UN "Human Rights" Official: Boston Got What It Deserved

Guest post by Anne Bayefsky


UN Human Rights Council “expert” Richard Falk has published a statement saying Bostonians got what they deserved in last week’s terror attack. He quotes W.H. Auden to make his point: "to whom evil is done/do evil in return.”

Richard Falk is the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” He has held the post since 2008, despite exposure as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

In his latest rant, published online on April 21, 2013 by foreignpolicyjournal.com. Falk repeats the libel that prior to 9/11 President George W. Bush was seeking a “pretext” for war, and that anything Israel is the opposite of “justice and peace.”

And then he attacks Bostonians head-on. The police action in Boston was a "hysterical dragnet." Boston’s dead were "canaries" that "have to die" because of America’s “fantasy of global domination."

Falk explains the attacks as justifiable “resistance.” In his words: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

He minimizes the crime and predicts worse if America doesn’t change its ways to better accommodate the demands of “the Islamic world.” As he puts it: “In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen…”.

For years, Falk has been espousing the worst forms of antisemitism from his UN perch, and for his efforts has been rewarded with repeated opportunities by the Council to lecture others on his world view.

That world view is shared by the 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), who only a week ago at UN Headquarters refused to define terrorism unless an exception clause was created for “legitimate struggle.”

The OIC controls the balance of power at the UN’s top human rights body, by holding majorities in both the African and Asian regional groups. Africa and Asia, in turn, control 26 of the 47 seats on the Council. With the backing of the OIC, therefore, Falk has been encouraged and protected.

The Obama administration has long championed the UN Human Rights Council, which it decided to join as one of its first foreign policy moves in 2009. Thanks to the Obama administration, U.S. began a second three-year term on the Council this past January. At the opening of the Council’s most recent session in March, Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer traveled to Geneva to address what she called “this esteemed body.”

There is nothing about a “human rights” body that countenances the likes of Richard Falk that is “esteemed,” and the United States should resign--effective immediately.


Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her @AnneBayefsky.

Advanced Levity Commences as Global Warming Con Game Implodes

Every. Single. Prediction. Every single one by the Climatards (which is the term they prefer, I hear) has turned out wrong, but none as spectacularly as this:

No, the world isn't getting warmer (as you may have noticed)... [and] official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed ... the ‘scientific basis’ for [reshaping the] economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases...

Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely...

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.

...Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century... But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower... Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.

...The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature... Its source is impeccable. The line showing world temperatures comes from the Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ database, which contains readings from more than 30,000 measuring posts. This was added to the 75 and 95 per cent certainty bands to produce the graph by a group that amalgamates the work of 20 climate model centres working for the IPCC.

...In the Seventies, scientists and policymakers were just as concerned about a looming ‘ice age’ as they have been lately about global warming – as the Time magazine cover pictured here illustrates... Temperatures had been falling since the beginning of the Forties. Professors warned that the trend would continue and food crises were going to get worse because of shorter growing seasons.

Newsweek magazine reported that evidence of cooling was so strong ‘meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it’. But, it lamented, ‘scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections’. It said the planet was already ‘a sixth of the way towards the next ice age’.

While recently every kind of extreme weather event has been blamed on warming, in the Seventies the culprit was cooling. One article predicted ‘the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded’, along with ‘droughts, floods, extended dry spells and long freezes’...

The recent leak of the Climategate 3.0 emails offers additional evidence that global warming is about as genuine as a mother-in-law's hug.

Not that any evidence would dissuade the lawless extremists at the EPA.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: A Foolproof Plan

Lee:

In 2010, the last year when stats were compiled nationwide, over 10,000 people died in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That far outnumbers the people killed by crazies with assault weapons. Clearly, the only way to deal with this tragedy is to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. We should call the initiative... Prohibition. It’s bound to work.

Then, we’ll go after the big one - we’ll make the smoking of any plant illegal (excluding the serious mind-altering ones, of course, since they’re harmless). That will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year, and an estimated 5 million worldwide, once the United Nations adopts and enforces the policy globally.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? The U.N.'s Internet Surveillance Document Leaked

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is an agency of the United Nations, a world body largely populated with dictatorships, oligarchies, violent theocracies and other delightful governments. The ITU is, as you may have heard, making a play to takeover control of the Internet.

Yesterday morning, I wrote about the closed-door [ITU] meeting where they were working on standardizing "deep packet inspection" -- a technology crucial to mass Internet surveillance. Other standards bodies have refused to touch DPI because of the risk to Internet users that arises from making it easier to spy on them. But not the ITU.

The ITU standardization effort has been conducted in secret, without public scrutiny. Now, Asher Wolf writes:

I publicly asked (via Twitter) if anyone could give me access to documents relating to the ITU's DPI recommendations, now endorsed by the U.N. The ITU's senior communications officer, Toby Johnson, emailed me a copy of their unpublished policy recommendations.

OOOPS!

5 hours later, they emailed, asking me not to publish it, in part or in whole, and that it was for my eyes only.

Please publish it (credit me for sending it to you.)

Also note:

1. The recommendations *NEVER* discuss the impact of DPI.

2. A FEW EXAMPLES OF POTENTIAL DPI USE CITED BY THE ITU:

"I.9.2 DPI engine use case: Simple fixed string matching for BitTorrent"
"II.3.4 Example “Forwarding copy right protected audio content”"
"II.3.6 Example “Detection of a specific transferred file from a particular user”"
"II.4.2 Example “Security check – Block SIP messages (across entire SIP traffic) with specific content types”"
"II.4.5 Example “Identify particular host by evaluating all RTCP SDES packets”"
"II.4.6 Example “Measure Spanish Jabber traffic”"
"II.4.7 Example “Blocking of dedicated games”"
"II.4.11 Example “Identify uploading BitTorrent users”"
"II.4.13 Example “Blocking Peer-to-Peer VoIP telephony
with proprietary end-to-end application control protocols”"
"II.5.1 Example “Detecting a specific Peer-to-Peer VoIP telephony with proprietary end-to-end application control protocols”"

Hit the jump for more of Asher's analysis and the download link:
3. Security threats against DPI entities is listed as:
- Destruction of DPI-related information;
- Corruption or modification of DPI-related information;
- Theft, removal or loss of DPI-related information;
- Disclosure of DPI-related information;
- Interruption of services (specifically mentions DoS.)

Giving the U.N. control of the Internet is akin to giving a 16-year old boy keys to the new Porsche and a fifth of Southern Comfort.