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Have a Very Intolerant Day

November 16 was National Button Day, National Fast Food Day and International Tolerance Day: if you’ve never heard of International Tolerance Day, that just shows how intolerant you are.

International Tolerance Day was celebrated at the World Tolerance Summit at the Armani Hotel in Dubai. A photo of the event shows three Arab Muslim men in burnooses sitting under the Summit's subtitle, "Prospering from Pluralism: Embracing Diversity through Innovation and Collaboration."

The UAE is an Arab Muslim entity. Good luck obtaining citizenship if you aren’t an Arab Muslim. Leaving Islam is forbidden, but the government has a special site encouraging infidels to convert to Islam.

Diversity is great. As long as it’s limited to Muslim men. Pluralism is fantastic. But you’re not allowed to leave Islam. And tolerance is applied equally to Muslim men and other Muslim men on Tolerance Day.

Like most terrible global ideas, International Tolerance Day was invented by the UN. Or specifically by UNESCO around the time that Bosnia and Herzegovina joined up before becoming enmeshed in a genocidal war. Because nothing says tolerance like genocidal ethnic conflicts at the United Nations.

Key conferences were held in Russia, Korea and Turkey: three countries in a permanent state of war.

The Turkey tolerance conference featured a renewal of Turkey’s emergency law after over 10,000 Kurds were killed by Turkish authorities. After the Korean tolerance conference, North Korea sent armed infiltrators across the border. And during the Moscow tolerance conference, Chechen Islamic terrorists attacked a hospital and took thousands of hostages. The 1995 score read: Intolerance 3, Tolerance 0.

But that’s always the way it is at the UN where tolerance is on the menu, but never on the plate.

International Tolerance Day led to the Year of Tolerance in 1995. It wasn’t very successful as the Bosnian War was still going on, the First Chechen War was underway, and the Taliban were wrapping up their takeover of Afghanistan. The Turks were tolerantly killing the Kurds, the Kurds in Iraq were killing each other, Bill Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs, and the United Nations retreated from Somalia.

And that was the last Year of Tolerance.

The Year of Tolerance Hell spawned the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize to commemorate the Year from Tolerance Hell and the 125th birthday of Gandhi, who had urged the British to surrender to Nazi Germany and suggested that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife.”

Since then a day of tolerance is about as much tolerance as anyone could manage.

Tolerance Day sits on the imaginary UN calendar between World Philosophy Day, and World Toilet Day. Like every UN holiday, it’s an utterly useless exercise in spreading awareness of things and of making commitments to improve or end other things whether they be philosophy, tolerance or toilets.

The 25th anniversary of International Tolerance Day has passed with less fanfare than World Toilet Day. UNESCO hasn’t become famous for promoting tolerance, but for spreading anti-Semitism. In October, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Permanent Observer to UNESCO described the ugly scene after the historical moment when the first UNESCO French-Jewish director-general was inaugurated.

"The day that Azoulay was inaugurated, I left the ceremony with some 15 Ambassadors and UNESCO officials. Number 3 in the hierarchy ran after me. In earshot of his colleagues, he shouted: 'Shimon, are you now happy to have your Jew as director-general?'”

That’s what tolerance look like at UNESCO and the UN.

According to UNESCO, its mission is to “deepen the binds of a single humanity, through understanding, dialogue and knowledge.” And occasional anti-Semitism. Hating Jews is one of those few things that Islamist sheikhs, European technocrats and American social justice crybullies can all agree on.

What better way to bind humanity together than finding common ground on hating Jews?

That’s why UNESCO, like the rest of the UN, divides its time equally between pointless hearings and sessions whose only purpose is justifying the hefty restaurant budgets of its personnel, and blaming Israel for everything under the sun, and in solar systems, galaxies and universes far beyond the sun.

As Hitler and Stalin knew, you can’t “deepen the binds of a single humanity” without hating and murdering a whole lot of people in general and Jews specifically along the way.

And Tolerance Day doesn’t look much better in America.

Tolerance Day is hard enough. Don’t even think about expanding it to a year, a month or even a week.

Last year, Riverside-Brookfield High School in Illinois tried to expand it into Tolerance Week with Monday as Gender Equality Day, Tuesday as LGBT Pride Day, and Friday as Minority Empowerment Day. Board members and parents objected to the left-wing agenda. Pro-tolerance board members then expressed intolerance toward Trump supporters. And an intolerant time was had by all.

At Gonzaga University in Washington State, this year’s International Day of Tolerance involved the director of the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane accusing white people of intolerance.

The trouble with tolerance is that tolerant people rarely go around advocating it. Tolerant people tolerate, rather than advocate. And tolerance advocates urge intolerance in the name of tolerance. Much like destroying the village to save it and making peace by fighting wars, the tolerant are the most intolerant people around. That’s why the International Day of Tolerance began with genocide.

The United Nations says all the right things and does all the wrong things. The tolerant ends always justify the intolerant means whether at UNESCO or Riverside-Brookfield High School.

Once you get past the idealistic rhetoric about our common humanity, the genocide begins. How else are we ever going to make that common humanity happen without repressing everyone who disagrees?

Idealistic tyrannies always turn murderous as the idealists demonize everyone who isn’t on the same page with their utopia. The good thing about the UN is that it’s too inept to commit genocide. Instead its delegates, diplomats, staffers, peacekeepers and janitors stand around whenever a genocide happens worriedly wringing their hands and urging all the participants to stop and let the UN finish the job.

The United Nations never stops talking about peaceful coexistence and never actually practices it. The International Day of Tolerance, like World Philosophy Day and World Toilet Day, is a bizarre fantasy of world government by a powerless body of bureaucrats which couldn’t figure out how to use a toilet, never mind philosophy or tolerance, and which has never done anything useful in its existence.

Powerlessness ought to have taught the UN humility. But the less power the UN has, the more grandiose its fantasies of world government become. It demands tolerance, but it never returns it.

The world doesn’t need a fantasy world government to teach it intolerance in the guise of tolerance. As the UN has demonstrated so often, its members are fully capable of being intolerant on their own.

The best to celebrate the International Day of Tolerance is to stop tolerating the United Nations.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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Comments

  1. Anonymous10/12/18

    Brilliant as usual

    ReplyDelete
  2. Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz said:

    “It is virtually impossible to get the United Nations
    to condemn any Arab terrorist group or state for
    any attack on Israel or Jewish institutions.

    Yet there is an eagerness to condemn Israel,
    whether Israel is right or wrong.”

    SOURCE: Chutzpah by Alan M. Dershowitz
    (chapter 7, page 225), year 1991, by Little Brown & Co
    ISBN: 9780316181372 * ISBN: 0316181374

    ===================================
    Daniel Byman said:

    “…for years, the United Nations (UN) refused to
    condemn terrorism, due to sympathy for national
    liberation movements that used terrorism as a tactic,
    auch as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).”

    SOURCE: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State,
    and the Global Jihadist Movement:What Everyone
    Needs to Know
    (chapter 9, page 187)
    by Daniel Byman, Oxford University Press, year 2015,
    ISBN: 019021726X (paperback) ISBN: 9780190217266
    (paperback) ISBN: 0190217251 ISBN: 9780190217259

    ===================================
    “…UNRWA’s definition of refugee is not
    dependent on need, and even applies to
    citizens of recognized states, such as Jordan.”

    SOURCE: The Media’s Unredeemable ‘Reporting’
    on UNRWA
    by Sean Durns / JNS.org * 2018/9/22 www.algemeiner.com/2018/11/22/the-medias-unredeemable-reporting-on-unrwa/

    ===================================
    “Instead, UNRWA schools and facilities have been
    used to promote hatred and murder of Israelis.

    For example, a March 7, 2016 ceremony at an
    UNRWA school in Gaza City celebrated stabbing Jews.

    UNRWA officials have also posed with maps
    erasing Israel and have been caught
    disseminating anti-Semitic materials.”

    SOURCE: The Media’s Unredeemable ‘Reporting’
    on UNRWA
    by Sean Durns / JNS.org * 2018/9/22 www.algemeiner.com/2018/11/22/the-medias-unredeemable-reporting-on-unrwa/

    ===================================
    “Yet according to a 2011 report by the
    Center for Near East Policy Research,
    UNRWA has four times as many staff members
    as UNHCR does — despite the fact that UNRWA
    deals with six times fewer refugees than UNHCR.

    In fact, instead of working to resettle
    refugees, UNRWA employees have been caught
    working for Hamas and praising Hitler.”

    SOURCE: The Media’s Unredeemable ‘Reporting’
    on UNRWA
    by Sean Durns / JNS.org * 2018/9/22 www.algemeiner.com/2018/11/22/the-medias-unredeemable-reporting-on-unrwa/

    ===================================
    “UNRWA employees have been caught praising
    anti-Jewish violence, and, per a 2015 UN
    investigation, [that] the organization’s
    facilities were used by terrorist groups
    to launch and store rockets during the
    2014 Israel-Hamas War.”

    SOURCE: The Media’s Unredeemable ‘Reporting’
    on UNRWA
    by Sean Durns / JNS.org * 2018/9/22 www.algemeiner.com/2018/11/22/the-medias-unredeemable-reporting-on-unrwa/

    Daniel Tragerman, 4 years old, who was killed in his home at Kibbutz Nahal Oz by a mortar shell fired from Gaza on 2014 August 22:
    www.timesofisrael.com/daniel-tragerman-was-killed-by-mortar-fired-from-un-facility-ex-idf-chief/

    UN Admits Palestinians Fired Rockets from UNRWA Schools:
    http://matzav.com/un-admits-palestinians-fired-rockets-from-unrwa-schools

    www.UNwatch.org

    ReplyDelete
  3. Israel is ONLY Country Criticized by U.N. for Women’s Rights Violations

    Posted on 2015 March 20 by JNS.org.

    www.jns.org/news-briefs/2015/3/20/israel-is-only-country-criticized-by-un-for-womens-rights-violations#.VQyJPGctA5s=

    www.algemeiner.com/2015/03/20/un-claims-israel-is-worlds-worst-violator-of-womens-rights/

    (JNS.org) In Friday’s annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), Israel was the only country the commission criticized for alleged women’s rights violations.

    A CSW report titled “Situation of and assistance to Palestinian women” criticizes Israel for what it calls “high levels of unemployment and poverty” among Palestinian women due to Israel’s control over territories including the West Bank, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem. (Gaza is governed by the Hamas terrorist group.)

    “Palestinian women and girls still face significant obstacles in accessing basic services, health care, psychosocial support, water and sanitation, justice institutions, and economic opportunities,” the report said.

    Noting that Israel was the only U.N. member criticized by CSW, Israel’s Foreign Ministry slammed the report, saying it was “fighting the decision, which was yet another testimony to the hypocrisy of U.N. members,” Ynet reported.

    The report ignores Hamas, which has routinely violated women’s rights in recent years, including a move to ban women from participating in the Gaza marathon, barring women from riding motorbikes, and banning women from smoking water pipes in cafes.

    Meanwhile, human rights groups have also demanded that Palestinian leaders pass new laws to protect women from honor killings amid their upsurge in Palestinian society.

    Anne Bayefsky, who serves as director at the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, slammed the U.N. commission in an op-ed for targeting Israel while ignoring more egregious violations of women’s rights in the Middle East.

    “Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Not Saudi Arabia. Where women are physically punished if not wearing compulsory clothing. Not Sudan. Where domestic violence is not prohibited. There is no minimum age for ‘consensual’ sex. Not Iran. Where every woman who registered as a presidential candidate in the last election was disqualified,” Bayefsky wrote.

    “Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy and shows much greater respect for human rights and due process than its neighbors, yet Israel is singled out time and time again by the United Nations for criticism, including by those who are themselves serious human rights abusers.”

    SOURCE: The UN’s Legacy of Bias and Failure
    by Aaron Feigenbaum, 2014 August 23
    www.aish.com/ci/s/The-UNs-Legacy-of-Bias-and-Failure.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mr. Greenfield, another brilliant column but I'd like to draw your attention to a meme you used. "WE had to destroy the village in order to save it" was a Peter Arnett miss quote, intentional or not, that the Anti-War Activists ran with. My source is 90 miles away but from the book Stolen Valor by B.G.Burkett he explains that after the occupation and recapture of Hue one of the commanders said "it was a shame so much of the town was destroyed while they were defending it." Just a bit different context. The NVA overran the artillery positions of the ARVN units and turned the guns on the town, the defenders only had small arms. Sorry to be so picky.

    ReplyDelete
  5. World Toilet Day perfectly characterizes the priorities of the UN. I couldn't stop laughing. Thank you, Daniel, for providing me with a chuckle-worthy absurdity. I recently watched a YouTube video about the history of the toiler from Roman times to present day Bangladesh (plumbing in ancient Rome was far more advanced than it would be in, say, Medieval London, when septic material was just dumped into the Thames or the nearest river or street). In Bangladesh, for most residents, a toilet is the closest hole in the ground with no privacy, and toiler paper is a rare if unknown option. This is one example of the "cultural enrichment" immigrants from the Mideast and Africa bring to Germany, Sweden, and England, to name but a few Western countries so fortunate to be blessed by countless unassimilable savages.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You can be a very funny guy Daniel. I can get a sense of your timing with you staccato punctuation. But what really makes it funny is that everyone knows it is true. I read that the U.S. is responsible for almost 1/3 of the UN budget. That is not funny.

    ReplyDelete
  7. As with everything coming from the left/progressives/socialists, whatever they say expect the opposite to be their actions and true intent.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous10/12/18

    U.N OUT OF THE U.S !

    ReplyDelete
  9. Amen.

    So mote it be.

    Thank you.

    Thank you for your life.

    B A.: - L A - CA - USA -- and The Very Far Away

    ReplyDelete
  10. LOOOOOOOVED it!

    ReplyDelete
  11. The International Day of Tolerance, like World Philosophy Day and World Toilet Day, is a bizarre fantasy of world government by a powerless body of bureaucrats which couldn’t figure out how to use a toilet, never mind philosophy or tolerance. Spot on Daniel - love your work.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Just a common 'tater12/12/18

    "Tolerance Day sits on the imaginary UN calendar between World Philosophy Day, and World Toilet Day. Like every UN holiday, it’s an utterly useless exercise." Perhaps the UN should stick to toilets and sewer systems. They have value and actually save lives, unlike the sewage that usually comes out of the UN.

    Great essay, and unfortunately accurate. You cannot make these kinds of absurdities up.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous16/12/18

    Didn't the city of Hue experience some mass slaughter of unarmed, capitalist, running dog "collaborators" committed by the NVA?
    I used to know a Vietnamese guy, his dad was a sergeant in the ARVN he said if they hadn't left Vietnam it would've re-education camps for his family (if they were lucky) and death for his father.

    ReplyDelete

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