International Affairs: October 2005 Archives
Everywhere you look in the world there are Muslims fighting with their neighbors, and despite France's eagerness to appease everyone in sight they don't seem to be able to stay on good terms with the enemy inside their own borders (as I wrote two years ago). Drudge reports that Parisian Muslims have been rioting for four nights straight, and the French government is struggling to respond and worrying more about who fired tear gas into a mosque than how to stop the violent mobs.
BOBIGNY, France (Reuters) -- Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday defended his tough crime policies against claims they helped increase tension after a fourth night of rioting in a Paris suburb in which tear gas was fired into a mosque.It was not clear who had fired the tear gas and Sarkozy, addressing police officers, vowed to find out what had happened.
Youths hurled rocks and set fire to cars in the northeastern Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of the French capital, where many immigrants and poor families live in high-rise housing estates notorious for youth violence.
French television said six police officers were hurt and 11 people arrested in violence partly fueled by the incident at the mosque.
"Partly fueled by the incident at the mosque", except of course for the first three nights of rioting. As I wrote two years ago:
If anti-Americanism is the cough and fever, the cancer that is eating the country from the inside is its untenable socialist economy that props up its population of 5 million unemployed, unassimilated, uneducated Arab Muslim immigrants.
It takes two sides to make peace, but only one side to make war.
Despite the recent news item about Google describing Taiwan as a "province of China", the opinions of a search engine aren't that important. Just as with Israel, the way an organization treats Taiwan says more about that organization than it does about the Republic of China (that is, Taiwan). Particularly, we can learn a lot about the UN by its continual refusal to admit Taiwan or even grant the nation observer status.
In the grand arena of global diplomacy, office renovations are of course a sideshow. But as a symbol of the difference between the aging behemoth that is the U.N., and the lively democracy that is Taiwan, the contrast between the two renovation projects could hardly be more apt. While the U.N. reserves one of five permanent seats on its Security Council for the despotic "People's Republic" of China, plays along with the nuclear bomb program of the Islamic "Republic" of Iran and routinely clears its schedule to entertain the opinions of Fidel Castro's Cuba, the U.N. does not even offer Taiwan observer status, let alone a seat. ...Borrowing a page from George Orwell, the U.N. also celebrated its anniversary with a poster in the lobby of its famous but decrepit headquarters, on which it advertised a display of "Original Signatories of the U.N. charter." Except they weren't. The original signatory for China of the U.N. charter was the Republic of China. In the 2005 U.N. version, the signatory listed was "China, People's Republic of." Informed of this Turtle Bay twisting of history, Mr. Hsia wrote to U.N. Undersecretary-General Shashi Tharoor, noting, "It is hard to imagine how the U.N., perhaps the world's most important international organization and one which is widely counted on to preserve the truth, could allow itself to blatantly deviate from history and misinform the world about something so fundamental to its history."
The U.N. did not write back, says Mr. Hsia, nor did the U.N. correct the mistake. Instead, in the finest tradition of Orwell's memory hole--the poster simply vanished.
The leftist elite that likes to pull the world's strings (and can, because most everyone else is too busy being productive) are trying their best to condemn us all to fascist tyranny for our own good. The denigration of Taiwan and the glorification of the ChiComs deserves to be a highly visible example of why their plans should be uprooted as soon as possible.
John Bolton's speech and answers at Yale demonstrate why he's exactly the right man to be America's ambassador to the UN.
In his address, which defended the Bush administration's foreign policy, Bolton argued that voluntary contributions from states would allow major donors such as the United States to choose to fund the U.N. programs that they believe to be the most efficient. But while fielding questions from impassioned students packed into Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, Bolton candidly discussed issues such as nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea, the war in Iraq and his own confirmation battles.Noting that voluntary contributions are not yet part of President George W. Bush '68's policy on U.N. reform, Bolton said it was unfair for the U.S. to pay 22 percent of the organization's budget in exchange for one vote in the 191-member General Assembly. Agencies like the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions, are more efficient and more responsive to donor countries, Bolton said.
"Why shouldn't we pay for what we want, instead of paying a bill for what we get?" Bolton said.
Why? Because the bureaucrats who are so eager to spend our money are purposefully using the dollars we give them to undermine America. If they had to be responsive to us, they'd be out of a job.
"He was extremely rude, extremely belligerent, everything the Democrats called him in confirmation hearings," Jed Glickstein '08 said. "He was all those things, but in the end he won the debate."
Works for me. That's exactly the kind of attitude that's needed at the UN to take out the trash. If the UN wants to be built into a useful organization, Ambassador Bolton is its only hope for salvation.
