Canada's Principles
Outspokenly courageous in a place without honour. How else to characterize the speech delivered by Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird? How many others have expressed themselves as frankly? For the most part government representatives to the United Nations seek to obey the unspoken rules of harmony within that body, accepting without question what the majority declares.
Free democracies representing enlightened populations do not represent the majority at the United Nations.
Who might ever have imagined that it would be Canada that would take the plunge and separate itself from the majority of Western countries for whom sitting on the fence represents the most acceptable policy of non-committal, to express indignation and denounce the ongoing and by-now familiarly predicable litany of accusations against one single country that accounts for more slights and slanders than the entire UN body-membership.
Including China in his denunciation of offences against human rights highlighting the right to freely practise one's religion without fear of government interference and state-imposed alternatives is yet another courageous stand. In light of the obvious, that China is a hugely productive and influential country with whom the whole world strives to achieve a remunerative trading partnership.
"Canada will not accept or stay silent while the Jewish state is attacked for defending its territory and its citizens. The Second World War taught us all the tragic price of going along just to get along", he reminded the body.
A useful reminder in light of the fact that it was the unspeakable atrocity of the Holocaust that forced the world to examine itself a little more closely, and to admit to itself a certain level of responsibility for the fairly successful extinguishing of six million lives in the effort to demolish the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Had the Thousand-Year Reich been victorious in its quest for world domination, that Final Solution would have been extended to encompass the rest of the world, where concentration camps and accompanying slave-work camps, and the inevitable death camps would have proliferated until the final job was accomplished, ridding the world of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, political dissidents.
In point of fact, there are governments who express dismay that the job was not completed, that Jews lived to see another day, and that the diaspora in its agony, understood that only a country of its own would suffice to protect its people from the destiny that Jew-haters sought to impose upon them. Countries like Iran are enabled to have their representative speak to the General Assembly obliquely of another Holocaust.
John Baird's address emphasizing Canada's acceptance of a duty to help protect the persecuted whether they are Christian minorities in Iran, Iraq and Egypt, or Muslims in Burma, or "Roman Catholic priests and other Christian clergy, and their laity, driven to worship underground in China", represent decent common sense.
It represented a speech that one would expect to come from a representative of the United States, as a country with similar concerns, but which has seen fit of late to be less confrontational and positive about these matters within the UN.
It serves no practical purpose to be modest and discreet about such declarations. There is an immutability about justice and honour and the intrinsic right of every person to experience freedom, denied them in their home countries because they are ruled by despots and thugs. There is no need to evince an air of tolerance and respect toward such intolerant and human-rights-abusing countries as those that pose as a danger to their own populations and the world at large.
Yet many of those brutal regimes are welcomed to speak in the most demeaning, insulting terms of enlightened liberal democracies, and those human-rights-abusing dictatorships are enabled to assume positions of influence on the world stage through various United Nations committees such as the Human Rights Committee, making a mockery of justice and truth. And it was to these regimes that Minister Baird spoke directly.
Bringing into the discussion also those governments who know better, but who remain unwilling to represent themselves as critical of the abusers, for fear of bringing attention to themselves, for fear of being cast as 'friendly' toward Israel and the United States, for fear of being shut out of trade opportunities and energy sources to keep their industries alive.
"The greatest enemies of the United Nations are those who quietly undermine its principles and, even worse, those who sit idly watching its slow decline. We cannot sit idly."
Free democracies representing enlightened populations do not represent the majority at the United Nations.
Who might ever have imagined that it would be Canada that would take the plunge and separate itself from the majority of Western countries for whom sitting on the fence represents the most acceptable policy of non-committal, to express indignation and denounce the ongoing and by-now familiarly predicable litany of accusations against one single country that accounts for more slights and slanders than the entire UN body-membership.
Including China in his denunciation of offences against human rights highlighting the right to freely practise one's religion without fear of government interference and state-imposed alternatives is yet another courageous stand. In light of the obvious, that China is a hugely productive and influential country with whom the whole world strives to achieve a remunerative trading partnership.
"Canada will not accept or stay silent while the Jewish state is attacked for defending its territory and its citizens. The Second World War taught us all the tragic price of going along just to get along", he reminded the body.
A useful reminder in light of the fact that it was the unspeakable atrocity of the Holocaust that forced the world to examine itself a little more closely, and to admit to itself a certain level of responsibility for the fairly successful extinguishing of six million lives in the effort to demolish the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Had the Thousand-Year Reich been victorious in its quest for world domination, that Final Solution would have been extended to encompass the rest of the world, where concentration camps and accompanying slave-work camps, and the inevitable death camps would have proliferated until the final job was accomplished, ridding the world of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, political dissidents.
In point of fact, there are governments who express dismay that the job was not completed, that Jews lived to see another day, and that the diaspora in its agony, understood that only a country of its own would suffice to protect its people from the destiny that Jew-haters sought to impose upon them. Countries like Iran are enabled to have their representative speak to the General Assembly obliquely of another Holocaust.
John Baird's address emphasizing Canada's acceptance of a duty to help protect the persecuted whether they are Christian minorities in Iran, Iraq and Egypt, or Muslims in Burma, or "Roman Catholic priests and other Christian clergy, and their laity, driven to worship underground in China", represent decent common sense.
It represented a speech that one would expect to come from a representative of the United States, as a country with similar concerns, but which has seen fit of late to be less confrontational and positive about these matters within the UN.
It serves no practical purpose to be modest and discreet about such declarations. There is an immutability about justice and honour and the intrinsic right of every person to experience freedom, denied them in their home countries because they are ruled by despots and thugs. There is no need to evince an air of tolerance and respect toward such intolerant and human-rights-abusing countries as those that pose as a danger to their own populations and the world at large.
Yet many of those brutal regimes are welcomed to speak in the most demeaning, insulting terms of enlightened liberal democracies, and those human-rights-abusing dictatorships are enabled to assume positions of influence on the world stage through various United Nations committees such as the Human Rights Committee, making a mockery of justice and truth. And it was to these regimes that Minister Baird spoke directly.
Bringing into the discussion also those governments who know better, but who remain unwilling to represent themselves as critical of the abusers, for fear of bringing attention to themselves, for fear of being cast as 'friendly' toward Israel and the United States, for fear of being shut out of trade opportunities and energy sources to keep their industries alive.
"The greatest enemies of the United Nations are those who quietly undermine its principles and, even worse, those who sit idly watching its slow decline. We cannot sit idly."
"In the defence of freedom and human rights, form cannot prevail over substance. While multilateral action should be preferred, failure to achieve consensus must not prevent the willing from acting to uphold human rights and the founding principles of the United Nations." John BairdThe $60,000 question, however is, can the United Nations be saved from itself?
Labels: Government of Canada, Justice, Politics of Convenience, United Nations
posted by Pieface | 6:31 PM
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