The Obama Administration makes itself an accomplice to U.N. corruption.
Opinion
The Wall Street Journal
8/25/2010
President Obama and his State Department have been widely criticized for downplaying human rights in their efforts to engage abusive regimes in Iran, China, Russia, Burma and even Sudan. But there’s at least one country whose human rights record merits the Administration’s minute scrutiny: the United States.
In a 29-page report submitted last Friday to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Administration offered a summary of the status of human rights in the U.S. The report forms part of what the U.N. Human Rights Council calls its “Universal Periodic Review” (or UPR) in which countries grade their own human rights records. For instance, in 2008 Iran praised itself for its achievements in promoting a free press and the rights of women.
That charade should suffice to ascertain the contribution UPR has made to the stock of knowledge about human rights. Not that the U.S. report adds much additional light. After some prefatory nods to the uniqueness of the American system, the report devolves into a celebration of liberal governance and Mr. Obama’s policies in repairing the basic injustice of American life. Thus the 1993 “Motor Voter” law “[helped] increase historically low registration rates of minorities and persons with disabilities,” says the report (neglecting to mention the law’s contribution to voter fraud).
The world is told that the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—”makes great strides toward the goal that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care.” This summer’s financial legislation gets a round of applause for addressing “the issue of predatory lending, and particularly discriminatory lending.” Even Mr. Obama’s intentions—to close Gitmo, or end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—come in for high praise.
Naturally, the report would not be complete without the usual beating of the guilty liberal breast. “We are not satisfied with a situation where the unemployment rate for African Americans is 15.8%, for Hispanics 12.4%, and for whites 8.8%,” it says. Well, neither is anyone, but why are these statistics in a human rights report other than to suggest that the disparities are due to flaws in the American system itself?
For many years, the cause of human rights has been systematically corrupted by people who cannot distinguish between the rights themselves and their own political hobbyhorses. What this report mainly accomplishes is to make the U.S government an accomplice to that corruption.
CAJ note: we posted the report yesterday in its PDF format.
