UN, EU, ICJ, Climate Cabal want to keep world’s poor impoverished

They proclaim a ‘human right’ to ‘clean environment’ but not to reliable energy or better health  

By Paul Driessen

On the evening of September 30, 1882, Henry Rogers turned a switch and the Hearthstone Historic House living room in Appleton, Wisconsin (my mother’s hometown) was bathed in a soft amber glow. Hearthstone became the first home in the world lit by electricity.

Today, few can imagine our lives without plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity – for lights, computers, washers, driers, dishwashers, heating, air conditioning, television, vehicles, hospitals, schools, factories, data centers, artificial intelligence and more, to light, improve and sustain our lives. 

And yet nearly 750 million people still have no access to electricity. Billions more have minimal, sporadic access. The vast majority live in Sub-Saharan Africa: 600 million with no electricity; hundreds of millions more with minimal or sporadic power. Many Asians and Latin Americans are similarly deprived. Often, electrification rates are high in cities but extremely low in the countrysides.

Incredibly, across much of Europe, millions of poor and middle-class families are also deprived. Many simply cannot afford electricity prices that have skyrocketed in the wake of coal, gas and nuclear power plant closures, in favor of wind and solar installations.

Other Europeans no longer have jobs, because factories and entire industries cannot afford those prices, closed down and sent their jobs to China and other coal-based-electricity nations. Still others are being told by climate-obsessed pressure group, media and political elites to light, heat and cool only one room, wear more sweaters, and appreciate electricity when it’s available, not gripe about its cost or absence.

Europe refuses to frack for oil and gas … but imports Russian fuels, thereby sustaining Putin’s war on Ukraine’s citizens and civilian infrastructure.

Several US states have also imposed Euro-style electricity rates, rolling or recurring blackouts, and economic disruption in the name of saving the planet from climate calamities.

Leading, applauding and demanding this insanity are the United Nations, European Union, International Court of Justice (ICJ), multilateral anti-development banks, non-governmental organizations and even the now-defunct USAID. They harp about climate emergencies, demand that countries switch to “clean” energy, and refuse to approve or finance fossil fuel projects even for Africa.

The ICJ recently asserted that people have a “human right” to a “clean, healthy, sustainable environment” – which to the court means no impacts from fossil-fuel-driven climate change. It said nothing about rights to reliable and affordable energy, modern healthcare or decent living standards.

These proclamations and policies carry serious and often lethal consequences, especially for the world’s poorest people. They excuse and justify policies that effectively keep families and nations mired in poverty, squalor, joblessness, disease and malnutrition.

President Trump has excoriated the UN for its “brutal” climate and Net Zero policies. The rest of the world should do likewise.

The ICJ-defined right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment also ignores the reality that “clean energy” requires extensive mining and minerals processing, using fossil fuels and resulting in extensive toxic land, air and water pollution. Much of this dirty work is done in the poor families’ own backyards (because the elites want no mining or processing in their fiefdoms), and much of it involves child and slave labor, no or substandard workplace safety rules, and rampant land and habitat desecration.

The subsequent wind, solar and transmission installations impact hundreds of times more crop, habitat and scenic lands than coal or gas power plants that generate electricity in far greater quantities, far more reliably, far less expensively.

In India’s Thar Desert, next to Pakistan, native species are being sacrificed on the climate crisis and clean energy altar. Solar panels already blanket over 200 square miles; more than 2.5 million trees have been cut down to install them; and another 14,000 square miles of habitat (almost equal to Switzerland or half of South Carolina) could be clear cut for more panels, Vijay Jayaraj reports.

Even ponds that once attracted pelicans and a dozen other species are covered with solar panels. Numerous other wild species are also struggling to survive as their habitats are destroyed. Cleaning and cooling the panels already requires the equivalent of 300,000 people’s drinking water needs every week.

This destruction is happening all over the world. The ICJ still insists wind and solar power foster “clean, healthy, sustainable, climate friendly” economies – and ignores the privation it perpetuates.

The limited, intermittent, unpredictable electricity from Climate Cabal-approved generators guarantees that the world’s still-impoverished people will never have the appliances we take for granted. They may eventually have cell phones and laptops, a few lights, dorm-room refrigerators, and jobs maintaining “renewable” power systems.

However, they will never enjoy the modern healthcare, homes and living standards that require 24/7/365 coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power.

So before we let Net Zero fanatics in the Climate Industrial Complex inflict their lies, ideologies and policies on people who’ve never had an opportunity to enjoy – much less reject – the marvels of modern civilization, let’s ask those prospective victims if they’re okay with that version of a “clean, sustainable” future. With giving up their aspirations for the lives and wonders they see in movies and magazines.

Let’s find out whether they’ve had a chance to speak with their European counterparts, and inquire about how Europe’s automotive, glass, pharmaceutical and other industries are faring. How many workers still have jobs. How many companies have moved their operations to China, India or other faraway locales. How much they enjoy living under the costs and restrictions imposed by EU politicians and bureaucrats.

Eastern Europeans weren’t overjoyed to exchange six years under the Nazis for 50 years under the benevolent people’s republics of the Soviet Union. Poor families in Africa, Asia and Latin America might not equally unexcited about the prospect of swapping their current daily grinds for the minimally better lives envisioned for them by would-be global ruling elites.

Perhaps they will no longer have to live in mud-and-thatch huts, carry water from distant wells, cook over wood and dung fires that infect women and babies with lung diseases, get intestinal diseases from parasite-infected water and spoiled food, suffer from malaria and other insect-borne diseases, be treated in antiquated hospitals that don’t even have window screens, and die decades before they should.

But how much better will their lives be under policies imposed by elites who decide their fates after flying private jets from one of their mansions to the next 5-star UN-sanctioned climate or economic conference?

The world’s poor don’t just have a human right to truly clean, healthy, sustainable environments. They have a right to enjoy the benefits of affordable 24/7 electricity, well-paid jobs, and all the modern appliances, healthcare, homes, prosperity and 6,000+ products made from petrochemicals that most people in industrialized nations already enjoy.

And do so without being guilted and conned by phony claims that aspiring to such energy and lives will bring worsening storms and inundations from rising seas, more forest fires, stressed blood supplies and other catastrophes conjured up by climate grifters and their political, academic and media allies.

Poor and developing nations need to band together, finance their own energy infrastructure, development, health and prosperity – and tell the carbon colonialists to take a hike.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death, and other books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.

More Great Moments in Human Rights

March 9, 2024 by Dan Mitchell

The libertarian view of human rights is basically “don’t hit people and don’t take their stuff.” 

Sort of a simplified version of the non-aggression principle about not initiating force against others.

This is sometimes called “negative liberty.” The freedom to be left alone.

Our friends on the left, by contrast, have the opposite perspective. They believe in so-called “positive liberty,” which means an entitlement to various handouts.

And they don’t care that those goodies can only be financed by using government coercion (via taxes, regulations, mandates, etc).

But today’s column is not going to involve a serious discussion of rights. Instead, I want to add to my satirical series on “great moments in human rights.”

The latest example comes from Spain, where you have the right to declare a different gender to get more benefits from the government.

Spain’s Left-wing government introduced a self-ID law in 2022 that made it simple to transition formally, while at the same time boosting benefits for women in the military and security forces. Since the change was introduced, 41 men have become women in the Spanish territory of Ceuta in North Africa.

Only four of that number have changed their names. …Roberto Perdigones, an army corporal who registered as female in the last year, now earns more money and lives in superior accommodation. “On the outside I feel like a heterosexual man, but on the inside I am a lesbian…”

“For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother,” he said. …Under Spain’s transgender law, anyone can switch the gender entered on their ID card and passport by formally requesting the change, without any additional requirements… Sources told El Español that officers in the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Local Police in Ceuta were also changing their sexes for benefits.

Like any good libertarian, I support the right of adults to change their names, to dress how they want, and/or to surgically alter their genitalia.

Making any of those choices simply to get more goodies from the government, however, seems a bit strange.

My Take - These last two sentences is why Libertarians will never be a major force. They support things that will ultimately create the things they hate.  Libertarians remind me of Senator Everett Dirksen, who was credited with saying,  "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money"?  His problem was he was a fiscal conservative and at the same time he was socially liberal.  What did he think was going to happen to spending when supporting liberal social schemes?  Less spending? 

The same principle applies here!  Does he think this will stop by them just living a life they choose?  While I think people have the right to live their lives as they wish, they don't  have the right to make me pay for those choices, or accommodate those choices, or accept the concept of those choices.  Have no doubt, that's where this all ends up.  A destabilizing force for society.  

Good Libertarians? Amazing! RK

But, as I’ve written before, incentives matter. For better or worse.

P.S. Here are some other bizarre moments in human rights.

• In Canada, there’s now a right to be an employed alcoholic.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development asserts there is a right to “emotional support animals” in college dorms.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.
• Both the United Nations and the Obama Administration think there’s a right to taxpayer-financed birth control.
• In the United States, the elderly have the right to taxpayer-financed sex-change operations.
• There’s even a right to a “special accommodation” if you’re a pee-shy worker in America.
• In Scotland, there’s now a human right to taxpayer-financed feminine protection products.

Great Moments in Human Rights

August 3, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’m a strong believer in rights, assuming they are defined properly (i.e., they don’t require trampling on the rights of others).

Unfortunately, many politicians assert people have “rights” that can only be fulfilled by exploiting others (usually taxpayers).

We now have lawmakers asserting that there are “rights” to housing, healthcare, jobs, and countless of other things that should be earned in the private sector rather than financed by other people.

Politicians love this game (at least until they run out of other people’s money).

But some politicians are more creative than others.

Today, we’re going to look at a somewhat unusual “right” that is being provided by Brazilian taxpayers.

Sushma Subramanian, in a column for the New York Times, explains there is a right to beauty in Brazil.

 

Brazil…prides itself on its huge number of skilled plastic surgeons. The country recognizes a right to beauty, which in practical terms means subsidizing nearly half a million surgeries each year… In the 1950s, a famed plastic surgeon convinced the president that ugliness can cause painful psychological suffering and that treatment should be covered.

While at first he was referring to those with congenital deformities and burn victims, most procedures covered today are purely aesthetic. …In a public health system that’s strapped for resources, it’s certainly arguable that this is the wrong kind of spending. Everyday differences in bodies end up being pathologized by the medical establishment, defining attractiveness in a limiting way. Small breasts, for instance, might be diagnosed as hypotrophy of the mammary glands. …what Brazil’s policy creates is an acceptance that beauty is a form of self-care and that there’s nothing embarrassing about wanting to meet society’s standard for how we should look, no matter our social class.

Since I’ve written on the economics of “lookism,” I agree that physical appearance is important for people. Not just for their psychological well being, but also for their economic success.

But does that mean taxpayers should become involuntary participants in the process of beautification?

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that American taxpayers already are paying for cosmetic surgery. And Buffalo taxpayers are facing the same problem at the local level.

P.P.S. Here’s my list of other “great moments” in human rights.

• Academics in both America and Europe, as well as a committee from the Council of Europe, claim there is a right to other people’s money.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development asserts there is a right to “emotional support animals” in college dorms.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.
• Both the United Nations and the Obama Administration think there’s a right to taxpayer-financed birth control.
• In the United States, the elderly have the right to taxpayer-financed sex-change operations.
• There’s even a right to a “special accommodation” if you’re a pee-shy worker in America.
• In Scotland, there’s a right to feminine protection products.

Our Human Rights Wasteland

May 24, 2023 By Eliot Pattison

The U.S. State Department recently released its annual report on human rights. There was nothing to celebrate. It was a testament to the wasteland where human rights advocacy now resides. In page after page the lengthy volume catalogs “allegations” and “reports” of violations of a constantly expanding list of what are characterized as basic rights, with heavy attention to those issues that attract the most attention in social media. Ruthless, jack-booted campaigns of genocide are eclipsed, for example, by vastly more voluminous reporting of “societal discrimination” in 198 countries.

The report could be Exhibit A in explaining Washington’s slipping reputation among countries that have been our traditional allies. The Biden administration pledged to make human rights a centerpiece of its foreign policy and the report is the scripture from which its new scolding foreign policy is preached. It makes no effort to distinguish fundamental rights of liberty from a rapidly growing list of “rights” now numbering in the scores, which are not fundamental at all but just new claims on the state in support of social-engineering agenda. A policy which embraces everything eventually embraces nothing........To Read More

 

Green Initiatives Didn't Save California. God Did!

By Rich Kozlovich

 

Now, do I really believe God directly involved himself in California's drought crisis?  Nah, but I added it to the title because I knew leftists and climatistas would go nuts over that and start foaming at the mouth.  Of course, it would be well to remember it was God who created the rain cycle.  Wow!  They are really going to foam at the mouth now. 

 

On March 16, 2023 Jack Hellner published this piece, A single multiple choice question for the ‘green’ energy pushers, asking his readers what they think so rapidly filled up California's depleted reservoirs.  Actually he mostly wanted the climatistas to answer these questions, but these are questions that need to be answered by everyone.  So, which of the following does everyone think is the correct answer, and there's only one.

The Paris Climate accord.

The misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” in which the Democrats claimed they can control the climate by handing out huge amounts of money to “green” pushers.

All the United Nations gabfests where people fly in private jets to stump about the need to cut emissions.

Shuttering coal and natural gas utility plants.

Transitioning the peasants to cricket and mealworms as “food” to control cow flatulence.

Making people buy inefficient, expensive, impractical electric cars powered by the dangerous, highly-flammable pollutant lithium.

Sequestering CO2, a clear, innocuous, non-pollutant gas that makes plants thrive and allows the world to be fed.

Record rain and snow that came cyclically and naturally.

If you picked the last one you were right.  If you picked any of the others, you're not smart enough to read the rest of this piece, just go away, since nothing rational will work for you.

If Californians had done all the things these green nitwits demanded of them, in no way would it have mattered if it hadn't rained or snowed.  These reservoirs simply didn't, and wouldn't have filled up unless they had "record rain that came cyclically and naturally".  It really is that simple!

Up until then California was suffering from a long term drought, and we absolutely know that drought wasn't caused by "oil, coal, CO2, cars, methane, or any of the other things “climate experts” blame for causing droughts, flooding, too much snow, too little snow and whatever else with which they want to scare the public."   How do we know that?  First, this isn't the first drought  to hit California, both short term and long term droughts: 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, and 2020–2022. It's cyclical, and...watch out now....here it comes......all natural.  Now that's really got to be a mouth foamer for climatistas and their allies.  

I think some more history is in order.  Hellman notes at one time the Sahara desert, thousands of years ago, was very wet, and then it was struck by a drought.  A big drought.  An unending drought.   And guess what?   There wasn't a car in sight!  They hadn't discovered oil yet and there's virtually no geological evidence North Africa has coal.  A lot of limestone under all that sand, but for all practical purposes, no coal.   So, their drought wasn't caused by oil, coal, CO2, cars, methane, or anything mankind was doing, nor was California's drought. It was...again....all natural!

He goes on to note the same nitwits who claim they can predict the climate fifty or a hundreds years out, and arrogantly claim they can control that future climate by adopting all these nutty green initiatives, are the same people who:

Apparently lack the ability to properly regulate banks…and then blame Trump for the problem.  Can’t control or tell the truth about the crisis at the borders…and then blame Trump for the problem. Can’t tell the truth or control the “spread” of COVID. Why would anyone trust the so-called “experts” at the CDC and the WHO who spread so much misinformation about COVID and destroyed so many businesses and people with their government edicts?  

Told so many lies about Obamacare, including the “you can keep your doctor” and “keep your plan” shticks, premiums would go down substantially fib, and that it would lower the deficit. And most of the media still says how great it is. Can’t educate children — no matter how much money they throw at it — to read or do math at grade level.  

And these are the brilliant minds onto which we're going to bestow tyrannical power?  Does it really sound like we should give these misanthropic monsters, under the false pretenses of anthropogenic climate change, or pandemic scare mongering, the power to control the very things necessary to maintain a technologically advanced society?  Should we allow them to decide how long we should live? How well we should live? What we should eat?  How many children we should have?  How they're raised, virtually overturning parental rights in every aspect of human endeavor?  

Or should they be ignored since they sound like spoiled brats who are irrational, misanthropic and morally defective misfits who shouldn't be trusted to tell us if day is light and night is dark? They already can't tell us what a woman is. 

Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality.  Everything we're told has a historical foundation and context, and everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.  These two criteria are absolute, and these "experts" fail at both miserably, and have done so over and over again.  Hellman then asks this historically important question:   Does it sound remotely intelligent to believe these people?

Okay, let's take a vote.  I vote no!

Former ESPN Host Bob Ley Says LeBron ‘Has a Responsibility’ to Speak on Chinese Human Rights Abuses

Warner Todd Huston 28 Jun 2022

ESPN’s Bob Ley took aim at those attacking the new Saudi-backed LIV golf league over the country’s human rights record. At the same time, they ignore the NBA’s connections to human rights abusing China.  As nearly two dozen pro golfers have jumped ship from the PGA Tour to join the Saudi-backed pro league, many have accused pros including Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, and Bryson DeChambeau of “sportswashing” the Saudi government’s human rights abuses — most especially the death of occasional columnist Jamal Khashoggi.  Indeed, a few weeks ago, Koepka blasted the media for constantly asking about the LIV league at the expense of even the PGA Tour’s offerings...............To Read More....

Our Mistaken Ideas About Human Rights Failed Us in Afghanistan

Daniel Greenfield August 26, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Human rights are not a government, they’re a culture.

America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths.

These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture.

The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people.

This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with.

And even in America there are voices that favor tearing up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and reverting to a hierarchical model. From the Marxists on the Left to the Neo-Reactionaries on the Right, there are those who would turn back the clock to feudalism with enlightened philosopher-kings imposing an “ideal society” on the inferior class of men.

When we say that something is self-evident, it flows naturally from our values and our beliefs.

Consider the two radically different worldviews inherent in Benjamin Franklin writing that, “the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards" is "a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy” and the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaiming “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun" and thus there "is no fun in Islam.”

Both Franklin and Khomeini were expressing a worldview that was self-evident to them.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” came from people who believed that God loves us and wants us to enjoy life. Beheadings, butchery, and the burka came from Islamists who believe that Allah does not like us very much and that we deserve to be miserable.

The respective governments of America and the Muslim world just play out that theology.

America’s approach to individual freedom and meritocratic government came out of broader English and European intellectual trends. Western nations mostly came around to the approach, at least after two world wars, finding that happy people made for a good economy and stability.

Asian First World nations also came around to their own modified versions of a free society while still emphasizing hierarchy and collective morality. And those were the success stories.

Most of the rest of the world is littered with failures.

The American idea was exported successfully by contact with our culture which contained its individualistic, moral, and aspirational DNA. That’s much less true than it used to be. But what is still true is that our efforts to directly export our ideals have failed miserably. Whether it’s trying to explain the Founding Fathers to the Iraqis or funding Women’s Studies in Afghanistan, few were influenced, and many were confused, irritated, or moderately amused by our efforts.

Constructing “governments-in-a-box” in Iraq and Afghanistan was never going to fit their culture. Exporting human rights by explaining our self-evident belief in individual rights didn’t work in cultures that don’t think that people are primarily individuals with agency, but members of a group whose rights come from their role in a rigid hierarchy of ethnicity, gender or race.

Our own political and cultural elites have adopted that worldview making them particularly unfit to spread human rights or individual freedom abroad even as they eliminate them at home.

How can Biden, who decided to pick a black woman as his vice president, before deciding which individual was going to fill that role, credibly tell the Afghans or Iraqis that they shouldn’t pick their leaders based on their gender, tribe, ethnicity, or Sunni and Shiite status?

Before we explain freedom and rights to the Afghans and Iraqs, we need a refresher course.

Our democracy export business is based on a series of intellectual errors dating back to the two world wars which we had defined as fighting for democracy and against tyranny in Europe.

Ever since then our intellectual and cultural elites have stuck to the conviction that the entire world works much like Europe. Every country, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, is in the midst of a struggle between liberal democrats and reactionary authoritarians. All we have to do is overthrow their Hitler or Mussolini, and a liberal democracy will emerge from the ashes.

This fallacy may have hit its peak with the insistence that the Arab Spring was Europe in 1848.

The rest of the world isn’t Europe of the past three centuries. Its intellectual trends, worldviews, and culture have little in common. While western lefties managed to export socialism to most of the world, it takes on very different forms in places like North Korea or Iraq. The “self-evident” assumptions of political ideas are lost in the translation and transition to very different cultures.

The problem with exporting our “self-evident” ideas is that they’re based on the belief in a loving and merciful God, on the value of individual life, and the genius of individual innovation. Most of the world’s cultures are not only not individualistic, many, like the People’s Republic of China or the Muslim world, are actively anti-individualistic and believe morality comes from hierarchy.

Is morality individual or is it collective? Is the role of government to free people to make moral choices or to force them to make the right choice? Where you come down on the answer to that issue is going to determine the sort of society and government you want and will fight for.

If you’re a member of the Taliban, of the Chinese Communist Party, a believer in critical race theory or the neo-reactionary ideology, odds are you will come down on the collective side.

And on the side of tyranny.

Is life basically good or bad? Are most people bad or good? Does God love us or hate us?

You can’t just casually export our underlying assumptions behind human rights to cultures that answer these questions in very different ways.

All of us, in a more tribal America, have experienced the frustration of mutually incomprehensible conversations with our fellow Americans that appear to be about issues, mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, or abortion, but that are actually about culture and values.

If it’s all but impossible to establish common ground on what rights and freedoms are with other Americans, what were the odds that we were going to do it with Afghans or Iraqis?

America can and should export human rights. But the best way to do it is by example.

Whether it’s parents influencing children, teachers acting as role models, or any other mentor relationship, the most vital lessons are not didactic, but personal. From our earliest years, we learn by imitation and we become like the people we want to be. Indeed, in both Judaism and Christianity, goodness comes from striving to learn from and imitate the ways of God.

Tellingly, the concept plays out very differently in Islam where Muslims imitate Mohammad.

When nations and peoples around the world strived to be like America, it’s because they admired what we had, what we achieved, and how we lived. Most people assume that success is the result of values and behaviors. How people see a successful group, whether it’s Americans, Jews, or Asians comes down to the question of whether they achieved their success fairly through discipline and hard work, or unfairly by abuse and thievery. The answer to that question will determine whether someone is anti-American, anti-Semitic, or anti-whatever group.

These days the loudest voices stating that America is evil, and that everything we had was gained through colonialism and slavery, are coming from our own political and cultural elites.

Why would anyone admire or imitate us when we loudly announce that we’re liars and thieves?

Exporting human rights is not a matter of finding dictators to overthrow. The Muslim world isn’t Europe. It’s not in a state of conflict between tyranny and freedom, but between different flavors of tyranny which all share underlying assumptions about hierarchy over individualism.

Regime change won’t fix the culture.

There are times when America may need to intervene in other countries, when it’s to counter a threat or to prevent an extreme wrong such as genocide, but we cannot and will not fix the world. The vast majority of the planet will go on living under authoritarian regimes. Women in Muslim countries will suffer. And so will various ethnic and religious minorities under their rule.

We should condemn evil where we see it without assuming that we can make it go away and that should drive us to build alliances with nations that share our culture, heritage and values. Instead of spending billions reconstructing enemies, we’re better off strengthening our friends.

Above all else, we should show that our values lead to a good life. The example that we set for the rest of the world will do more to spread human rights than any military interventions.

That’s how it always was.

After a century of ideological cold wars, countering Communism and then Islamism, we have a lot of military interventions under our belt, but have gotten no better at making arguments for our way of life to our own people. While we were trying to convince Africans that Marxism wasn’t for them, our Ivy League institutions adopted it. And while we tried to talk the Afghans and Iraqis out of Islamic theocracy, our own cities, institutions, and governments filled up with Islamists.

If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home.

It’s not just Afghanistan where young girls are being enslaved or sexually abused by Islamists.

In 2019, I reported that there had been over 2,000 visas approved for underage 'brides' from Muslim countries. Two years before that I reported on a female genital mutilation network in Michigan. There have been multiple cases of slavery involving Muslim families in America.

The massive influx of Afghans into America will make those numbers worse, not better.

The fundamental lesson of our founding is that we can’t defend our rights without also defending our culture. The self-evident truths on which our freedoms were founded are no longer all that self-evident on a college campus, let alone in Islamist enclaves like Dearborn or Little Mogadishu. If we want to save our rights, we’ll have to defeat the Taliban at home.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Bearing Witness to China’s ‘Orwellian Dystopia’

By Bari Weiss

Earlier this month, Patrick Wack got a boost any photographer would dream of when Kodak’s Instagram account — 841,000 followers and counting — decided to feature ten photographs from his forthcoming book. It’s called “Dust,” and it chronicles the transformation, over the past half-decade, of the Xinjiang region, the cradle of Uyghur civilization, at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Then, a few days after Kodak shared the photos, the company deleted them. 

It didn’t just delete them. It replaced Wack’s haunting pictures with its corporate logo and a statement that reads, in part: 

“Kodak’s Instagram page is intended to enable creativity by providing a platform for promoting the medium of film. It is not intended to be a platform for political commentary.” It went on to “apologize for any misunderstanding or offense the post may have caused.”

Instagram is banned in China, so Kodak put out an additional statement on WeChat, a Chinese social-media platform. This one was more abject:

For a long time, Kodak has maintained a good relationship with the Chinese government and has been in close cooperation with various government departments. We will continue to respect the Chinese government and the Chinese law.

We will keep ourselves in check and correct ourselves, taking this as an example of the need for caution. 

To appease Chinese Communist Party officials, other Western  brands — Apple, Airbnb, the NBA, Marriott, Dior and Valentino, to name just a few — have issued similar apologies. 

Kodak’s Instagram faux pas most closely resembles that of Mercedes-Benz, which, in 2018, posted a #MondayMotivation ad on its Instagram account that included a quote from the Dalai Lama: “Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.” The line sparked an uproar in Beijing, and the German carmaker quickly apologized.

Wack’s images are far more threatening to the CCP. The photographer calls the situation in Xinjiang, in the northwest region of the country, an “Orwellian dystopia.” He would know. He traveled there six times from 2016 to 2019, documenting the province as it became, in his words, “an open-air prison.”

In today’s newsletter, we are proud to reprint Patrick Wack’s stirring images. They are accompanied by a conversation, edited for length and clarity, with him. You can preorder his book here. 

 To Read More.....

 My Take - I've shown three comments below, go to the article to see the rest.  Worth the time.  

1. Here in America, corporate oligarchs, feckless politicians, and sycophantic celebrities endorse and sponsor marching, looting, burning, and killing to protest slavery that ended 150+ years ago.When it comes to China, those same corporate pashas, loathsome politicians, and unctuous celebrities ignore the slavery and atrocities that are happening now, right before their uncaring eyes. The slavery and barbarity visited on the Uyghurs could easily happen in America; such a society is the ultimate dream of the woke and hyper-liberal.
2.  Thank you for shining on light on this tragedy ~ powerful images. Shame on Kodak for their apologist comments and for bending a knee to Communist China."China is a country where so many products are manufactured. It’s a country that the whole world has business and diplomatic relations with. And they are trying to re-engineer and disappear a people and their culture. I hope to bring light to this and what kind of a regime this is. "We American consumers can all do our part to stop this human tragedy by shunning products made in China ~ especially American brands who ignore the efforts to disappear a culture by Communist China.
3.  Did you hear Nike and LeBron James' and the NBA, and MLB and the NFL and Woka-Cola and Kodak's full-throated condemnations of these atrocities against the Uyghur in China? I didn't. Neither did anyone else. Shame on us. Shame on us for drinking on deciliter of Coke. Shame on us for watching one second of MLB, NBA, NFL and for buying their merch. Shame on us for watching one frame of John Cena et al and FF9 and every other Hollywood property cleansed, purged and whitewashed of anything offensive to the CCP, lest its gazillion dollar market be disrupted. Shame on us for selling out the Uyghur and our own souls for cheap, mediocre crap from China. The shame is on us. Shame on us.

Nothing Is Ever As It Appears In China: Human Rights, Part I

By Rich Kozlovich

This piece isn't about human rights.  It's about a stunning lack of human rights and the world's willingness to ignore it. 

As we watch the Woke corporations and athletes claiming America is a "racist" nation and insisting blacks are being kept down by "institutional racism", we see these self same groups groveling before the most evil government on the face of the planet.  China, and the Chinese Communist Party!

Here's a government that eschews any rule of law, domestic or international, and is now controlling so much of what major corporations in America are doing.   Their infiltration into America's institutions, including the Congress and now the Presidency, is astounding, dangerous and has to be considered treasonous, all of which I will address in more articles this week and next. 

But this piece deals with human rights, so let's start with the Uighur people of China.  A Muslim group who Michael Curtis claimed in his article,  Is China Committing Genocide against the Uighur People?, are being horribly abused by Communist China saying:

"......moral outrage that must be challenged by the global community in the strongest possible terms. Sacks wrote that the sight of people being shaven-headed, boarded onto trains, and sent to concentration camps was particularly harrowing. They were being murdered, terrorized, victimized, and robbed of their liberties because of the way they worship God."

And in spite of all the evidence of human rights abuses when the International Criminal Court was asked to investigate they refused. Why?  Because it claimed the ICC didn't have jurisdiction, since  China isn't a signatory of the agreement, and they claim "the transfer of Uighurs from other countries did not constitute a crime against humanity".

Strange isn't it how that doesn't seem to bother them when it comes to false charges against the nation of Israel and America, neither of which are signatories of the Rome Statute, and yet they claim they have jurisdiction.  Remarkable, don't you think? I've discussed this at some length in my articles:

• The World as I See It: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is Corrupt to the Core!  
• The International Criminal Court: Leftists Out of Control 
•  The World as I See It: The International Criminal Court

The U.N. Human Rights Council also declined to investigate, which is interesting since it appears the UN seems to think they're qualified to come to America and decide if America is a racist nation. If this was Israel both of these loser groups would have been jumping up and down to investigate and the media would be screaming and demanding it be done.   

Oh, by the way.  Here are the countries sitting on the UNHRC: Bolivia, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan. 

Well, what about the Muslim controlled nations?  What are they doing about this, remember, between them and their supporters in the UN, they have an unending whine about the rights of Palestinians living in and around Israel, rights they wouldn't have living in the surrounding Muslim controlled nations, so you would imagine they're outraged at the treatment of their fellow Muslims by the government of China.  Right?  Wrong! 

The Uyghur people are a Turkish group. So why, as Patrick Goodenough points out in his December 20th article, "Uyghurs Alarmed as China Ratifies Extradition Treaty With Turkey, Long a Haven For Exiles", is Turkey considering a treaty that would force Uyghur's back into the hands of their oppressors?  He notes:  

More than one million Uyghur and other minority Muslims are reported to have been held in re-education camps in the region since 2017............“After Uyghurs flee China, the Chinese government relentlessly pursues Uyghur refugees and uses its power and influence to pressure host countries into returning Uyghur refugees and asylum seekers,” it said, adding that more than 300 such cases have been confirmed over the last two decades – a number that does not include those secretly returned to China.  “Upon their return, Uyghurs are subjected to enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture, and other serious human rights violations.”

And while western nations have a need to be concerned about the potential of Muslim terrorist activity, it wasn't the Muslim world that spoke up.  I was the United States who challenged China over their abuses of this Muslim group. Their response to America's challenge over this?

“Disinformation on Xinjiang fabricated by some American politicians is the biggest ‘lie of the century,’” he said, evidently a barbed response to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s description of the atrocities as the “stain of the century.”

And get this:

“Xinjiang enjoys social stability, economic growth, ethnic solidarity, harmony among religions and better livelihoods, and people of all ethnic groups including Uyghurs are living a life of happiness, tranquility and peace,”...... “By contrast, there's systemic racial discrimination and police brutality in the U.S. judicial and law enforcement systems.”

We'll be coming back to their claims of "police brutality in the U.S. judicial and law enforcement systems", however, that piece of clabber from the Chinese envoy was on December 20, 2020.  Then just nineteen days later, on January 8, 2021, Andrea Widburg posted this piece, Chinese communists boast about Uighur women’s sterilizations saying: 

"The Chinese Embassy in the United States proudly announced on Twitter that its sterilization policy for Uighur women in “residential communities” was actually liberating them by protecting them from the horror of being baby-making machines. It was an eerie echo of Barack Obama’s pronouncements about the necessity of early birth control as a way to protect his daughters from the punishment of a baby,  As you read this keep in mind that Twitter bans the United States president from its site, but not the Chinese Communist Party. 

 If you read the article you'll find the Orwellian language becomes even more convoluted. But the facts are: 

China has been systematically assembling Uighurs in concentration camps and using them for slave labor and forced organ donations.

On July 11 this year Kelly O'Connell asks, Is Devilish China the Globe's Most Evil State?  Why such a provocative title? O'Connell goes on to explain: 

• First, there are no Human Rights. 
• Second, the society is composed upon Marxist principles with some capitalism. 
• Third, the government is designed upon atheist secular ideals, so bans religion.
•  Fourth, the government has launched a large-scale human organ transplant business. 
• Fifth, there is no law-above-the-law to check any of the above problems. 
• Sixth, influenced by secular media, Americans have a blase’ attitude towards China and don’t understand how dangerous the world’s biggest country is, and many don’t care about the real facts. 

 He goes on to say:

 

China reaps a billion dollars yearly on human organ sales. And, given China’s rejection of human rights laws, religion and the concept of the human soul—there is no reason not to take organs from citizens and steal their organs for sale. 

 

Consider this headline: “Forced Organ Harvesting: “I’m going to China, they’re shooting my donor.” While claiming to stop using the organs of executed prisoners in 2015, studies in 2019 report the practice still goes on. See: “China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.” ........

China is considered an open air prison under constant surveillance whose population is under constant threat of arbitrary arrest. Over 236 million Chinese are affected by human trafficking. 

Christian churches are currently being burned and pastors jailed and murdered. See “In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture.”

 Sadly, American Christians are unaware that Chinese use millions of religious minorities, including Christians, as factory slaves. See Christian Human Rights Activist Urges Believers To Avoid Products Made By China’s Slaves.............

And corporate behemoths, who brag about defending US human rights and being woke—like Nike—use such slave labor. See Xinjiang forced labour reported in multinational supply chains. 

See Reports: China Sells Minorities Into ‘Forced Labor’ to Benefit Apple, Foxconn, Others & China’s Forced Labor Problem & New bill would punish America’s corporate giants relying on Chinese slave labor. In short, Christian Americans must arise and demand we stop using China as our National Dollar Store and support countries who don’t use and murder religious minorities for free human organ transplants.

This is such a big topic I'm breaking this down into two parts, and depending on how it flows,  possibly three.  Understand, this goes far beyond the Uighurs.  There are other groups suffering human rights abuses in China, and they're even kidnapping people living in foreign nations.  All of whom seem to just disappear. 

 Part II will be presented tomorrow. 

In First Big China Test, Team Biden Got Rolled...And It's Painful to Watch

Matt Vespa @mvespa1 Mar 19, 2021 

Team Biden had their first big foreign policy test with China—and they failed. There’s no way to spin it. Even the liberal media is saying the whole meeting in Alaska devolved into anarchy. This meeting is supposedly the one that will determine if President Depends is going to meet with Xi Jinping. By how things turned out, I don’t think we should even consider it. Why embarrass the United States even more? Secretary of State Tony Blinken just exposed how weak we are in dealing with China. They know it. We got trashed on our own soil and from the looks of it, we didn’t really respond in any way, shape, or form. We got rolled in front of the cameras (via Daily Beast):.........To Read More.....\

My Take - Biden's team got rolled? Really!  And we're shocked why?  As the little kid in the Little Rascals said:  Remarkable! 

• Rep. Eric Swalwell Escapes Effort to Kick Him Off Intel Committee
• Biden's Diplomatic Team on China Needs Real Experts, like Hunter and Swalwell 
• Meet Joe Biden, America's first Idiocracy President
• A New Cold War with China?
• China Celebrates Humiliating Biden Foreign Policy Team
• Lectures Biden Admin on America’s ‘Long History of Killing Blacks’
  
  

The Progressive Conception of "Rights" Is as Seductive as It Is Dangerous

Nate Hochman June 27, 2019

When outcomes the Left desires are framed as ‘rights,’ they’re easier to sell to the public, but limits on government power are inevitably discarded to achieve them.

What are rights?

If your knowledge of political philosophy were informed by the contemporary rhetoric of many prominent Democrats, you could be easily forgiven for thinking “rights” don’t really mean anything at all; or, rather, that they mean whatever progressives want them to mean.

It seems that we are increasingly expected to believe that rights are synonymous with whichever policies inhabit the progressive agenda on a given day. Universal health-care coverage? That’s a human right. Government-funded housing? Check. A four-year college education? Yup. Guaranteed employment in a well-paying job? Yes, that too..........To Read More

How a Hero Of Human Rights Foresaw Hong Kong

By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun | June 17, 2019

How sad, I've been thinking, that the founder of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein, a champion of human rights in China, isn't alive to see the broadcasts of hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions, of protesters take to the streets of Hong Kong to defend what is left there of freedom and the rule of law.

What a good sign it is for America, even on matters that, like the tariff fight with China or the rising tensions with Iran, may seem only tangentially related to whether residents of Hong Kong are subject to extradition for trial in mainland China.............To Read More.....

Europe opting for submission to Islam

By Alex Alexiev November 13, 2018

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939.

“Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”.....................Read more

Haley, After Losing Series of Votes on Cuba: That’s ‘Why So Many People Believe That Faith in the United Nations is Often Misplaced’

By Patrick Goodenough | November 1, 2018

By large majorities, member-states of the United Nations on Thursday one by one voted down eight draft amendments proposed by the United States, highlighting human rights abuses by Cuba’s communist rulers.  Having done so the General Assembly, by a vote of 189-2, condemned once again the United States’ embargo against the Cuban regime. Except for Israel, every U.N. member-state voted in favor. No countries abstained, although Ukraine and Moldova did not vote..................“There are only losers: The United Nations has lost. It has rejected the opportunity to speak on behalf of human rights. The U.N. Charter commits every country here to the promotion of peace, security, and human rights. And that Charter was betrayed today.”............To Read More.....

The UN Wants to be Our World Government By 2030

By E. Jeffrey Ludwig October 27, 2018

In the 1960s, an informed but naïve undergraduate, I was walking across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania with the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, Prof. Charles C. Price. He told me that he was president of the United World Federalists, and asked if I knew what that organization was. When I said that I did not, he replied that they believed in a one-world government that would grow out of the United Nations. I was nonplussed as I had never heard anyone suggest that idea before. To me, the United Nations was a benevolent organization dedicated to pressuring the world community in the direction of peace, and to operating charitable programs to help the struggling, impoverished peoples of the world. I imagined the UN as a kind of United Way on a worldwide scale.

How would Prof. Price’s vision of a new world government emerge? Although there was a socialistic thread in its founding document, the United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) which placed the concept of rights at the forefront for the progress of the world body. And rights are the mainstay for uplifting human freedom and the dignity of the individual. The UDHR document followed many amazing documents that presented rights as the central concept of the post-feudal world: the English Declaration (or Bill) of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence with its important and forceful assertion of inalienable natural rights, the powerful U.S. Bill of Rights enacted in 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789)...............United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) .............The word “rights” appears in almost every sentence of the 1869-word UN document. The document is literally obsessed with rights ...........To Read More.....

Rights Gone Wrong

Review of 'The Debasement of Human Rights' By Aaron Rhodes

James Kirchick  Aug. 15, 2018

On a visit to Canada in 2016, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, was questioned about his country’s human-rights record. Wang was ready with a response. “Do you know that China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty?” he snapped back.

Defenders of Cuba’s one-party state reliably employ a similar deflection tactic whenever discussion about the island prison turns to human rights. “But,” they invariably retort, “Cuba boasts universal health care and 100 percent literacy!”

Such earnest recitations of societal achievements are the Communist version of that apocryphal line about Mussolini making the trains run on time.

That most European countries provide government-run health-care and refrain from throwing people into prison for criticizing the government proves that a generous social-welfare state and individual liberty are not mutually exclusive. (Some of these countries even have punctual train arrival and departure times, too)..........The attempt to ward off criticism of a nation's abysmal human-rights record by touting its provision of material benefits is, according to Aaron Rhodes, more than mere "whataboutery," the obnoxious Soviet rhetorical trick that answered every criticism of Communist repression by highlighting the West's own iniquities......To Read More

Time for Free Nations to Leave the UN Human Rights Council

Last week, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley attempted to have the U.N. Human Rights Council cease its perpetual preoccupation with condemning Israel. But our European allies would have none of it.


Morton Klein, 7 Jun 2018

Europe refused to join the U.S. in seeking to terminate the Council’s permanent agenda item devoted to Israel –– the only country singled out in that fashion.  Nearly a year ago, Ambassador Haley warned the UN to reform the Human Rights Council or expect a U.S. exit from the body.  That moment might now be in the offing. If so, not a moment too soon.........To Read More.....

Cuba Dealt Diplomatic Defeat at the UN Human Rights Council

By Maria C. Werlau

The Cuban missions to the United Nations in New York and Geneva are among the largest and their work, mostly carried on by intelligence officers fronting as diplomats, is very active and effective. But sabotaging the UPR pre-session on Cuba unmasked the regime’s true face in the most flagrant of ways. Untold hours and millions of dollars of hard work by Cuba’s influence and propaganda apparatus were undone in 90 minutes by the regime’s own hand.  Although Cuba is one of 47 Member States serving on the United Nations Human Rights Council, Cuban diplomats on Friday................ .............To Read More.....

My Take - The hypocircy of the UN is unbelievable.  Cuba is on their Human Rights Council?  You just can't make this kind of stuff up.  So who are the members?  Here's the list! A big portion of whom have no business determining what constitutes Human Rights, including Venezuela. Imangine that, expecting the most incompetent and corrupt organization that ever existed to aviod being incompetent and corrupt. 

UN Human Rights Council Opens With Poorest Membership Yet; Sanctioned Iranian to Speak

By Patrick Goodenough | February 26, 2018

 

The United Nations’ top human rights body begins a four-week session in Geneva on Monday, boasting the largest numbers of autocratic and repressive regimes among its members in its 13-year history.

No fewer than 14 of the diplomats who fill the council’s 47 seats (29.7 percent) for the 37th regular session represent countries that are ranked “not free” by Freedom House, the veteran Washington-based watchdog which grades countries annually on political rights and civil liberties.

Never before since the HRC was established in 2006 has the number of “not free” members been that high. Previously the largest contingent of “not free” members was 13 (27.6 percent), in 2010, and the smallest number was eight (17 percent), in 2009..........To Read More....

My Take - And we're surprised?  The UN is the most corrupt incompetent organization the world has ever known, so why should we expect their Human Rights Council be any different? 

Scarlett Johansson Proclaims Abortion, a Human Right

By Michael Ware

There is the loss of much when we over do something. It is not as special on Christmas when we get gifts if we receive them once a month. This is the same with words. As we widen a word to cover things that it used not to include, we stretch it out of proportion, and it losses its meaning.

This has happened with human rights.

As I have argued, there is a problem with the way that we use the word rights. In our day, it can cover anything that you wish to do. If you want to sin and not have anyone say anything, then all you have to do is claim that it is a right. 

This is the next way the left will try and keep their murder factories open. 

Breitbart reports

Actress Scarlett Johansson says the right to abortion is not just a women’s rights issue, but also “a human rights issue.”.......To Read More....

My Take - Murdering unborn children is a "human right"?  Just one more example of the lack of intellectual and moral clarity within the entertainment industry.  The left is just as vile as the ancient pagans who sacrificed their children to false gods in order to have the favor of the gods.  These people are guilty of infanticide and in sane days they would have been prosecuted for those murders.  And we....as a society....have lost our way and our minds.