In the past, such American statesman as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick have used their role as ambassadors to the United Nations to speak the truth about bloodthirsty tyrants, especially when those tyrants made the organization a platform for condemning democracies like the U.S. and Israel. By contrast, America’s current UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, used a speech to the General Assembly last month to declare that “slavery is the original sin of America. It’s weaved white supremacy and black inferiority into our founding documents and principles.” Noah Rothman writes:
Thomas-Greenfield is presently focused on getting the U.S. back into the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an organization from which the U.S. withdrew in 2018—and for good reason. The UNHRC is an organization plagued by corruption. It elevates miscreants like China, Algeria, Congo, Cuba, Pakistan, Venezuela, Russia, and Qatar to membership. It maintains a permanent agenda item—Item Seven—dedicated to the criticism of Israel. It elects people like Richard Falk, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and obsequious apologist for the terror group Hamas, to oversee the situation in the Palestinian territories.
And, of course, the UNHRC appears to share Thomas-Greenfield’s assessment of America’s terribly unimpressive record when it comes to the promotion of racial comity and minority rights. . . . The death of George Floyd proved an occasion for Russia’s envoy to denounce the “calamitous state of human rights” in the U.S., and it allowed China’s representative the chance to denounce America’s “chronic and deep-rooted racial discrimination.”
The tortured effort to equate racial tensions, lingering personal bigotries, and even the illegal (and prosecutable) mishandling of minorities by police with, for example, the resettlement of an entire ethnic minority into reeducation and labor camps requires you to sacrifice even the most elementary powers of discernment. It isn’t enlightened—just the opposite. It is bafflingly stubborn and deliberately dense. Worst of all, it . . . leads its advocates all but to defend the actions of genocidal states. After all, who are we to judge?
If our objective is the advancement and preservation of human rights abroad, this sort of behavior only makes that goal harder to achieve.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/noah-rothman/americas-self-flagellation-at-the-u-n-only-helps-rogue-states/