For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defence of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saw the writing on the wall three years ago when he spoke of the old Commission on Human Rights having “become too selective and too political in its work”. Piecemeal reform would not be enough. The old system needed to be swept away and replaced by something better. The Human Rights Council was supposed to be that new start, a Council whose members genuinely supported, and were prepared to defend, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet since its inception in June 2006, the Human Rights Council has failed to condemn the most egregious examples of human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere, whilst repeatedly condemning Israel and Israel alone.

It’s been a while since I was last speechless (in spite of my freedoms), but I’m very near to being that now. In only a couple of years, a key UN resolution has been completely upturned and is now meaningless to anyone but muslim dictators.

Yesterday’s attack by the Islamists, led by Pakistan, had the subtlety of a thin-bladed knife slipped silently under the ribs of the Human Rights Council. At first reading the amendment to the resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression might seem reasonable. It requires the Special Rapporteur:

“To report on instances in which the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination …”

The resolution is now an enactment to limit freedom of speech, rather than ensuring it. This is convenient, as violent reactions to someone exercising their freedom of speech can now easily be excused:

On the vote, the amendment was adopted by 27 votes to 15 against, with three abstentions.
The Sri Lankan delegate explained clearly his reasons for supporting the amendment:
“.. if we regulate certain things ‘minimally’ we may be able to prevent them from being enacted violently on the streets of our towns and cities.”

In other words: Don’t exercise your right to freedom of expression because your opponents may become violent. For the first time in the 60 year history of UN Human Rights bodies, a fundamental human right has been limited simply because of the possible violent reaction by the enemies of human rights.

The violence we have seen played out in reaction to the Danish cartoons is thus excused by the Council – it was the cartoonists whose freedom of expression needed to be regulated. And Theo van Gogh can be deemed responsible for his own death.

The Council itself demonstrates the importance of democratic decisions and the right to speak freely:

Incredibly, following the vote on the amendment, the Council descended even further into chaos. At the very last moment, Cuba introduced an oral amendment – clearly against the rules of procedure. When Canada objected they were overruled by the President. When Slovenia – on behalf of the European Union – tried to intervene on a point of order and ask for a ten-minute adjournment, they were ignored. When they tried to protest in another point of order their right to do so was challenged by Egypt, and the Egyptian objection was upheld.

The main resolution was then put to the vote and was adopted by 32 votes in favour, none against, with 15 abstentions.

The inevitable conclusion:

The wafer-thin sham of an international consensus on the promotion and protection of human rights has finally been exposed for what it was – a sham. The fragmentation of human rights now appears inevitable. The proposed Islamic Charter on Human Rights (read “Duties towards Allah”) will certainly go ahead, as will the creation of a parallel Islamic Council on Human Rights. But the OIC will nevertheless continue to attend and dominate the UN Human Rights Council, thereby ensuring its continuing emasculation and descent into total irrelevance.

In the days of Kofi Annan, I supported strengthening the UN. Following this charade one might as well dismantle the whole thing before our new, Muslim overlords attempts to use the UN name to legitimate further atrocities. I am – historically – inclined to agree with a certain musician. The UN as we knew it is dead. Insh’allah, and long live the new UN.

Sources, references and further reading:
International Humanist and Ethical Union

This in turn sparked a debate on the pisstake/news relay site Fark.com, noted chiefly for its uncanny ability to bring down lesser sites with an influx of traffic as hordes of users flock to the source of today’s laugh lulz. As one user points out, the way that the thread swings back and forth between “gun nuts” and “gun control weenies” calling each other out and generally attempting to solve their differences through a verbal pissing contest, aptly highlights the way the whole gun control debate really looks from outside. The level of general asshattery and bullshit in circulation on both sides means that if intended as an actual debate – instead of just an unsolvable political issue that “libruls” and conservatives can fight ceaselessly over – it’s failing spectacularly.

Some statistics first. The FBI keeps track of murders and non-negligent manslaughter in an easy-to-comprehend format. One would think their numbers at least represent reality as we know to a respectable degree. Nationmaster concerns itself with a broad array of statistics, and covers just about every nation – which is useful when you want to compare crime rates between nations. As you can see the number of murders they operate with here differs from the FBI numbers – but their footnotes explain it well enough. They operate with numbers from a survey period of 1998 to 2000, a period during which, going by the FBI stats, violent crime was at an all-time low in the US, as opposed to the most recent annual records. Then there’s the distinction between murder and non-negligent manslaughter, which I am going to assume accounts for the roughly 4000 “missing” murders in the nationmaster stats. If then we can assume that the nationmaster stats are not totally off, we can move on to the stats that are related to the matter at hand – guns.
Note: If anyone can provide more accurate – or just alternate – statistics, then feel free. I’ll include those as well.

Looking at the number of murders by firearms, the US narrowly avoids the bronze medal by placing 4th – however the gap between 3rd and 4th place is distinct. The murder rates can be justified by simply pointing to the latest numbers on total population. When humans live together, someone gets killed every now and then. I believe history itself serves as evidence for that. Three hundred million people together means more people in total get killed. Of course, what makes statistics so much fun is that they let you determine more than just totals. Once you get served the same statistics, but in per-capita format, they’re a lot more valuable. Behold now, the top ten Nations with people who like to shoot each other to death list, in all its statistical glory:

• #1 South Africa: 0.719782 per 1,000 people
• #2 Colombia: 0.509801
• #3 Thailand: 0.312093
• #4 Zimbabwe: 0.0491736
• #5 Mexico: 0.0337938
• #6 Belarus: 0.0321359
• #7 Costa Rica: 0.0313745
• #8 United States: 0.0279271
• #9 Uruguay: 0.0245902
• #10 Lithuania: 0.0230748

While ranking 8th may not seem all that bad, consider that the US is the only fully-industrialised western democracy to make the top ten list of the per capita murders with firearms rating. With the other contenders on the list being corrupt, crime-ridden regimes, newly liberated ex-Soviet states and the festering abomination of violence and crime that is South Africa, I wouldn’t see the above as particularly reassuring. A 1997 Police Foundation survey found that there were at the time approximately 197 million handguns in private ownership across the USA, in addition to various long guns (that tend to be owned by people who own handguns to begin with anyway). The abundance of firearms coupled with the high per capita rate of murders by firearm might lend to the theory that guns cause murders.

But there’s a hitch. It’s called Canada, and it’s located directly north of the USA. Canadians spend their time wrestling grizzly bears, battling cabin fevers, and playing hockey. They, too, have a lot of guns – yet for some reason they spend less time killing each other with their guns. At least that’s how it looks if we go back to the top ten list from before, and keep scrolling down:

Murders with firearms (per capita)

• #20 Canada: 0.00502972 per 1,000 people

… ?

Thus one might conclude that the reason why John and Jane Doe have such a penchant for shooting at each other is most likely not attributable to the number of firearms in circulation, or the – by most standards – liberal gun policy. Note that liberal was not used in the “librul” sense just now; it’s a linguistic paradox that across the pond, liberals are advocating less liberal gun laws, while conservatives are fighting for the gun legislation to remain liberal.

Yet the liberals (this time in the sense of anti-gun American liberals) seem to think that if the guns go away, then crime rates will magically drop and people will stop killing each other. For some reason that strikes me as optimistic to the point of foolishness; if every firearm across the USA suddenly vanished overnight, I doubt it would take them as much as a week to start killing each other with whatever else they could: Knives, bats, pitchforks, chainsaws, sledgehammers, vegetables, screwdrivers, phone boots, swords, kitchen appliances, bleach, and so on. I admit, it would in most cases require a tad more manual labour – not to mention a whole lot of creativity in the cases of vegetables and bleach – but they’d still get the job done.

The error I perceive in the pro-regulation camp’s reasoning stems from what I believe is an attempt to apply European logic to American society. It’s not going to work. Yes, there are certain indisputable facts that support the “less guns = less dead people full of holes” thesis: There are less guns amongst the general public of Europe, and we don’t find killing each other to be that exhilarating anymore – I guess it’s gotten old, we’ve spent the past two millennia years doing it already – as reflected in our per capita murder rates that are significantly lower than those of the US, where there are a lot of guns.
However. They’ve had their guns since they still liked the French , cementing a mindset about guns and self-defense conventions that are radically different from European custom (and, before someone starts pointing fingers, not necessarily wrong because it’s different). Had I been born an American, I don’t doubt that I would have felt disempowered and downright stripped of a very basic right if I weren’t allowed to own a handgun anymore.

I can also identify at least one wide-reaching practical issue that would make effective gun regulation complicated on a purely logistic level as well as ideologically contested: The sheer amount of guns in circulation is so massive that making gun ownership restricted today would prove a rather futile effort. Then there’s the issue of people who employ guns in their “trade”.
As the NRA and other pro-gun advocates continue to point out – the criminals won’t go and turn in their guns just because the government tells them to. There are a lot of legal, traceable guns in the hands of Americans, but it seems naïve to assume that the number of “non-existent” guns in the hands of people who will use them for less-than-honest purposes is negligible enough to warrant disarming everyone else.

However, this doesn’t excuse the much-spoken-of gun nuts, who to this day exert a paranoia rarely seen amongst the sane. You don’t need an AK to defend your home (unless you expect that the army will attack your home), nor is it very likely that the demanding of an assertion that you are not utterly batshit before you get to buy your guns is a certain precursor to men in pink suits arriving at your door and informing you in gruff Soviet voices that you must now – for great justice and Komrad Obama – hand over all your guns or face assimiliation and the GULag. As I mentioned initially, both sides tend to blow things vastly out of proportions.

In Europe (and certain other parts of the world), criminals are much less likely to be armed with a firearm. The guns are harder to get even illegally, more expensive on the whole, and if you want to legally own a handgun or a rifle, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. Not to mention you can’t pick up ammo at your local convenience store. For someone outside of the police force or military to get their hands on a submachine gun or an assault rifle, you’d need to be fairly deep in the underworld in order to have the relevant black-market contacts.

Together, this all constitutes a very unofficial “live and let live” agreement between those who enforce the law, and those who break it. With general public not being armed and prone to return fire and start shootouts, and police officers not ready to unholster their guns and fire away at a second’s notice, criminals don’t have to resort to firearms either. While crime still occurs (and organised, large-scale crime of course operates with firearms), it means the average retard mugger won’t be pointing at you with a gun. Burglars won’t be carrying a revolver “just in case”, and liquor store stick-ups are significantly harder to successfully accomplish if you’re armed with a baseball bat instead of a semi-automatic. It also ensures a minimum of innocent victims caught in eventual crossfires. The results can gleaned from the crime rate statistics covering Europe. It’s just less violent overall. I know some people might shake their heads in disbelief upon reading this, but that is in fact how it is. And it works very well.

While this apparently is very appealing to the American gun-control crowd, I sincerely doubt it would work out the way they hope it will if they adopted the “less guns” stance from here. As I’ve tried to illustrate above, American society itself is in a state where taking the guns away from (largely) law-abiding citizens is simply not advisable. If they had done away with guns two hundred years ago, then things would have been different. Per today, it’s just too late to change that part of American society.

In the end, one can do naught but accept that it is indeed not the guns that kill people – it’s the Americans.

References, sources and further reading
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080414/ap_on_go_ot/gun_sales
http://www.nraila.org/
http://www.nra.org/
http://www.fark.com/
http://www.fbi.gov/
http://www.nationmaster.com/
http://wikipedia.org
http://www.cfc-cafc.gc.ca/
http://michellemalkin.com/

In spite of this, Fitna (فتنة – arab.: strife/conflict/AIDS/murder/donkey rape) does raise some fair – and however un-nice they may be – valid points. Ok, so the muslims aren’t all going to bring out the AKs and semtex and start their revolt at your local mall tomorrow. That’s not really what anyone’s trying to claim either, although certain elements would have you think otherwise. The muslims do, however, come in droves and try to impose their not-so-democratic laws and customs on everyone else. Now, a lof of people like bitching about the flaws of democracy, but seriously – we’ve yet to come up with something better that actually works (working on paper doesn’t count).
And fuck knows we’ve tried already.

The democracy package also happens to come bundled with a couple of fringe benefits that a lot of people I know would be reluctant to give up – the right to say whatever you want, for instance; even if it’s absolute drivel. The right to print bile on cheap paper and sell it as news being another.

Fast-tracking to the point: Only a very small minority of the denizens of the western world would want to do away with democracy. Thanks to the inherent irony of the universe, the self-declared propagators of democracy, equality and fairness are the ones who are most prone to assuming a submissive and completely apologetic stance towards Islam – the only religion that is actively attempting to undermine democracy and civil rights. As per today, the political spectrum is marred by the fact that anything is subject to Muslim Approval ™ before it can be inflicted on the clearly unsuspecting and frail-minded public, in which there is a small percentage of Muslims (who may be offended and threaten to blow something up). This political correctness run rampant effectively ensures that any potential debate about religion in general – and Islam in particular – is stillborn.

The PC police also appears to have reverted to their customary tactics when faced with an issue that tears down the imaginary world they seem to live in: They scream “FAR RIGHT” and “EXTREMIST” at the top of their voices in an attempt to invalidate any and all opinions whoever it is they target may postulate. In the mind of the public, “far right” is still tantamount to “nazi”, and as such it’s a brutally effective verbal assault. No one wants to agree with a nazi, after all. I’m not about to plunge into the whole “but national socialism was a leftist ideology!” debacle, I’m just going to say that being opposed to Muslims as the ruling caste, Islam being the compulsory religion, and the shari’a set of islamic laws replacing whatever Constitution or Magna Carta that makes up your current legislation does not make you an extremist, nor does it make you a nazi.

In spite of this, those who attempt to label anyone disagreeing with them as racists/fascists/nazis/anti-semitists have a point. It’s hard to find anyone sharing your opinion on Islam as an expansive force – who are not at the same time total numpties. You have the traditional Europan far right (and these guys actually are far right), who in recent years have figured out that hating muslims gets you more votes than hating jews and black people. Curiously, back when they advocated the bombing of Israel and persecution of Jews, many of their voters happened to be Muslim. Not only are these political groupings nauseatingly populistic in nature, they’re also comprised almost exclusively of simpletons with a quasi-religious conviction to various ethnic cleansing-ideologies mixed with a bit of nationalism and half-assed liberatarianism. Overseas from Europe, you have neocons and conservatives making up the Christian Right – and while they don’t like muslims, they also happen to be Christian fundamentalists who think the earth is 6000 years old, and fervently maintain that there is no evidence suggesting that baby Jesus did not in fact have a pet Velociraptor that proves the coexistence of mankind and very large reptiles. The following anecdote from where the fundies blissfully ignore the real world ought to illustrate the problem:

It is sometimes asserted that if human bones aren’t found with dinosaur bones, then dinosaurs and man didn’t live together. Creation scientists point out that this is a false assumption; if human bones aren’t found buried with dinosaur bones, it simply means they weren’t buried together.
Evolutionists point out that radiometric dating of rocks containing dinosaur bones shows them to have formed between 65 million years ago and 250 million years ago, whereas rocks with human bones in them are dated as being much newer (less than 5 million years old). Young Earth Creationists believe that these methods of dating rocks provide false results, and therefore reject this argument.

Their approach to scientific method and the convergence of evidence can be summarized as follows: If the evidence does not fit the conclusion you had decided in advance to reach, based on your belief in an elaborate fairytale – ignore it!
Their use of the term “creation scientist” implies that they think creationism is somehow related to science. The only relation so far is that a band of creationists have attempted to pass their ramblings off as actual science, by casting a very thin veil of factuality over their beliefs. It doesn’t work. Basically, whatever stuff you happen to believe in “because it said so in the Bible” does not constitute as science. Creationism (and its baseborn derivation, Intelligent Design) is not science. No one takes you seriously. The creationist lobby are also famous for trying to make you believe that “Big Science” is in fact …

… a shadowy group of men, exercising their absolute authority over any and all science across the world from a secluded penthouse office space, where they gather in secret around a table in the shape of an aborted fætus to plan who they will next excommunicate from their scholarly brotherhood, whose principal values are communism, atheism, and darwinism…

This is not the case. Science is not some exclusive brotherhood where you have to perform heinous rituals and pay tribute to pagan gods to be initiated and allowed to publish. It’s a public matter. Scientific journals are entirely public. The reason why so-called creation scientists’ works are not published, is because they can’t get through the mandatory peer review – their failings to comply with basic scientific method causes it to not qualify as science; it’s not falsifiable, it’s based largely on the assumption that a divine creator exists (which in turn is hardly testable), and the lack of solid, empirical evidence is simply astounding. If they had been actual scientists, they would have gone back to the lab and tried again, this time employing proper scientific method – but as this is a poorly disguised attempt at validating religious beliefs by turning them into science, that’s simply not possible. The solution?
In the tradition of whiny cunts who think they’re right in spite of being totally wrong, they then run to the media and claim that the scientific community is biased and hates them and that the theory of evolution is to blame for the holocaust, all scientists are atheists, and atheists give less to charity, therefore it follows logically that creationism is superior and should replace actual science as a subject in schools.

Add to this Conservatives’ habit of filling their so-called encyclopedia with distinctly non-encyclopedic material, such as unfounded and unsourced “warning to parents about Dungeons and Dragons” (I’m not lying, check the revisions history for the page if they’ve changed it by the time you read this), that they’re opposed to civil rights unless you’re a heterosexual male, tend to mutilate their children on a regular basis (it’s only out of love!), and so on.

The only thing that makes them better than Muslims is that there’s not quite as many of them that seem to be quite as interested in dismantling democracy and western civilzation. At least not at this point. I’m fairly certain that in the ideal world of a fundie, everyone’s a pious christian (in fact, other religions, not to mention atheism, would be outlawed and severely punished), being gay is punishable by death, any doctor found to have performed an abortion must be stoned to death along with the woman he performed the abortion on (and whoever impregnated the bitch would be castrated to prevent further mishaps), and only the most pious can become leaders. And I’ll bet you anything they would think this is the right and just way of doing things, oblivious to the obvious fact that avoiding a situation like this is exactly why opposition to Islamistic expansion exists in the first place. Fundamentalist Christian rule doesn’t appeal to me any more than Muslim sovereignty.

Democracy is ideally secular – in the sense that everyone can choose whichever version of the fairytale they want, and then live by it – all as long as you don’t get in peoples’ faces, and tell them they’re condemned to eternal torment in a fiery pit because they happen to not harken to your particular version of the fairytale… Or attempt to persuade others into converting to your religion of peace by threatening to kill them if they don’t. You would even be free to not believe in fairytales in the first place.

Finally, as is to be expected in this age of user-created content, muslims have taken it upon themselves to be clever back. This anti-Fitna flick is likely done in a fit of righteous indignation, but it turns out to fail spectacularly for a number of reasons. It seems, for instance, to assume that The War on Terror (woe to thee, dictionaries) is a war on the behalf of christianity, like some Pope-sanctioned Crusade of the kind that went out of fashion in the 13th century. Unless the US of A are the embodiment of Christendom – and I’m sure there are people who think they are, anyway – the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are entirely on the behalf of those nations who launched them. While it is mandatory that the Commander in Chief invokes his god every now and then, I’m pretty sure the executive orders came from a mere mortal, and that it is indeed only mere mortals who pilot the bombers (that the pilots might feel a bit like god at times is a different matter), and – judging by the body count – only mere mortals who trudge around in the desert and get shot at.
I’m also a little disappointed that he missed some of the more hilarious quotes from the bible. I appreciate the need for doomy and gloomy statements that match those of Fitna, but these are still more fun – and some of these others do involve death and massacring. Admittedly, most are from the Old Testament, but still: There’s a law dictating how to cut your hair, and how to grow your beard. There’s a law specifying that you can’t have people from neighbouring areas as slaves (maybe it’s time to stop abusing your Mexican maid?), and a whole host of laws that should provide you with ample opportunity to throw stones at your daughters and wives. In the end, the whole mess comes down the chronology – Europe rallied to kill muslims 900 years ago, and our collective conscience has been suffering dearly ever since. But that was 900 years ago; Muslims were crashing civilian planes into large buildings 7 only years ago. Therein lies the difference.

At the end of the day, someone who’s opposed to Islamic expansion yet not of a rabid disposition in either direction when it comes down to political convictions (and not too hot on the religion thing in general), is in for a real challenge when trying to settle down somewhere in the political landscape. Michelle Malkin obviously has a somewhat functional brain, but her tendency to erupt in a flood (pardon the lewd imagery) of ad homimem bullshit turns me away – as does her amazing ability to throw hissy fits over Absolut-ly nothing – even if she’s good at highlighting what she calls the “shari’a creep” (a very apt term). The way she runs a closed system where her neocon disciples circlejerk endlessly over her writings isn’t particularly impressive either – fuck’s the point of writing something online if only people who already shamelessly fawn over you are allowed to voice their opinions without having their names, addresses and home phone numbers made available on her blog, after which follows the customary death threats from her acolytes? I don’t get it.

With “docility” being the favoured political stance on anything unpleasant in Europe these days, I guess we’re going to see history repeat itself soon enough. Almost a hundred years ago now, tensions in Europe got the better of someone, and we killed millions of our own and turned half of France into a ditch. Thirty years later, the short guy with the silly moustache wanted to try his hand at war, and so we ended up having our asses saved, again, by the same dirty colonials we sent off on some rickety boat 400 years ago, who, while we bickered amongst ourselves as always, grew into a superpower who didn’t really like us, but helped out us out anyway. Not only did they make sure we didn’t starve during the war, they also made sure we didn’t all end up speaking Russian as part of the aftermath of the war. If we keep ignoring any and all threats that are not just at our door – but nicely settled in our living room – we’re going to have to depend on some foreign superpower to pull us out of the mire we’ve gotten ourselves stuck in, again. This time, however, the question of which superpower it is, is a lot more open. Comrade Putin, perhaps? Our friends of small stature and large-yet-still-steadily-growing economy from the east?
The playing field is a little too open for comfort

Post-publish edit: As of 14th of April, comment registration on Michelle Malkin’s blog was re-opened, meaning anyone wishing to comment on her blog ought to peg down a username before it closes again closed. I’m still opposed to the idea of demanding registrations for posting comments in the first place, but as we’re guests on her premises, common sense and etiquette demand we play by her rules.

References, resources and further reading
http://eupolitics.einnews.com/news/geert-wilders
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3636049.ece – Geert Wilders is “far-right”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943764.html – Geert Wilders is still “far-right”
http://www.startribune.com/local/17406054.html
http://youtube.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://conservapedia.org/
http://pajamasmedia.com/
http://michellemalkin.com/
http://www.stephenjaygould.org