The European Approach To International Law

I have always said that international law is such a misnomer, if there ever was one. No one follows it unless it advances their own interests.

Here is an article from the WSJ that supports what I have believed all along.

Many of President-elect Barack Obama's supporters hope he will scrap the Bush administration's skeptical attitude toward international law and take a more European approach. This is presumably to bring us in line with what these supporters regard as more enlightened practices abroad.

In fact, Europe's commitment to international law is largely rhetorical. Like the Bush administration, Europeans obey international law when it advances their interests and discard it when it does not.

Europeans are some of the nicest people on a personal level, but can also be very hypocritical on issues of importance.

Dr. Doudou Coming to America

That's right. You read it right.

Dr. Doudou Diene of Senegal is coming and the NY Sun has details:

As an African American politician is set to assume for the first time in the country’s history the leadership of a major political party, a Geneva-based United Nations human rights investigator plans to come here next week to investigate whether racism plays a role in the presidential campaign, according to a statement released yesterday.

The special rapporteur on “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance,” Doudou Diène of Senegal, will arrive in America Monday for a two-week tour that will take him to Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to the statement.

Mr. Diene “is scheduled to hold meetings with representatives of the government, both at national and local levels, and with members of the legislative and judiciary branches,” the statement said. He will also hobnob with “non-governmental organizations, community members, representatives of political parties, academics, and other organizations and individuals working in the field of racism and discrimination.”

Outstanding. Brilliant, even. I wonder how many committee meetings it took to come with this gem of a plan.

This means that people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, left-wing professors that teach African studies, and maybe if we are lucky, Louis Farrakhan will get to weigh in on the terrible racism problem that we have, right here in the evil imperialist America. How objective will they be in their assessments?

But this is not the half of it.

This also means that the UN (an organization that seems to be powerless to stop the killings in Darfur) is going to be looking at attitudes, stereotypes, and dreaming up some skewed and predetermined finding which will no doubt paint the American electorate as racist, if they do not elect Barack Obama.

This is an organization that seats Sudan on the commission and turns a blind eye to Sudanese Arabs killing Sudanese Blacks. In addition, countries like China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Saudi Arabia are on seated. Past members include Algeria, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam.

Just wait and see.

If Obama is not elected, there will be cries of racism from one end of the earth, to the other. If he is elected, every time someone tries to argue against the Obama Administration's stances, proposals, and policies, there will be cries of racism from every entity mentioned heretofore in this post (and then some).

There is no winning this.

LOST In The Senate

By now, most of my readers have no doubt come to some conclusions on what this blog stands for, in the form of two very important recurrent themes. Individual freedom and national sovereignty are those two. And right now, there is one piece of legislation currently in the Senate, which will curtail much of our sovereignty.

We can complain about tax hikes all day long and much of it is certainly justifiable. Just the mere mention of them will raise the ire of the vast majority of people that pay them. In fact, in some instances, you can really get a huge backlash in the polls if the hikes are large enough.

But when you consider that the average American has not even heard of the Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) - much less taken a position pro or con on it - it certainly makes one wonder how people process information in this day and age.

Here, we have an elected body of officials that (for the most part) had no part in the meat grinder, known as WWII. They cannot tap that as an experience that forms the foundation of the judgments they make. Thye simply do not remember, because they were either too young or not alive yet.

We have people that have turned a blind eye to the storm that is currently rising in the Middle East, about to throw away our national freedoms on the high seas, and submit our forces that travel on or over it to the UN. Which does nothing for the countries that seek their own rights to self-determination, but rather strengthens those that seek to curtail individual liberties.

I am not alone in my assessment of this bogus piece of work. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) thinks it's a bad idea and explains why, here in this op-ed piece. I highly suggest that if you have not given this issue much thought, you start researching the pros and cons objectively. And this piece, by Inhofe, is a good place to start.

Burma Violence To Spur UN Action?

The political crisis in Burma is mounting sufficiently enough that a meeting is supposed to take place tonight in the UN. But after watching this organization perform at a snail's pace in other pressing matters around the world, I wouldn't get too excited or expect that anything substantial will emerge from it.

Besides the fact that the UN sat idly by in years past while dictators like Saddam butchered his people, the UN is not known for its speed and efficiency. The current crisis in Darfur bears this out. The UN also is in no hurry to take on the burden of the Iranian situation, so how are we to believe that this meeting tonight will yield anything of any reasonable value?

But, like all things that come out of the UN, I am sure that whatever comes out of tonight's gathering will sound good in a sound bite and look good on paper. Meanwhile, the protests and the repression of such will most likely continue, while the UN tries to hoodwink us all into thinking they are relevant.



Addendum:

Found this article from the WSJ. It adds to the mix in this story, in that, the UN will fail because China will always be there to obstruct anything that would prove the slightest bit constructive. I said when China became a member of the Security Council, the world would someday rue that day. I think that "someday" is already here.