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Iran Rejects UN Chief’s Human Rights Report as Fundamentally Flawed

October 5, 2016

Iran Rejects UN Chief’s Human Rights Report as Fundamentally Flawed, Tasnim “News” Agency, October 5, 2016

(It all depends on the meaning of the phrase “human rights.” — DM)

humanrightsiniran

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman slammed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recent report on human rights situation in Iran as baseless, saying there are fundamental flaws in the report, which has been drafted on the basis of unfair resolutions with political purposes.

“Such reports have fundamental flaws in essence and that is why they lack validity from Iran’s viewpoint,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Wednesday, after the UN chief gave a negative assessment of human rights in Iran in a 19-page report, released this week.

Ban has said he remains “deeply troubled” by what he called accounts “of executions, floggings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, unfair trials, denial of access to medical care and possible torture and ill-treatment” in Iran.

In response, Qassemi said the report lacks credibility since it has been prepared on the basis of “cruel, unfair and politically-motivated resolutions” with the purpose of exerting pressure on Iran.

What casts more doubt on the credibility of the report is that it has used unclear and unreliable sources, he added.

“The report makes an unfair, one-sided and incorrect judgement on Iran’s human rights situation and has missed the opportunity for an evenhanded and fair assessment based on facts,” the spokesman added.

Highlighting Iran’s efforts to promote human rights and protect civil rights under the Constitution, Qassemi said Ban’s report has ignored the Islamic Republic’s struggle against major challenges, such as the fight against narcotics trafficking and dealing with cruel sanctions.

The spokesman finally warned of erosion of trust in the United Nations as a result of continued politicization of issues, adoption of double standards on human rights and turning a blind eye to the killing of women and children in Yemen.

Such a poor performance dashes hopes about the UN’s role in promoting the human rights situation in the world, he deplored.

Categories: Iran - human rights, United Nations
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Ending the Palestinian Exception

September 27, 2016

Ending the Palestinian Exception, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, September 27, 2016

palestinian_demonstration_against_demolish_of_the_village_susya-e1433517117362

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

Ahead of Monday night’s first presidential debate, Rudolph Giuliani – former New York mayor and Republican nominee Donald Trump’s current adviser – spoke at the Israeli American Council’s annual conference. Four days of intense debate preparation with Trump preceded the talk. Giuliani insisted the time has come for the US to “reject the whole notion of a two-state solution in Israel.”

It can only be hoped that regardless of who prevails in November, Giuliani’s statement will become the official position of the next US administration.

In his speech before the UN General Assembly last week PLO and Fatah chief and unelected Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said many things to drive home the basic point that he is not interested in peace with Israel. He is interested in destroying Israel. But one particular demand stands out.

It stands out not because it is new. It isn’t new.

Abbas says it all the time and his advisers say it all the time. They say it to Palestinian and international audiences alike, and it always is met with support or at least sympathy.

Abbas demanded that Israel stop arresting Palestinian terrorists and release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons. That is, he demanded that Israel allow thousands of convicted terrorists to walk free and refrain from doing anything to interfere with terrorists engaged planning and carrying out the murder of its citizens.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians support this demand. And so does the US government.

During US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed peace process in 2013-14, President Barack Obama and Kerry embraced Abbas’s demand that Israel release 104 terrorist murderers from its prisons as a precondition for agreeing to negotiate with the Jewish state.

Bowing to US pressure, Israel released 78 terrorists from its jails in three tranches. Ahead of the fourth scheduled release, Abbas and his advisers bragged that they would cut off talks with Israel as soon as the last group of terrorist murderers were released.

That is, they admitted that the negotiations, such as they were, were nothing more than a means to achieve the goal of freeing murderers.

Rather than condemn Abbas and his colleagues for their cynical bad faith and repulsive immorality, the Obama administration chastised Israel for refusing to play along. When Israel responded to their statements by refusing to release the last group of 26 convicted terrorists, the administration accused Israel of breaching the terms of the negotiations.

Obama, Kerry and their advisers held Israel responsible for the talks’ failure.

It’s important to consider what Abbas’s demand for free-range terrorists says about him. It is important to ponder what the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are partners in this demand says about them as a society.

And it is worth pondering as well the strategic rationality and moral stature of a US government that supports this position.

As far as Abbas and the Palestinians are concerned, their refusal to view mass murderers as criminals tells us a great deal about who they are and what they want.

The Palestinian national movement they have come to embody was never about a deep-seated desire for national liberation. It was never about building “Palestine.”

From the time it was created by Amin el-Husseini in 1920, Palestinian identity has been about the negation of the Jewish national liberation movement – Zionism. And since Israel achieved independence in 1948, the Palestinians have defined themselves by their collective dedication to annihilating the Jewish state – hence their support for terrorists who kill Jews.

Husseini’s heir Yasser Arafat shared his view that terrorism was a both strategic goal in and of itself and a means to achieve the ultimate end of the Palestinian movement – that is, the violent eradication of Israel.

As the heir to both men, Abbas, like his sometimes partners and sometimes rivals in Hamas, has never been interested in building anything. And indeed, he hasn’t.

Consider what is loosely referred to as the “Palestinian economy.”

In an article published this week by the Hebrew-language online journal Mida, economist Uri Redler showed that the Palestinian economy isn’t actually an economy. It is an extortion racket.

Using World Bank data, Redler showed that the Palestinian economy is an optical illusion. In its 22 years of existence, the PA has almost entirely destroyed the private sector in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Seventy-five percent of its tax income comes from indirect taxes that Israel collects for it on imports. Forty percent of its budget comes from donors. Only 18% of it income comes from direct taxation. And most of that comes from deduction at source of PA employees.

Since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, only 15% of foreign aid toward the reconstruction of Gaza has been used for reconstruction projects. The rest of the money has been used as discretionary funds by Hamas. Seventy percent of the funds have come from American and EU taxpayers. This means that the US and the EU have been directly funding Hamas terrorists.

It is not surprising that the aid has been diverted.

And it is not surprising that the US and the EU have continued to provide money they know is being diverted by Hamas.

Hamas, like Fatah, has no interest in developing a Palestinian economy. Economic development doesn’t bring in the money. Terrorism does. Palestinians with economic freedom won’t be dependent on the likes of Abbas and his Hamas counterparts for their livelihoods. So they block all independent paths to prosperity.

Rather than build roads, the PA and Hamas pay people to kill Jews. The more Jews you kill, the more money you receive.

They can maintain this policy because the US and Europe pay them to do so. The more terrorism they commit, the more headlines the Palestinians receive. And the more headlines they receive, the more money they are paid by the UN and Western governments – to advance the cause of the “twostate solution.”

This then brings us to the US and Europe, and their unstinting support for Palestinian demands for the release of terrorists. What are they thinking? Earlier this month Prof. Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern University Law School and the Kohelet Forum published a paper on the international community’s general interpretation of paragraph 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Protocol from 1949. The relevant clause states that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

As Kontorovich noted, this clause the forms the basis of the international community’s constant refrain that Israeli communities built beyond the 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are illegal.

In other words, it forms the basis of the West’s case against Israel and, by extraction, for the Palestinians’.

Just last week during his speech before the UN General Assembly, Obama attacked Israel for its continued settlement activity.

Kontorovich investigated the same international community’s view of communities built by citizens of a dozen other states in lands occupied by their governments in armed conflicts.

He noted that the activities of Moroccans in the Western Sahara, of Turks in Northern Cyprus, of Indonesians in East Timor and of other nationals in multiple other territories are legally indistinguishable from Israel’s activities in the areas it took control over from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israel war.

In none of these other cases, however, has the US, EU, UN or any other international or national authority ever invoked the Fourth Geneva Convention or otherwise claimed that those activities are a breach of international law. In other words, the legal basis for the criminalization and political condemnation of Israel in relation to the Palestinians is entirely specious and discriminatory.

In other words, US support for the so-called two state solution, like the international community’s support for it, is really just a means of discriminating against Israel. It does not advance the cause of peace or justice, for Israelis or for Palestinians. It merely empowers terrorist gangsters to kill Israelis and extort both the Palestinians and the international community.

So again, Giuliani is absolutely right.

Categories: Abbas, Fatah, Israel - release of Palestinian terrorists, Israel and human rights, Israel settlements, Israeli security, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian economy, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Two state solution, United Nations
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Netanyahu: The U.N. Is a Global ‘Moral Farce’

September 22, 2016

Netanyahu: The U.N. Is a Global ‘Moral Farce’, Washington Free Beacon, Jack Heretik, September 22, 2016

(Look at all the empty seats in the audience. The absentees must have known that Netanyahu would not be politically correct. — DM)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu castigated the United Nations on Thursday in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, calling the organization a “moral farce.”

After stating that he believes Israel has a bright future with the U.N., Netanyahu gave a scathing indictment of the international institution for having a bias against the Jewish state.

“Year after year, I’ve stood at this very podium and slammed the U.N. for its obsessive bias against Israel and the U.N. deserved every scathing word,” Netanyahu said. “For the disgrace of the General Assembly, that last year passed 20 resolutions against the democratic state of Israel and a grand total of three resolutions against all the other countries on the planet. Israel: 20, rest of the world: three.”

Netanyahu then lambasted two other U.N. entities, the Human Rights Council and the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“And what about the joke called the U.N. Human Rights Council, which each year condemns Israel more than all the other countries of the world combined. As women are being systematically raped, murdered, sold into slavery across the world, which is the only country that the U.N.’s Commission on Women chose to condemn this year? Yep, you guessed it, Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Israel, where women fly fighter jets, lead major corporations, head universities, preside, twice, over the Supreme Court, and have served as speaker of the Knesset and prime minister.”

“And this circus continues at UNESCO. UNESCO, the U.N. body charged with preserving world heritage,” he continued. “Now, this is hard to believe, but UNESCO just denied the 4,000-year connection between the Jewish people and its holiest site, the Temple Mount. That’s just as absurd as denying the connection between the Great Wall of China and China.”

Before addressing why he believes Israel has an optimistic future, citing in part the country’s robust technology sector and growing diplomatic ties around the world, Netanyahu delivered another scathing line against the international body.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the U.N., begun as a moral force, has become a moral farce.”

Categories: Israel, Moral farce, Netanyahu, United Nations
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Obama’s Parting Shot at Israel

September 22, 2016

Obama’s Parting Shot at Israel, Front Page Magazine, Ari Lieberman, September 22, 2016

unobama

Obama’s last address before the UN General Assembly was typically and predictably condescending, hypocritical, disingenuous and vainglorious. He used the opportunity to perform some electioneering and take a swipe at Donald Trump. “Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself,” he said in a not too subtle reference to Trump’s promised plans to secure the southern border with the construction of a wall and restrict immigration from high-risk countries.

France, a NATO ally that has partnered with the U.S. to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic extremism in Mali, was also derided. Though he did not mention France by name, he criticized “liberal societies” for their “opposition to women who choose to cover themselves.” This of course was a veiled reference French laws banning Burkas and Burkinis, items of Islamic clothing that are oppressive to and denigrate women.

Of course, Obama made no mention of the Paris and Nice massacres. Nor did he note that as a result of Muslim violence, 70 percent of Europe’s Jews won’t be attending synagogue during the Jewish High-Holy Days. Obama did of course heap praise on Indonesia, a Muslim nation that discriminates against minorities and the LGBT community, still maintains so-called “blasphemy” laws, and imposes draconian Sharia law in some districts. This year, a 60-year old Christian-Indonesian woman was given 28 lashes for selling alcohol. This is the model nation that the president touts before the world community.

The vainglorious president also took the opportunity to tout his disastrous Iran deal, noting that the United States “resolved the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy.” Obama, however, failed to note that he inked the worst deal in U.S. diplomatic history and likely the worst deal since the 1938 Munich Accord. He also omitted the fact that the infusion of $150 billion into Iran’s anemic economy will enable the mullahs to continue to sow misery throughout the region.

Of course, no Obama speech would be complete without the perfunctory assault on Israel. What better place to attack the Jewish state than before a body that is today’s greatest purveyor of anti-Semitism, where anti-Israel invective flows like water and where the Jewish state is incessantly vilified?

Recognizing of course that referring to Jews as “apes and pigs” is a national Palestinian pastime, Obama reminded the Palestinians to play nicely before directing his invective against Israel.

“Surely, Israelis and Palestinians will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land,” he said.

There are two egregious problems with Obama’s statement. First, it is insufficient for the Palestinian Authority to merely “recognize the legitimacy of Israel.”

Israel has made clear that the PA must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The PA has rejected this demand outright because they envision a future Palestinian state, exclusively for Palestinians, in Judea/Samaria and an entity that calls itself “Israel” composed of Jews as well as Palestinian Muslims, thereby negating the Jewish character of the state.

That represents the crux of the problem. Palestinian Muslims will never recognize the indigenousness of Jews in their ancestral land. Any peace agreement without such recognition is inherently flawed and sets the stage for more bloody conflict. In terms of strategy, there is absolutely no difference between the PA and Hamas. Both aspire to the ultimate goal of establishing a Muslim Arab state from the River to the Sea. The only difference is tactics. The PA has adopted a more practical and deceitful approach toward achieving their ultimate objective (though every once in a while they slip and reveal their true colors) while Hamas is frighteningly and brutishly honest.

The second problem is that Judea and Samaria is neither “occupied” nor is it “Palestinian land.” It is a territory that is the subject of a bonafide dispute between two parties with competing claims.

From a legal perspective, Israel’s claim has more merit. In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Israel/Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. General Assembly resolutions have no binding legal authority. The Jews accepted partition, but the Arabs rejected it. Had they accepted it, the matter would have been settled and an agreement would have validated the GA resolution and made it legally binding under international law.

During the War of 1948 that followed, Jordan seized Judea and Samaria as well as the eastern portion of Jerusalem and annexed these territories. Only Pakistan fully recognized Jordan’s illegal annexation, while England’s recognition was limited to Judea and Samaria. The territory was occupied by Jordan for 19 years and during those 19 years, Jewish institutions were reduced to rubble while Jewish headstones in the Mount of Olives cemetery were used to build latrines for the Jordanian army.

In June 1967, Jordan’s monarch, fed on a steady diet of fantasy-like falsehoods of Israel’s impending demise, attacked Israel with Hawker Hunter jets and artillery. Israel responded to the provocation and liberated Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria in a matter of days.

The UN considers war and conquests therefrom to be illegal, but Article 52 of the UN Charter provides an exception to the illegality of war in cases involving self-defense. The Six-Day War was as clear as they come in terms of self-defense. Israel acquired these lands through defensive conquest. Never in the history of mankind has a nation been compelled to return territories — acquired in the course of a defensive war — to an aggressor entity.

Following the war and after many months of haggling, the UN Security Council, which has the power to establish international law, passed Resolution 242. The resolution called upon Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Notably, the word “all” was deliberately omitted thus giving implicit recognition to Israeli territorial conquests. One can reasonably argue that Israel has fully complied with Resolution 242 by virtue of its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, some 40 percent of Judea and Samaria and Quneitra on the Golan Heights, and that no further territorial withdrawals are required.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that two Jewish commonwealths existed on territories now claimed as “occupied” hundreds of years before Mohammedan colonizers set foot on the land. It would be more precise to refer to the territories as “re-occupied,” in deference to the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

Obama likely knows all this but couldn’t resist taking a parting shot at Israel. That he would choose to do it in a forum that is infamous for its anti-Semitic vitriol speaks volumes of the man.

Categories: Abbas, Islamist terror attacks, Israel - Jewish state, Israeli settlements, Obama and Israel, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terrorists, Two state solution, United Nations
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Satire?| Obama Ratifies Treaty on Sharia Law

September 4, 2016

Satire?| Obama Ratifies Treaty on Sharia Law, Dan Miller’s Blog, September 4, 2016

(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

Having personally ratified the Iran Scam Treaty and the Climate Change Treaty with China, President Obama today met with Turkish, Saudi and Iranian heads of state to ratify a new treaty making Sharia Law binding in the United States. Please see also, The West Needs Sharia Law – Pakistani cleric. Obama, a renowned constitutional scholar, quickly rejected objections by Senate leaders that “He shouldn’t oughta do that because it’s our job” by reminding them that He is the President and is therefore empowered by the Constitution to do whatever pleases Him.

TOTUS Seal

Here is the text of President Obama’s statement on ratification of the Sharia Law Treaty, provided by The Incomparably Honorable I. M. Totus, Teleprompter of the United States:

My beloved Islamist colleagues, men, women and whatever: today, with great pleasure and a heart-felt desire for a better future for all, I today ratified a treaty with The Republic of Turkey, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran making Sharia Law officially binding in America just as it is in those great progressive, humanitarian nations.

As United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently stated, the debate about the horrors of man-made climate change is over and the issue is settled. So be it with any debate over My success in preventng Iran from using nuclear weapons and, indeed, over My constitutional powers as your humble President. I have settled those matters as well, as all loyal Americans must agree.

Sharia Law will make America a far happier and better place for all including, most importantly, refugees coming to our shores in increasing numbers from other Islamist nations. I can think of no better way to welcome them than by guaranteeing them the dignity, honor and freedoms under Sharia Law they so richly and justly deserve.

For too long has America based its laws on flawed Judeo-Christian principles. But that’s not who we are; we have a long, honorable and mutually beneficial history with Islam and many if not most of our best citizens are Muslims. The treaty I ratified today will finally put us on the right side of history. It will also facilitate My brilliant countering violent extremism initiative by encouraging an honest discussion of Sharia law, long rejected by “America First” nationalists and other Islamophobes who despise Allah and His one true Religion of Peace.

I am confident that all loyal Americans will be happy to abide by our Sharia Laws; common sense steps will be taken to encourage all to do so. Observers from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran will soon come to America to assist us in implementing whatever encouragements may be needed.

We should all thank the three other splendid freedom loving nations which also ratified the new treaty and encourage all other nations of the world to join us as soon as possible.

Thank you and have a pleasant day.

Hated by many Americans until now, The Islamic Republic of Iran has shown that it is a truly glorious example of Islamist democracy in action, where Sharia Law is enforced, followed and enjoyed by all.

hangings_in_iran

With Obama leading the way as always, we are joining them. Just look at the Iranians depicted in the following Iranian propaganda video! They are proud, happy, peaceful, patriotic and loving despite the shameful efforts of America in the past and, indeed, of some war-mongering Americans today, to humble and destroy them and their beloved nation.

No longer will that happen. The President has spoken! This will be the most beneficial and longest lasting of all of His many great leaps forward to make America a country of which He, His beautiful wife Michelle and all other good people can and will be truly proud.

It is anticipated that President Obama will soon issue an executive order changing the name of the country from The United States of America to The Islamist Republic of Obama. The flag of the new Islamist Republic of Obama will combine the best elements of the flags of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Republic of Turkey and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A photo of Obama as the bringer of true Islamic peace and understanding will be superimposed over the other flag elements.

Obama:

Obama death to America

Iran:
Iranian flag

Turkey:
Flag_of_Turkey.svg

Saudi Arabia:
saudi flag

Oh well.

what me worry

Categories: Civilization jihad, Climate change, Hijrah, Iran scam, Islam and Christianity, Islam and honor, Islam and human rights, Islam in Saudi Arabia, Islamic immigration, Islamic refugees, Islamic supremacy, Islamists in America, Islamophobia, Obama and Islamists, Obama's America 2016, Political Islam, Right and wrong sides of history, Satire, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, Turkey, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Senate, United Nations
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Changing America by changing its people!

September 1, 2016

Changing America by changing its people! Secure Freedom via YouTube, August 31, 2016

Categories: Hillary Clinton and Islamic refugees, Islamisation, Obama and Islamic refugees, U.S. Congress, United Nations
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Enjoy the Internet, Before Obama Abandons It to the UN

August 30, 2016

Enjoy the Internet, Before Obama Abandons It to the UN, PJ Media, Claudia Rosett, August 29, 2016

internet and UN

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Gordon Crovitz sounds an urgent warning about President Obama’s plans, during his final months in office, to fundamentally transform the internet. It’s an intricate tale, but the bottom line is that unless Congress acts fast, the World Wide Web looks likely to end up under control of the UN.

That would be the same UN that serves as a global clubhouse for despotic regimes that like to wield censorship as a basic tool of power. Russia and China occupy two of the five veto-wielding permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Iran since 2012 has presided over one of the largest voting blocs in the 193-member General Assembly, the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Among the current members of the Human Rights Council are Venezuela, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia — where blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, for blog posts the Saudi government considered insulting to Islam.

We’re talking here about the same UN which for generations has proven incorrigibly corrupt, opaque and inept at managing almost anything except its own apparently endless expansion and self-serving overreach. This is the UN of the Oil-for-Food worldwide web of kickbacks; the UN of the evidently chronic problem of peacekeepers raping minors they are sent to protect; the UN that can’t manage to adequately audit its own books, and offers its top officials an “ethics” program of financial disclosure under which they are entitled to opt out of disclosing anything whatsoever to the public.

This is the UN where a recent president of the General Assembly, John Ashe, died this June in an accident that reportedly entailed a barbell falling on his neck, while he was awaiting trial on fraud charges in the Southern District of New York — accused by federal authorities of having turned his UN position into a “platform for profit.”

So, how might this entrancing organization, the UN, end up controlling the internet? Crovitz in hisJournal column explains that Obama’s administration is about to give up the U.S. government’s longstanding contract with Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which, as a monopoly, operates “the entire World Wide Web root zone.”

If that sounds like a good idea, think again. This is not a case of Obama having some 11th-hour 180-degree conversion to the virtues of minimalist government. It works out to the very opposite. Here’s a link, again, to Crovitz’s column on “An Internet Giveaway to the UN.” Crovtz explains that as a contractor under government control, Icann enjoys an exemption from antitrust rules. When the contract expires, the exemption goes away, unless Icann can hook up with another “governmental group” so as to “keep its antitrust exemption.” What “governmental group” might that be? Well, some of the worst elements of the UN have already reached out. Crovitz writes:

Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”

This is far from the first time the UN has cast a covetous eye at the internet. For years, there have been UN proposals, shindigs and summits looking for ways to regulate and tax the Web. Recall, as one example among many, the 2012 UN jamboree in Dubai. Or 2007 in Rio. Or the 2009 Internet Governance Forum gathering in Egypt, inspired by the 2005 conference of wannabe-be web commissars in Tunis.

All that hoopla pales next to the alarming reality of Obama’s plan to cut loose Icann this fall, and let the economic and political currents carry it straight into the waiting clutches of the United Nations. Crovitz notes that the Obama administration, while preparing to drop Icann’s contract, has already “stopped actively overseeing the group,” with dismal results inside Icann itself. Crovitz concludes, “The only thing worse than a monopoly overseen by the U.S. government is a monopoly overseen by no one — or by a Web-censoring U.N.”

Lest that sound hopeless, Crovitz adds: “Congress still has time to extend its ban on the Obama administration giving up protection of the internet.” But not a lot of time. The deadline is Sept. 30th.

Categories: Internet, Islamic nations, Obama, U.S. Congress, United Nations
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Obama Demands UN Do Something Over Syria’s Violation of His Red Line

August 25, 2016

Obama Demands UN Do Something Over Syria’s Violation of His Red Line, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 25, 2016

mission-accomplished_7

I could call on the fairies. Or the UN.

Both are equally likely to do anything. Obama knows that. This is why his theatrical outrage is such a ridiculous joke.

The US has urged “strong and swift action” after a UN investigation concluded that Syria used chemical weapons against its own people.

The year-long inquiry found the government used chlorine gas in attacks in Idlib province in 2014 and 2015.

The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said the use of chemical weapons was “barbaric” and called for “all states to support strong and swift action”.

Yes, please do something since we made it clear that we don’t want to. But wait, it’s all part of a brilliant collective plan.

These leaks and statements are part of an administration effort to put pressure on President Bashar Assad and his Russian backers before an August 30 meeting by the UN Security Council to look at the issue of chemical weapons in Syria, a U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast.

Why now? According to this official, the answer goes back to 2014, when the Assad regime was accused of repeated chlorine attacks, and the world shrugged its shoulders.

“We weren’t getting enough political oomph when the chlorine attacks first came to light. So we figured the best option was to work through the slow UN process, get the Russians to a place where they’re cornered diplomatically,” the intelligence official said.

Plus, the official added, finger pointing by the United States alone wouldn’t be nearly as effective as collective action.

Yes, because you guys are really good at cornering Russia diplomatically. This way we pass it to the UN. The UN does nothing. Obama shrugs. Mission accomplished.

Categories: Assad, Obama and Syria, Obama's red lines, Syria - chemical weapons, United Nations
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Anti-Israel Double Standards Enable Assad’s Brutality

August 23, 2016

Anti-Israel Double Standards Enable Assad’s Brutality, Investigative Project on Terrorism,  Noah Beck,August 23, 2016

1789

Syria’s civil war claimed 470,000 lives since it started in March 2011, the Syrian Centre for Policy Research announced in February. That’s an average of about 262 deaths per day and 7,860 per month. The carnage has continued unabated, so, applying the same death rate nearly 200 days after the February estimate, the death toll is over 520,000.

Such numbers are staggering, even by Middle East standards. However, the violence has become so routine that it only occasionally captures global attention, usually when a particularly poignant moment of human suffering is documented. The most recent example is Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year old Syrian boy who was filmed shell-shocked, bloody, and covered in dust after the airstrike bombing of his Aleppo apartment block.

The tragic image of Omran caused outrage around the world, as did the image of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body washed up last September on a beach in Turkey. Yet Omran’s plight demonstrates that, nearly a year after the last child victim of Syrian horrors captured global sympathy, nothing has changed.

If anything, the violence in this multi-party proxy war seems to be getting worse. Since Aylan Kurdi’s drowning, Russia began blitz-bombing Syria in support of the Assad regime. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimates that nine months of Russian airstrikes have killed 3,089 civilians – a toll that is greater, by some estimates, than the number of civilians killed by ISIS. By contrast, Syrian civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes are probably in the hundreds (over roughly twice as much time, since U.S. airstrikes began in the summer of 2015).

But Syrian airstrikes are responsible for the bulk of civilian deaths in Syria. The Assad regime killed 109,347 civilians between March 2011 and July 2014 (88 percent of the total casualties at the time), according to estimates by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That works out to about 91 civilian deaths per day. More recently, the SOHR documented 9,307 civilian deaths from 35,775 regime airstrikes over a 20-month period running from November 2014 through June 2016. Thus, roughly one innocent Syrian was killed every hour, during the 20 months that the SOHR documented civilian casualties caused by Russian and Syrian airstrikes.

Compare those figures to the number of innocent Palestinians killed by Israel from 2011 to 2014. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has been accused of anti-Israel bias, 37 Palestinians were killed in 2011, 103 in 2012, 15 in 2013 and 1,500in 2014 – the year when Hamas fired rockets at Israel from highly populated Gazan areas. That’s a four-year total of 1,655. During roughly the same four-year period, the number of Syrian civilian deaths was about 76 times greater than the HRW total of Palestinian civilian casualties.

Yet the European Union singles out Israel for conflict-related consumer labels without any similar attempt to warn European consumers about goods or services whose consumption in any way helps the economies of countries responsible for the Syrian bloodshed, including Syria, Russia, and Iran. Human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky has highlighted how none of those countries is targeted by those advocating a boycott of Israel out of a purported concern for human rights. Even more absurd, most of the results produced by a Google search for “academic boycott of Syria” or “academic boycott of Iran” concern academic boycotts of Israel. That asymmetry precisely captures the problem.

In addition to supporting the Assad regime in Syria and contributing to the violence there, Iran executes people for everything from drug offenses to being gay.

Indeed, the global outcry over Syrian suffering is embarrassingly weak when compared to reactions to Israel’s far less bloody conflict with the Palestinians. Imagine if Omran Daqneesh had been a Palestinian boy hurt by an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. College campus protests, the media, NGOs, and world bodies around the planet would be positively on fire. Israeli embassies would be attacked, French synagogues would be firebombed (eight were attacked in just one week during Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza), Jews around the world would be attacked, and condemnations would pour in from the EU, the United Nations, and the Obama administration. UN resolutions and emergency sessions would condemn the incident. International investigations would be demanded. Global blame would deluge Israel, regardless of whether Hamas, a terrorist organization, actually started the fighting or used human shields to maximize civilian deaths. Israel would be obsessively demonized despite any risky and unprecedented measures the Israeli military might have taken to minimize civilian casualties.

Moreover, when an occasional Syrian victim captures global attention, the protests are generally for some vague demand for “peace” in Syria, rather than blaming and demanding the punishment of Syria, Iran, and Russia, even though those regimes are clearly responsible for the slaughter. The starkly different reactions to Israel and Syria are even more shocking when it comes to the United Nations.

From its 2006 inception through August 2015, 62 United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions condemned Israel, compared to just 17 for Syria, five for Iran, and zero for Russia, according to the watchdog group UN Watch. The lopsided focus on Israel is equally appalling at the UN General Assembly, as UN Watch has highlighted. In each of the last four years, as the Syrian bloodbath claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, there were at least five times as many resolutions condemning Israel as those rebuking the rest of the world:

2012: 22 against Israel, 4 for the rest of the world

2013: 22 against Israel, 4 for the rest of the world

2014: 20 against Israel, 3 for the rest of the world

2015: 20 against Israel, 3 for the rest of the world

A corollary of the anti-Israel bias ensures that no Israeli victim will ever enjoy the kind of global sympathy expressed for Omran Daqneesh or Aylan Kurdi. When a Palestinian man enters the bedroom of a 13-year old girl and stabs her to death in her sleep,Obama says nothing even though she was a U.S. citizen and the world hardly notices. By contrast, imagine if the Israeli father of Hallel Yaffa Ariel had decided to take revenge by entering a nearby Palestinian home to stab a 13-year old Palestinian girl to death in her sleep. The global anger would be deafening.

Why do Israeli lives matter so much less? And why do student activists, the UN, the EU, the media, and the rest of the world focus so much more on alleged Palestinian civilian deaths than on Syrian civilian deaths? Doing so is woefully unjust to Syrians. It is also deeply unfair to Israel, which has endured terrorist attacks on its people throughout its existence as a state. It is the one country that, according to Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has done more to protect civilians during war than any other in the history of war.

The global obsession with condemning Israel not only defames a beleaguered democracy doing its best, it also enables the truly evil actors like the Assad regime and Hamas, by giving them a pass on some of the world’s worst crimes.

Categories: Foreign policy, Iran, Israel, Media and Israel, Mendacity, Palestinians, Russia, Syria war, United Nations
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Report: Recruitment of Child Terrorists by Palestinians Ignored by U.N.

August 1, 2016

Report: Recruitment of Child Terrorists by Palestinians Ignored by U.N., Washington Free Beacon,  , August 1, 2016

At least 42 Palestinian child terrorists have attempted 36 attacks from the second half of 2015 until May 2016, according to a new report obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon that criticizes the United Nations for omitting these statistics from its official records on the use of child soldiers.

The U.N. is slated to discuss its annual report on Children and Armed Conflict this week. Its section on Palestinian children states, “Limited information is available about the recruitment or use of children.”

However, a counter-report issued by a leading human rights organization calls this finding into question by detailing at least 36 instances in which Palestinian children have attempted to carry out terrorist attacks.

Insiders apprised of the findings say the U.N.’s omission of these statistics calls into question the integrity of its report and provides further evidence of a deep anti-Israel bias at the organization.

“The preferred method of murder and attempted murder by Palestinian child terrorists are stabbings or knifings, the modus operandi in 34 of the 36 attacks,” according to the report, authored by Human Rights Voices, an anti-discrimination group that monitors the U.N.

Male and female children ages 11 to 17 have perpetrated terrorist attacks over the past year, according to the report.

Boys carried out at least 14 of the attacks while girls committed 11, according to the report. The terrorist’s gender was not identified in 17 cases.

Anne Bayefsky, a lawyer who heads Human Rights Voices and directs the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, said the U.N. is covering up Palestinian crimes and skewing official records on child terrorists.

“Obviously, information on these incidents is readily accessible,” Bayefsky wrote in the report. “And the Palestinian U.N. Ambassador publicly supported child terrorism at the U.N. itself. Moreover, videos, photographs, television programs, and social media outlets—from Palestinian and Israeli sources—provide a multitude of evidence both of Palestinian children engaged in armed conflict and Palestinian adults (from the political sphere to the education system to the family unit) promoting such behavior.”

“Shockingly, however, the U.N. Secretary-General’s most recent annual report on Children and Armed Conflict, released in May 2016, contains the following statement specifically about Palestinian children: ‘Limited information is available about the recruitment or use of children,’” she added, noting that “the Secretary-General’s claim is manifestly untrue.”

The omission of these statistics raises questions about the U.N.’s integrity and ability to objectively record the number of Palestinian child terrorists, according to Bayefsky.

“The United Nations is not merely engaged in a feeble cover-up,” she wrote “The U.N. is now an active enabler of the violation of the rights of Israelis and Palestinians: the basic rights to life and security of the person of the Israeli victims of Palestinian children engaged in terrorism, and the rights of Palestinian children not to be recruited or engaged in terrorism in the first place.”

The report further disclosed that senior Palestinian officials have encouraged and praised the recent wave of terrorism against Israel.

During a speech at Turtle Bay, the Palestinian representative to the U.N. publicly celebrated a string of 16 attacks in 2015 in which “Palestinian child terrorists had murdered two and injured nine.”

“We are so proud that in this popular uprising that has started almost two months ago, that the backbone of this uprising are the youth of Palestine,” Riyad Mansour said at the U.N. headquarters on Nov. 23, 2015.

“Since that time, Palestinian child terrorists have attacked Israelis at least another 20 times,” according to Bayefsky’s report.

Categories: Israel, Palestinian child terrorists, Palestinian heroes, Palestinian incitement, United Nations
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