The War Economy – CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Warns About Job Loss if the U.S. Stops Arming Saudi Arabia

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Ladies and gentlemen, it appears the long anticipated moment of peak mainstream media stupidity may have finally arrived.

This is what passes for journalism in America today.

The Intercept reports:

Sen. Rand Paul’s expression of opposition to a $1.1 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia — which has been brutally bombing civilian targets in Yemen using U.S.-made weapons for more than a year now — alarmed CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday afternoon.

Blitzer’s concern: That stopping the sale could result in fewer jobs for arms manufacturers.

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The U.N. and U.S. Embassy Stand Down as American Aid Workers Beaten and Raped in Sudan

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Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.

The United Nations was also strongly criticized for failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.

– From January’s post: U.N. Peacekeepers Caught Paying 50 Cents for Sex with 13-Year-Old Girls in War Zones

The following excerpts are gut wrenching and absolutely sickening.

The AP reports:

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.

“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.

She didn’t really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.

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U.N. Peacekeepers Caught Paying 50 Cents for Sex with 13-Year-Old Girls in War Zones

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Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.

The United Nations was also strongly criticized for failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.

– From the Washington Post article: U.N. Says Some of Its Peacekeepers Were Paying 13-Year-Olds for Sex 

I can’t say I’m surprised. After all, this is the same organization which just last year named Saudi Arabia to head up a human rights panel. Nevertheless, the following revelations are absolutely revolting.

From the Washington Post:

 The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently called them “a cancer in our system.”

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Saudi Arabia Sentences Poet to Death for “Renouncing Islam”

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A Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent contemporary art scene has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam. 

Fayadh, 35, a key member of the British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes by the general court in Abha, a city in the south-west of the ultraconservative kingdom, in May 2014.

But after his appeal was dismissed he was retried last month and a new panel of judges ruled that his repentance did not prevent his execution.

Fayadh’s supporters believe he is being punished by hardliners for posting a video online showing the religious police (mutaween) in Abha lashing a man in public. “Some Saudis think this was revenge by the morality police,” said Kareem.

The case highlights the tensions between hardline religious conservatives and the small but growing number of artists and activists who are tentatively pushing the boundaries of freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, where cinema is banned and there are no art schools. 

– From the Guardian article: Saudi Court Sentences Poet to Death for Renouncing Islam

If ISIS had sentenced an internationally renowned poet to death on trumped up charges of “renouncing Islam,” it would be highlighted endlessly across Western media until the public was sufficiently salivating for war against the latest CIA-invented enemy.

When one of America’s closest allies does it…not so much.

It wasn’t long ago that I commented on a separate example of Saudi barbarism related to the case of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a teenager sentenced to death by crucifixion for political dissent. Here’s a quick summary from that post:

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Saudi Arabia Forces the UN to Drop Humanitarian Inquiry Into Yemen Atrocities

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The following would be funny, if it weren’t so incredibly sad. The United Nations’ spiral into clownish insignificance continues unabated.

From the New York Times:

GENEVA — In a U-turn at the United Nations Human Rights Council, Western governments dropped plans Wednesday for an international inquiry into human rights violations by all parties in the war in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians in the last six months.

The change of direction came as the Netherlands withdrew the draft of a resolution it had prepared with support from a group of mainly Western countries that instructed the United Nations high commissioner for human rights to send experts to Yemen to investigate the conduct of the war.

That proposal was a follow-up to recommendations by the commissioner, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, who detailed in a report this month the heavy civilian loss of life inflicted not only by the relentless airstrikes of the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia but also by the indiscriminate shelling carried out by Houthi rebels.

But in the face of stiff resistance from Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, and to the dismay of human rights groups, Western governments have accepted a resolution based on a Saudi text that lacks any reference to an independent, international inquiry.

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The UN Releases Plan to Push for Worldwide Internet Censorship

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The United Nations has disgraced itself immeasurably over the past month or so.

In case you missed the following stories, I suggest catching up now:

The UN’s “Sustainable Development Agenda” is Basically a Giant Corporatist Fraud

Not a Joke – Saudi Arabia Chosen to Head UN Human Rights Panel

Fresh off the scene from those two epic embarrassments, the UN now wants to tell governments of the world how to censor the internet. I wish I was kidding.

From the Washington Post:

On Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” — which, nbd, we’ve all heard before.

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