ISLAMIC UN "HUMAN RIGHTS" BOSS SEEKS "PROACTIVE" WEB CENSORSHIP
BY ALEX NEWMAN
SEE: https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/29921-islamic-un-human-rights-boss-seeks-proactive-web-censorship?vsmaid=847&vcid=3987; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
A fringe Islamic prince turned United Nations “High Commissioner for Human Rights” infamous for comparing President Donald Trump to Hitler and ISIS, and for protecting child-raping UN troops from exposure, has a new target: free speech on the Internet. Under the guise of stopping “hate speech,” a concept first pushed by the murderous Soviet regime that has evolved to encompass any speech the establishment hates, outgoing UN “human rights” boss Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called on the Big Tech companies to “proactively” step up their escalating censorship campaign. Facebook and Google seemed more than happy to comply.
The disgraced UN bureaucrat, a frequent advocate of gun control in America, also demanded that the Internet and the companies that inhabit it be governed by UN “human rights law,” which is entirely incompatible with traditional U.S. notions of inalienable God-given rights and free speech. But Hussein's extremist successor, a Castro-loving socialist who defected to a murderous communist dictatorship, appears to hold the same dim view of liberty and genuine human rights as he does. Still, the dynamic UN duo are now so toxic that the U.S. government is severing ties and threatening to cut all funding from the UN's entire disgraced “human rights” apparatus.
Perhaps learning from past failures, Hussein was strategic about his calls for Internet censorship. Rather than just outright demanding that speech he disagrees with be purged from the Web — for instance, speech criticizing mass Islamic migration into the West, Islam itself, or even its prophet, Mohamed — he interspersed his comments between references to reported Buddhist attacks against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (also known as Burma). In fact, he even threatened Internet companies such as Facebook that they could be prosecuted by self-styled global “authorities” as “accessories” to crimes, merely for not taking down speech that the UN thinks should be banned.
“We've seen from the jurisprudence of the past that if you've enabled, you've abetted, you've been an accessory,” Hussein said before quickly adding that he was not accusing Facebook of being an accessory but that “they have to be sure that they know where they are and what side of the law they are on.” Yet again, the unhinged bureaucrat tried to suggest that Americans could be “prosecuted” by the UN and its disgraced kangaroo court, despite the fact that the U.S. government has never signed any treaty or agreement legitimizing the farce. He recently threatened that Trump could be prosecuted for “incitement” against the media for exposing the lies of the establishment's propaganda machine.
After threatening that the social-media companies could be prosecuted if they do not obey him, Hussein went on to call for proactive censorship by the Big Tech giants. “They should be thinking proactively about what steps they will take to mitigate that,” said the UN bureaucrat, infamous for, among other scandals during his brief tenure, terrorizing whistleblowers who exposed the systematic rape of children by UN “peace” troops, and the leaking of the identity of Chinese human-rights defenders to the mass-murdering communist regime in Beijing so the activists could be kidnapped before testifying.
Keep in mind that for the UN and the globalist establishment behind it, terms such as “hate speech” and “extremism” have come to mean speech that exposes their agenda. Indeed, Hussein's comments came just weeks after all of the Big Tech companies colluded to disappear Alex Jones and Infowars from their platforms under the guise of fighting “hate speech,” without citing a single example of the allegedly hateful speech. Conflating Jones' and Infowars' anti-establishment truth-telling with Buddhist generals inciting genocide is outrageous, of course. But that is exactly what the UN boss and the establishment are seeking to do.
Obviously, this is not the first time the UN has openly demanded an end to free speech. As The New American reported a year ago, after a protest and counter-protest in Charlottesville turned violent, the UN released a statement demanding that the U.S. government “provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights [free speech and freedom of association] are not misused to promote racist hate speech.” By contrast, the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protects the inalienable right to free speech, even if it is racist or abhorrent. And the UN knows that very well, but apparently believes its discredited “human rights law” trumps the Constitution.
In 2014, meanwhile, again under the guise of “human rights,” the UN viciously attacked the Japanese government and its constitutional protections for free speech. At least two separate UN outfits, the dictator-dominated UN “Human Rights Commission” and the UN “Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” both condemned Japan for failing to criminalize free speech. The global body called on authorities to overthrow the nation’s constitution and take “appropriate steps to revise its legislation” by criminalizing and punishing speech, rallies, and groups considered “hateful.” The outfit also demanded a “comprehensive law prohibiting racial discrimination.” On top of that, the UN called on the government to “prohibit all propaganda” that might incite "discrimination" or “hate.”
Perhaps relying on the ignorance of the media, or perhaps ignorant himself, Hussein has been careful not to reveal the origin of the whole “hate-speech” agenda. But it is hardly a secret. A 2011 report by the respected Hoover Institution, for instance, exposed the originator of the “hate speech” campaign: the mass-murdering hate regime ruling the Soviet Union. “The introduction of hate-speech prohibitions into international law was championed in its heyday by the Soviet Union and allies,” the paper on the “sordid origin of hate-speech laws” explained. “Their motive was readily apparent. The communist countries sought to exploit such laws to limit free speech.” Acceptance of hate-speech schemes by what remains of the free world, the report added, could have “devastating consequences for the preservation of free speech.”
For good measure, Hussein pretended to be concerned about too much Internet censorship by Big Tech. His supposed defense of free expression, though, was in reality, a call for supplanting genuine free speech, as protected by the First Amendment, with UN-approved speech controls. Among other concerns, apparently reacting to Trump's threats to social-media companies amid growing censorship of conservatives and Christians, Hussein said “there is also another danger (of being) overregulated.” To deal with that, the UN “rights” chief, a prince with the Islamic monarchy ruling Jordan, called for the Internet and social media to “be regulated by international human rights law.”
To understand the implications of that, it helps to look at what the UN dishonestly touts as its international “human rights law.” Consider that, according to the UN's “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” all of your “rights” can be restricted or abolished by government at will under virtually any pretext. In Article 29 of the declaration, which claims that the pseudo-rights can be limited “by law” under the guise of everything from “public order” to “the general welfare,” the UN even argues that “rights and freedoms” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
Such an absurdity would be tantamount to the First Amendment declaring that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech — unless that speech is being used to criticize Congress or otherwise makes Congress unhappy or goes against its purposes and principles. America's founders said publicly that rights such as free speech were inalienable and came from God — the idea that those rights could be restricted or abolished would have sounded grotesque. Obviously, the two views on human rights are incompatible at a basic level. The two visions are actually almost opposites — unalienable God-given rights protected in the Constitution on one hand, versus revocable government-granted privileges on the other.
There are some limits to free speech in America. In a ruling that reversed the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan group, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brandenburg v. Ohio that even the “advocacy of the use of force” is protected, with the exception being if it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.” That means pro-genocide speech that was actually intended to foment a slaughter — such as the rhetoric of many of South Africa's top political leaders, or what has reportedly taken place in Myanmar that Hussein relied on for his dishonest propaganda — would not be protected under the Supreme Court's understanding of the First Amendment. In short, even considering the isolated case in question, there is no need for Internet firms such as Facebook to defer to UN “human rights” absurdities in deciding to censor speech.
It seems that everyday people understand this, by and large. On the few establishment propaganda organs that have not yet removed their comment sections to conceal how discredited the media has become, it was abundantly clear that Americans and news consumers worldwide saw right through the dishonest UN and establishment attempt to subvert free speech. In an article posted on Yahoo! News, for instance, virtually every comment ridiculed Hussein, the UN, and their totalitarian agenda to smash free speech. The U.S. government appears to be cracking down on the UN's increasingly unhinged behavior as well.
In response to the blatant totalitarianism-mongering by the UN's almost comically discredited “human rights” machine, the Trump administration has taken serious action. First, it was announced that the U.S. government would withdraw from the UN “Human Rights Council,” a disgraced body that is dominated by many of the world's most brutal mass murderers — communists, socialists, and Islamist tyrants galore. To understand just how outlandish the body is, Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddhafi led the UN Human Rights Commission a little over a decade ago, forcing the bureaucracy to be re-branded as a “council” after becoming the subject of global ridicule.
More recently, the Trump administration, via National Security Adviser John Bolton, announced that it was planning to cut funding from Hussein's disgraced UN Office of the “High Commissioner for Human Rights.” With a Castro-loving Marxist set to take over the outfit to promote abortion and global socialism, an end to U.S. tax subsidies for this farce cannot come soon enough. UN officials insist the U.S. government's withdrawal of American tax funding from the “human rights” bureaucracy will not be “fatal” to the farce. Nor will U.S. government withdrawals from key UN agencies and agreements such as the UN “education” bureaucracy known as UNESCO or the “Paris Agreement” purporting to fight “climate change.”
However, Congress and the president could easily deliver a fatal blow to the dictatorial UN if they wanted to. In fact, legislation sitting in the House Foreign Affairs Committee known as the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 193) would not only end U.S. membership in the dictators club, it would also expel its headquarters from U.S. soil. By passing this simple bill, America could protect its independence and end the UN's decades-long war against true human rights. But for that to happen, outraged Americans will have to demand it in large numbers. There has never been a better time than now.
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