First, courtesy of Melanie Phillips, a gift from the international elites:
Latest UN shocker: 'It's ok to kill gays'.
Those who persist in the delusion that the Club for the Perpetuation of Tyranny and Terror, aka the United Nations, is the authoritative arbiter of global justice and ‘human rights’ should be asked whether they still think the same thing after reading this:
Last week, the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted on a special resolution addressing extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions. The resolution affirms the duties of member countries to protect the right to life of all people with a special emphasis on a call to investigate killings based on discriminatory grounds. The resolution highlights particular groups historically subject to executions including street children, human rights defenders, members of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority communities, and, for the past 10 years, the resolution has included sexual orientation as a basis on which some are targeted for death.
The tiny West African nation of Benin (on behalf of the UN's African Group) proposed an amendment to strike sexual minorities from the resolution. The amendment was adopted with 79 votes in favor, 70 against, 17 abstentions and 26 absent.
A collection of notorious human rights violators voted for the amendment including Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Eritrea, North Korea, Iran (didn't Ahmadinejad tell the world there were no gays in Iran?), Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
Next, a digression:
I entered medical school in New York in 1974 and finished my Residency training at Bellevue Hospital 8 years later. The 1970's through the 1990's were the heyday of liberal policies in New York, a town that has never strayed far from its liberal roots) and on the streets of New York and in the Bellevue Emergency Room and on the Psychiatric wards we saw the fruits of our liberalism on a daily basis. I would walk from SOHO (downtown) to NYU Medical Center everyday and have to detour around street people in residence on the sidewalk on every block. Aggressive panhandlers, almost universally looking for money to support their drug and alcohol use, were ubiquitous.
The Supreme Court had determined that Psychiatric patients could only be held in the least restrictive conditions and that, except in an emergency situation, Patients had the Right to refuse treatment. Once the lawmakers in Albany, in a marvelous example of the law of unintended consequences, discovered that the court rulings meant that they could save money by closing state hospitals under the rationalization that such hospitals were not "least restrictive"places to store chronically and severely mentally ill people, a large number of people were sent into the community with no ability to function independently and no community based structure capable of caring for them adequately.
[Of course, no money was ever actually saved since no one could be fired. The workers were in a powerful Union, 1199 and New York politicians have mutually corrupted themselves and the Union over the years with mutual payoffs; the Community Mental Health Centers never fully materialized because of NIMBY and lack of money for a politically impotent constituency, the mentally ill; and besides, the theoretical savings were all spent on more favored projects anyway.]
The upshot was that thousands of Psychiatric patients were left to fend for themselves on the streets of New York City. Most of the patients were tragic victims, a story for another day; a very few were frightening, deranged lunatics. One man in particular became a minor media celebrity. If memory serves me, he lived in the 57th-59th street area of midtown Manhattan. He would become agitated and threaten people, defecate on the street regularly, and frighten the horses. (That is not a joke; on 59th Street in Manhattan you can hire a horse and carriage to take rides through Central Park.) When his behavior became more than the usual alarming the police would pick him up and bring him to Bellevue where he would be admitted, medicated appropriately, and discharged with plans for all sorts of follow-up in place. Of course, once he was out of the hospital he did not adhere to any follow-up plan, returned to his residence on the streets, stopped taking his medicine and, in short order, the cycle would begin anew. This went on for years. At times there would be attempts made to hold him in the hospital for longer term care; this required a great deal of work by the Psychiatrists and Social Workers who had to document his history, dot every i and cross every t and would still end up disappointed as the Judges would typically mandate his release because at the moment he was no longer a threat to self or others and therefore could not be held against his will.
All of the foregoing is interesting but what does it have to do with those in the international community who enable evil? Just this: the fair people of New York, most of whom were and are sympathetic to the less fortunate among us, learned that there was essentially nothing they could do about this man. The authorities, distant from the scene, from the Supreme Court to the New York legislature to the Mayor of New York (David Dinkins at the time, 1990-1993, a lovely, completely ineffectual man) had determined that in their ideal fantasy world no one should be or could be held against their will for such inconveniences as threatening their community or inconveniencing the citizenry. It was the citizens of New York who would have to adjust to the psychotic maniacs among us, at least until they committed a crime egregious enough to warrant re-institutionalization, albeit after the crime as inmates of the prison system rather than a more humane Psychiatric system. The citizens then determined not to see the homeless mentally ill, most of whom became invisible, and thousands of lives were worsened.
(I defy anyone to argue that living on the street in one's own filth, free to indulge in cheap alcohol and chronic terrifying paranoia, and occasionally freezing to death in the winter is more humane that being held in a facility that allows for treatment of one's psychosis, a clean environment with decent food and health care, and security from the street thugs who preyed on the helpless disturbed. When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was elected in 1994, he instituted the "broken windows" approach to community policing; this included getting the homeless mentally ill off the streets and into SRO'a and other appropriate settings. New York City became a boom town under Giuliani and a desirable place to live, work, and play.)
In the international community we are unfortunate enough to have a fair number of deranged and paranoid lunatics, among them North Korea, Iran, and much of the Arab/Muslim world. They firmly believe in lunatic theories and threaten their neighbors on a regular basis. The international community, from afar, like the Judges in Washington and the legislators in Albany and DC, weave fantasies of the world which have only a passing resemblance to the real world and then pronounce that in their fantasy land, for example, the Palestinians are merely innocent victims who only want a state in which to live peacefully with their Jewish neighbors. They imagine themselves to be virtuous men, even courageous men speaking truth to power (since it is obvious that the non-lunatic Israelis have built a much more functional society than the Palestinians and therefor are the powerful ones in the equation) but their acquaintance with reality is tenuous at best. However, of even greater significance, and the key point to remember, is that most of the international enablers are simply all too human cowards. To confront the lunatic is frightening. Lunatics tend to be unpredictable and do not operate under civilized self imposed restraints.
When "leaders" have a surfeit of the all too human characteristic of fear along with the inability to admit to themselves when they are frightened, the result is a craven mix of projection, dissimulation and rage at those who by their actions make their fear less deniable. A politician, often the most craven of all, is by nature a cautious being. Especially in the post-modern West, esteem does not fall upon the man who acts but on the man who speaks. Much of the West has forgotten how to act and are afraid to act, because words have minimal (short term) consequences while deeds can not be conveniently forgotten when they go awry. The Men of Words will never be happy with the Man of Action while the outcome is in doubt; it is only when victory is at hand that they will suddenly discover they have been behind him all along.
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