Jewish World Review Sept. 25, 2002 / 19 Tishrei 5763

Wendy McElroy

Wendy McElroy
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
James Glassman
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports


Why is prez promising to embrace UN radical social engineering programs?


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | A statement went almost unnoticed in President Bush's Sept. 12 address to the United Nations General Assembly on Iraq.

The president pledged to rejoin UNESCO -- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization -- from which the U.S. had withdrawn in protest in 1984. Rejoining is a mistake.

The U.N. and its alphabet-soup agencies are committed to spreading a politically correct agenda on issues such as gender around the globe. The U.N. is a corrupt, mismanaged and power-hungry organization that has contempt for the U.S. and for individual rights.

UNESCO is not the benign agency it is sometimes painted as, as President Reagan discovered. In the early '80s, American tax dollars were funding about 25 percent of UNESCO's bloated budget which -- it was discovered -- went largely to fund leftist causes or into the pockets of then Director-General Mahtar M'Bow and his cronies.

The rest of the American tax money went into producing proposals such as UNESCO's "New World Information Order," approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1974. The policy required journalists around the world to be licensed to practice so that cultural bias in reporting could be prevented through the threat of revocation or non-issuance. Translation: Western journalists and their values would no longer be allowed to "dominate."

In exiting UNESCO with congressional support, Reagan declared the agency "extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with. It has exhibited a hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press."

In re-entering UNESCO, Bush stated that the "organization has been reformed." UNESCO's critics, such as the Heritage Foundation, dispute the effectiveness of reorganization within the notoriously corrupt agency. But, assuming UNESCO has been ably reformed, what is its true mission? What will the U.S. be funding to the tune of at least $60 million a year?

UNESCO's first Director-General Julian Huxley prepared the official document "UNESCO, Its Purpose and Its Philosophy" in 1946. Speaking of a need to transcend traditional religions and political-economic doctrines (e.g. free trade), Huxley declared, "The task before UNESCO ... is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purposes." [Emphasis added] He wrote of the "transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization."

UNESCO's current mission statement speaks in vague terms of contributing "to peace and security in the world ... in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms."

The ideology lurking beneath the noble vagueness can be judged by which issues UNESCO addresses and which it skirts.

UNESCO is ambitious in the area of bioethics. This is the crossroads between medical science and morality that includes issues such as abortion, cloning, euthanasia, population control, and gene therapy. According to a 2000 address by Koichiro Matsuura, then director-general of UNESCO, the agency's objective was "the construction of a shared bioethics, that is, of universal principles in bioethics." It has established active sub-agencies like the UNESCO Bioethics Committee and International Regulation of Gene Therapy.

Huxley predicted this focus in his 1946 document. He wrote, "Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable."

One bioethical issue UNESCO skirts is China's one-child policy, established in 1979. For decades, the policy has forced women who exceed the government-approved number of children to abort, even in late pregnancy.

Among the millions of the policy's victims are the first-born infant girls killed by parents who are desperate for a son to support them in old age. UNESCO itself estimates such deaths at "more than one million."

Why, then, is there no official condemnation of the one-child policy, which is arguably the greatest bioethical atrocity on the globe? UNESCO makes clear and official statements of what should be legal regarding gene therapy. Yet it seems unable to come up with a firm statement on one-child policies. UNESCO's Web site includes articles defending -- as well as critiquing -- China's policy, as though the murder of millions of female infants was a debatable issue. UNESCO seems determined to support the family planning programs of the U.N. which has been complicit in the slaughter.

The U.N. and UNESCO have no respect for individual rights or for America. One day after the U.S. was voted off the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, commentator Juan Williams asked Mary Robinson -- then U.N. high commissioner on human rights -- if she worried about America withholding funds. She replied "I hope the Americans see it as a wake-up call to take a more positive approach." She believed Americans should try to "earn their way back" onto U.N. committees.

A more accurate phrasing is "buy" their way back. The U.S. should walk away.

Enjoy this writer's work? Why not sign-up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.



JWR contributor Wendy McElroy is the editor of Ifeminists.com. She also edited Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Independent Institute, 1999) and Sexual Correctness: The Gender Feminist Attack on Women (McFarland, 1996). She lives with her husband in Canada. Comment by clicking here.

Up

09/18/02: Dirty dealings kill men's panel
09/11/02: Taking back your power
09/05/02: Calm down, Hootie!
08/21/02: Will Congress empower a group of radical feminists to oversee money slated for Afghan women?
08/14/02: Empower the U.N. with power to sculpt American laws and institutions into the image of gender feminism!?
08/01/02: Practicing 'intellectual virtue'
07/24/02: All male, bad. All female, good: Your tax dollars at work
07/11/02: Put Up or Shut Up
07/03/02: NOW they've done it, again!
06/19/02: A dark cloud shades U.N. Women's Treaty
06/10/02: This Father's Day, send justice
05/31/02: When good women do nothing
05/28/02: Feminists claiming motherhood as liberal cause
05/20/02: Wounds in health care system are self-inflicted: Or, why "my son the lawyer" makes more sense
05/10/02: Are parents boycotting public schools?
05/03/02: Women can't be gun-shy about defense
04/25/02: The Bill of Intellectual Rights
04/19/02: World Bank or World Government?: The World Bank is blackmailing impoverished nations
04/12/02: Victims From Birth: Engineering Defects in Helpless Children Crosses the Line
04/05/02: The professor made me cry, now I will make him pay!
03/31/02: Doctors and teens --- parents be on guard
03/22/02: I was born, now I'm suing you!
03/15/02: The 21st Century is knocking at the barricaded door of feminism
03/08/02: Fun and games at the Ms mag Bulletin Board
03/01/02: Andrea Yates, NOW, and Feminist Jurisprudence
02/22/02: Lady, Your Slip is Showing
02/14/02: 'Abusing' Valentine's Day
02/11/02: Is NOW Pro-Choice or Pro-Abortion?
02/01/02: Are 'fathers' rights' a factor in male suicide?
01/25/02: Is the U.N. Running Brothels in Bosnia?
01/18/02: 'Freedom' at another's (moral) expense
01/11/02: Feminists hit Ground Zero with WTC funds grab
01/04/02: Males winning "diversity discrimination" cases is good?
12/21/01: Good will toward men
12/14/01: "Boss Tweed" feminism
12/07/01: Call me 'anti-woman'

© 2001, Wendy McElroy