Inhuman Rights

David Littman: Just one victim of the Islamised UNHRC

Here is a brilliant piece by Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss on the subversion of the UN Human Rights Council, which has become a friend of and a tool for the Islamic jihad everywhere. It's a must-read.

One particularly worrying example they cite is the following:

Another person harassed was David Littman of the Association for World Education. This past June, during the eighth session of the HRC, Littman was scheduled to discuss the human rights of women in certain countries, including Islamic ones. Among other things, Littman’s testimony criticized human rights abuses resulting from the implementation of sharia—in particular, the forced marriage of Muslim girls as young as nine and the stoning of women for adultery, practices that cannot be adequately described without reference to the Koran. In stark violation of the rules, which state that no delegate can receive transcripts of forthcoming testimony, Amr Roshdy Hassan of Egypt had somehow obtained an advance copy of Littman’s speech. Hassan and others interrupted Littman a total of 16 times. The testimony, which should have taken only a few minutes to give, was prolonged to about two hours by various points of order and an extended 40-minute recess.

Backing up Hassan was Siddiqui, who claimed that Littman’s statement would “amount to spreading hatred against certain members of this Council.” Upon returning from the 40-minute recess, Costea ruled that the “Council is not prepared to discuss . . . religious matters in depth,” and reiterated with strange grammar and even stranger logic a ruling from an earlier session: “As long as a statement is made with restraint from making a judgment or evaluation of a particular set of legislation which is not in the point of our discussion, the speaker may continue.”

Littman did continue—by pointing out that in Iran and Sudan, women are buried up to their waists in pits and pummeled to death with blunt stones for the crime of infidelity, and that 96 percent of Egyptian women are still subjected to female genital mutilation, despite state legislation formally banning the practice (note that the HRC does permit a “judgment” or “evaluation” of secular legislation pertaining to human rights abuses). But the instant Littman suggested that only a fatwa issued by Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, an influential Egyptian cleric, could reverse this ghastly trend, Hassan once more interjected, demanding a vote on Littman’s testimony. “I will not see Islam crucified in the Council,” he declaimed. But asking an Islamic cleric to intervene to stop a human rights abuse is hardly a crucifixion of Islam.

They conclude the piece as follows:

"At the close of World War II, Bertrand Russell observed that the human species was historically unwilling to acquiesce to its own survival. An intellectual accomplice in this ongoing suicide pact is surely cultural relativism, an invention of Western liberalism that non-Western reactionaries have taken up as a license to kill and butcher people in peace and quiet. There has been no worse exemplar of this fatal tendency than the UN Human Rights Council."

Read it all.