanitarian efforts should reflect on Canada and the generosity of Canadians, not a middle man taking credit.

[styky]

Let’s get out of UN: And do not apologize to this global collection of thugs

By Brian Lilley ,Parliamentary Bureau

First posted: Thursday, May 31, 2012 07:45 PM CDT
Canada apparently owes the United Nations an apology. That’s the view put forward by a group of supposedly eminent Canadians such as Ed Broadbent and Flora Macdonald, as well as organizations such as Amnesty International. These fine folks are upset at the reaction of the Harper cabinet to Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

You remember De Schutter, or Scooter as I call him. He’s the Belgian academic who has never held a real job outside of the rarefied world of the United Nations or Europe’s finer universities. He came to Canada, spent 11 days talking to political activists and then issued a report saying that at the same time too many Canadians are obese, we aren’t doing enough to make sure people are fed.

His solutions, and he gave many, all boiled down to Canada adopting European-style socialism.

Now I don’t know what you think of Europe’s fiscal problems, but following a system that has been tried and is currently failing spectacularly doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Then again, neither does working with the UN.

The letter calls on Prime Minister Stephen Harper not only to apologize but also for Canada to “provide assurances to the United Nations Human Rights Council that Canada will co-operate fully with its mechanisms.”

Do these people not realize that the UN human rights council accepts thuggish and dictatorial countries as members? Current members include China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and the Russian

Federation, among many others with real human rights violations on their records. These are the thugs Scooter reports to.

Of course, having thugs on its human rights council isn’t the only nuttiness the UN engages in. This week it was reported Zimbabwe’s longtime thug-in-chief Robert Mugabe would be made a global tourism ambassador for the UN. Come for the beaches, stay for the brutality, killings and corruption.

You have to wonder what the UN is thinking when they make appointments like this, but as we learned when they appointed North Korea to the head of a disarmament body, they weren’t thinking at all. The appointments are handed out alphabetically and the country still trying to build a nuclear arsenal was next in line.

Too many Canadians still have a rosy view of the UN as a global body for good. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The UN is an amoral organization that does not distinguish between thuggish regimes like Zimbabwe or North Korea and liberal democracies like Canada and the United States. To the folks at the UN, they see only member countries, not good countries and bad countries.

The truth is, Canada should be done with the UN, walk away completely.

That doesn’t mean we stop working with other countries, but instead work only with those that share our values, values that go beyond the political divide inside Canada. For a start, we could work only with democracies.

It’s time to give up on the image of the United Nations represented by peacekeepers in blue helmets standing for all that is good in the world. Today the UN is represented by Robert Mugabe, the sultans of Saudi Arabia and the Castro brothers — and that’s not company I want to keep.

http://www.winnipegsun.com/2012/05/31/l ... n-of-thugs

[Dogpatch]

More whiney BS from the UN

Canada accused of 'complicity' in torture in UN report

The United Nations Committee Against Torture has condemned what it calls Canadian "complicity" in torture and human rights violations of Muslim men caught up in the post-9/11 security net. Terry Milewski has exclusive details.

The committee's report condemns Canada's practice, during the Afghan combat mission which ended last year, of handing prisoners over to Afghan security forces despite a "substantial risk" that they would be tortured.

In addition, the UN committee:

- Recommends that Canada promptly approve the transfer of Omar Khadr from Guantanamo to Canadian custody.

- Urges Canada to pay compensation to three men who were the subjects of the Iacobucci Inquiry - Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin.

- Faults changes to Canada's immigration laws which it says may increase the risk of human rights violations.

Almalki, Elmaati and Nureddin are all suing the federal government, alleging that Canada participated in their "extraordinary rendition" to Syria and Egypt, where they say they were tortured.

Khadr, meanwhile, has applied for return to his native Canada, but Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has not yet approved that transfer.

"The Committee is seriously concerned," the UN panel says, "at the apparent reluctance on part of the State party [Canada] to protect rights of all Canadians detained in other countries, by comparison with the case of Maher Arar." Arar received an apology and $10 million in compensation in 2006, after the O'Connor inquiry found U.S. agents, acting on information provided by the RCMP, took him to Syria, where he was tortured.

Almalki, Elmaati and Nureddin are in the same boat, the UN report says. It condemns what it calls Canada's "refusal to offer an official apology and compensation to the three Canadians despite the findings of the Iacobucci Inquiry."

Read more at http://news.sympatico.cbc.ca/world/cana ... t/ef1305b1

[styky]

UN record on human rights tarnished

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, QMI Agency

Last Updated: June 2, 2012 12:00am
Now that the United Nations has asked Robert Mugabe to be a global leader for tourism, I'm trying to come up with a good ad campaign for Zimbabwe to help it attract more international visitors.

How about: "Zimbabwe: Come for the fixed elections, stay for the ethnic cleansing"?

Or, "You'll leave your heart in Zimbabwe . . . along with various other body parts."

Or, "Zimbabwe's economy will surprise you . . . because it doesn't have one."

Aside from touting the infamous, 88-year-old dictator as a poster child for tourism - even though Mugabe is banned from travelling in Europe due to international sanctions - the UN's World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) will also hold its next general assembly in southern Africa in August next year, under the joint sponsorship of Zimbabwe and neighbouring Zambia.

Faced with almost universal condemnation and outrage from human rights groups over its recognition of Mugabe - whom, they warn, will use it for propaganda purposes inside Zimbabwe to boast the world community accepts him - UNWTO hastily pointed out it is not bestowing any formal title on Mugabe, such as making him a UN ambassador.

Of course, this explanation satisfied no one.

Human rights groups and Zimbabwean political dissidents wondered out loud how the UN could do something so damaging to the cause of human rights.

Indeed, when the UN - now trying to muster a credible international response to Syria's massacre of 108 people, including 49 children, in Houla - pulls stunts like this, it just makes people shake their heads in disbelief and disgust.

Then again, is it really all that surprising when, for example, Zimbabwe, Iran and China all currently sit on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women?

Iran, for example, not exactly known for its stellar reputation on women's rights, joined the UN's Status of Women Commission in 2010, right after one of its senior religious clerics blamed earthquakes on women who wear revealing clothes.

That was three years after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted to students at Columbia University, during a visit to New York to address the UN General Assembly, that women enjoyed equal rights in Iran.

He also told them Iran had no homosexuals.

But is all of that any weirder than the fact Libya was named to the UN's Human Rights Council in 2010, when it was under the iron fist of the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, or that Saudi Arabia and China are also members in good standing of the UN's top human rights body?

This keeps happening because membership in UN human rights organizations isn't based on the human rights records of member countries, but on the calendar (that is, when it's their turn to join) and on membership in various UN voting blocs.

In the real world, while one can see the value in a handful of UN bodies such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF - although even they are not entirely without controversy - when it comes to human rights, the UN lacks all credibility.

Canada is the seventh largest financial contributor to the UN among its 192 member nations. At some point, don't we have to start asking ourselves if this is money well spent?
http://www.lfpress.com/comment/columnis ... 27366.html