by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
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Posted by Walt as Socialism at 7:30 AM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Walt as Socialism at 7:19 AM EDT
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Geneva – UN Watch has called on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to denounce the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran for sending Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, who is implicated in grave human rights violations, as its representative to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ Tripartite Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. "Mr. Pour-Mohammadi is credibly believed to have been involved in the murders of thousands of political prisoners, writers, and dissidents in Iran," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights monitoring organization. "This man does not deserve to be toasted at Geneva cocktails with diplomats and high UN officials — he belongs in jail."
This is not the first time that Iran has shown contempt for a UN body in Geneva by sending a notorious human rights abuser to participate on its behalf. In June, Iran's delegation to the inaugural session of the new UN Human Rights Council included Tehran Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi, who stands accused of the 2005 torture and murder of Iranian-Canadian journalist Zarah Khazemi. (For more information on Ms. Khazemi's murder, click here.) The incident made international headlines and the government of Canada demanded Mr. Mortazavi's arrest, but he managed to leave Europe without incident.
"The Ahmadinejad government's policy of brazenly sending human rights criminals to major UN human rights and humanitarian assemblies is yet another example of Tehran's complete contempt for the standards and values of the international community," said Neuer. "It only underscores the compelling need for the United Nations to protect its basic Charter principles by resorting to a strong remedy: suspension or expulsion of Ahmadinejad's Iran." (To read about UN Watch's campaign to urge the Security Council and General Assembly to rescind Iran's UN membership, click here.)
UN Watch is a Geneva-based human rights organization founded in 1993 to monitor UN compliance with the principles of its Charter. It is accredited as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Special Consultative Status to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and as an Associate NGO to the UN Department of Public Information.
Posted by Walt as Corruption, Freedom & Human Rights, Middle East at 1:07 AM EDT
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Geneva, October 6, 2006 — UN Watch expressed deep disappointment that the UN Human Rights Council finished its second regular session this afternoon without taking action on any substantive human rights issue. The Geneva-based non-governmental organization closely follows the Council's proceedings.
During the session, the Council heard reports from its "Special Procedures," the 40-odd independent human rights experts mandated to monitor human rights situations around the world. Many of these experts do excellent and important work, and their reports flagged serious human rights issues in many countries, including Belarus, Burma/Myanmar, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan. (For more on the experts' presentations, see our press releases here and here.) Yet the Council acted on none of them.
"Given its poor record to date, the Council needed to show at this session that it was willing and able to take specific action against at least some of the many countries in the world that violate human rights. Unfortunately, it utterly failed to do so," said Hillel Neuer, UN Watch Executive Director. (For a list of compelling situations of human rights violations that UN Watch and a coalition of NGOs asked the Council to address, click here .) In its three months of existence, the Council, which is dominated by countries from the UN's Islamic group, has adopted only three resolutions on country-specific situations, all of which have been against Israel.
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Posted by Walt as Corruption, Freedom & Human Rights at 10:15 PM EDT
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Geneva, September 29, 2006 — This afternoon in Geneva the UN Human Rights Council will return to condemnations of Israel, with the presentation of new reports as mandated by prior resolutions that were criticized as one-sided by Western democracies and human rights groups. "Sadly, the constructive part of this Council session—reports by the Council's 40 independent monitors on human rights situations around the world—is now over," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a non-governmental organization in Geneva that monitors the Council. "Anyone observing the Council's agenda over the next week might easily mistake it for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference."
The resolutions on the agenda for today's follow-up are the only measures adopted by the Council that address violations by a specific country. All three were sponsored by the Council's Arab and Islamic groups over the summer, and opposed as one-sided by Western democracies and major human rights organizations. All three require reports condemning alleged Israeli violations in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, yet omit any reference to attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah.
The reports concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Gaza will be presented by the Council's Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Mr. John Dugard (who already presented his regular annual report on Israeli violations in the Territories on Tuesday). His mandate, sponsored by Arab and Muslim countries, has been criticized for its exclusive focus on Israeli violations only.
The report on Lebanon will be an update on the progress of a three-person inquiry commission that is now visiting Lebanon, mandated only to examine alleged Israeli violations. When the resolution establishing the inquiry was adopted by the Council's emergency session in August, Amnesty International criticized it as "a highly-politicized resolution that muted the Council's voice by ignoring the violations of one party to the conflict" and that "failed to meet the principles of impartiality and objectivity expected," saying it was the product of "members' focus on their narrow political objectives." Human Rights Watch said that the resolution's "one-sided approach" was "a blow to [the Council's] credibility and an abdication of its responsibility to protect human rights for all." Reporters Sans Frontières "condemn[ed] this use of the Council for political ends" and said that the Council, so far, had been "a repeat of the worst moments of the defunct Human Rights Commission . . . , with an automatic, blocking majority imposing its will and doing as it pleases," that is, "exploiting human rights for political ends."
Secretary-General Annan, speaking at a September 13 press conference prior to the current Council session, urged the new body to "focus on respect for human rights throughout the world, without focusing merely on individual countries. It should be fair, and apply the rules consistently across the board." Similarly, prior to the Council's inauguration in June, he pleaded with the Council to "move away from some of the past practices that we have all criticized," saying he hoped "we are not going to see a situation where the Human Rights Council focuses on Israel, but not on the others."
UN Watch and a coalition of NGOs on Tuesday will present the Council with a broad list of compelling violations, in countries around the world, that require Council action. See list of countries here.
"It's an outrage that a body meant to protect victims worldwide has allowed itself to be taken hostage by the UN's anti-Israel lobby, devoting 100 percent of its country resolutions to one-sided attacks against the Jewish state," said Neuer. "The measures pushed through by the Arab and Islamic groups, with the support of an automatic majority, abuse the language of human rights for the political purpose of demonizing Israel."
For more information on the Council, see UN Watch's recent report, "Reform or Regression?"
UN Watch is a Geneva-based human rights organization founded in 1993 to monitor UN compliance with the principles of its Charter. It is accredited as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Special Consultative Status to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and as an Associate NGO to the UN Department of Public Information.
Posted by Walt as Freedom & Human Rights, Middle East at 12:22 AM EDT
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