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And Speaking of Tolerance . . .

Nov 16, 2009
By .
Politics & Current Events

In the post below, Patrick points to Joel Rosenberg's excellent Blawg Review about the United Nation's International Day of Tolerance.

What does the United Nations consider tolerant? Well, tolerance apparently means not criticizing censorship, even in the most mild terms, and even in forums devoted to debate. That's apparently why in the course of the U.N.'s Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, U.N. goons forced panelists to remove a poster that contained an unflattering reference to China's censorship policies.

The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many," Ahmed reported.

The poster promoting ONI's forthcoming book, "Access Controlled" was removed by the IGF's organizers because a sentence in the poster apparently violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads, "The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."

That, naturally, was intolerant of China, whose differences we must celebrate.

To anyone who has been paying attention, it comes as no surprise that the U.N. continues to push values of "harmony" and "cooperation" over values like freedom of expression.

Via Boing Boing.

Last 5 posts by Ken

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  1. PatrickKelley  •  Nov 17, 2009 @5:53 am

    What can anybody expect from a world body that's make-up consists of at least two-thirds a combination of third-world thugs and bureaucratic extortionists bent on subverting the will of the people of sovereign nations, while lining their pockets at the world's expense? Their idea of democracy is, we get together and agree on what everybody should do, and everybody else learns to like it, because we know better than you, because we obviously are better than you. Democracy is just a buzzword, with about as much relevance as the word Republic in the USSR. The UN wasn't created as a means of promoting peace so much as it was a means of carving up spheres of influence and establishing hegemony for the chosen few. Sorry, I didn't give them a vote over what I get to say.