America is likely the most open society in the world, is constantly examining itself, criticizing itself and taking action against itself by way of changes that carry it ever closer to a material and moral quality of life few nations can even imagine.
There is something therefore that it really does not need, and that’s a closed-minded U.N. racism inspector intent on elucidating our faults.
But needed or not, he’s with us now and will stay here for a couple of weeks more, looking into “racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” for a later report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. What occurs to me is that it’s this man, Doudou Diene, who is actually in need of inspection, along with the council and the United Nations itself.
Read up on him, and you find this Senegalese lawyer hardly ever finds much fault with vicious authoritarian regimes that treat human aspirations, dignity and lives as if they were so much trash to be carted away and buried. He concentrates his criticisms instead on Western democracies. His own chief concern, you learn, is “Islamophobia,” and few things have exercised him as much as Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed unfavorably.
The Human Rights Council was formed two years ago because its U.N. predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, seemed almost more a threat to rights than a protector of them. As a commentator observes, this new council represents more of the same; its member-states still include big-time oppressors and it spends more time lambasting Israel than the Sudan, where war on innocent families has been a way of life.
Commentators also say that the United Nations itself is corrupt and has done little that is significant to prevent a long list of stomach-churning atrocities around the globe in recent decades. Just one example: China and Russia joined in casting vetoes of a 2007 Security Council resolution condemning human rights abuses in Myanmar, a land where thousands of cyclone victims are suffering because of a government that doesn’t care enough fully to accept the proffered generosity of others.
As has been noted, this racism inspection comes at a time when a black man is not just running for president of the United States, but is widely given a very good chance of winning the office. America’s racial sins are among its worst, and few would argue discrimination has been wholly overcome, but the country has traveled an enormous distance from the days of Jim Crow. So what’s up?
My own guess is that what many in the world hate most about America is not failings we have corrected better than most, but our wealth, our strength, the soundness of our institutions, the liberties and legal protections of our people. Foreign policy arrogance on our part has much to do with the resentment we face, many contend, but do not suppose this resentment developed yesterday. It has been there for a long, long time, and is exacerbated by authoritarian ideologies and vast cultural differences to the point where our virtues are dismissed and our imperfections magnified beyond recognition.
Maybe our critics abroad and on the home front will think it splendid that a U.N. inspector will be aiming in a matter of weeks to demonstrate some awful facts the world ought to know about, but to me the visit is simply one more reason to wonder with others whether the United Nations is deserving of our support and money, and whether there are not other alternatives that could serve the world much better.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
