Friday, February 15, 2008

The Depravity of the UN

Tigerhawk has a thought-provoking post on United Nations' mockery of free speech and human rights. Excerpts:

Flemming Rose, the involuntarily courageous Danish editor who first published the famous "Danish cartoons" depicting the Prophet Mohammed, has an op-ed this morning about the danger that Islam and its appeasers in the West pose to free speech. My own term for this is the "violence veto," which I discussed here in one of my most widely-read posts.Rose touches on the now many cases of censorship, imprisonment, and intimidation against speakers who dare challenge Islam, often in Western countries that have laws that purport to protect speakers from such things. Now the United Nations has gotten into the act, transforming itself in the most Orwellian way from a defender of human rights to an opponent (...)There are two key points. First, it is human beings who enjoy rights. A religion, per se, has no rights. Only people who practice a religion have rights, and they include the right of free expression. Religious freedom is nothing but a particular form of freedom of speech and assembly; where there is no freedom of speech and assembly, there can be no freedom to practice religion.Second, it is no more possible to defame a religion, which is a bundle of ideas, than it is to defame any other idea. Sure, one can defame a religious institution -- the Roman Catholic Church, for example -- but not a religion, just as one can defame John McCain, but one cannot defame the idea of supporting John McCain.However obvious it may be, this is all apparently lost on the United Nations Human Rights Council. If that does not discredit that institution beyond redemption, I am not sure what would.

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