An occasion only bureaucrats (and theocrats) could love

http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=958

by George Jonas
National Post
March 12, 2011

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It's a weird world. Take, for instance, the United Nations celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day by electing Iran to a four-year seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

No, this isn't a Monty Python sketch, nor Mark Steyn in a mellow moment. This is stark reality. You could call it intellectual theft, I suppose: The UN stealing comedy routines, shamelessly plagiarizing humorous turns, taking them on the world's stage with no apologies to the history of the bizarre, the theatre of the absurd, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Alice in Wonderland, nothing. Perhaps Lewis Carroll's estate should sue the UN for copyright infringement.

The news quietly popped up in a UN press release a week ago. Iran, having abandoned its high-profile quest for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, was now among 10 other nations "elected by acclamation" to the Commission on the Status of Women.

Today, there are 45 seats on this august body, set up in 1947 "to raise the status of women, irrespective of nationality, race, language or religion, to equality with men." Women have since achieved equality in some of the seat-holding countries more than in others, but Iran is probably the only country that views them as the cause of earthquakes.

Yes, earthquakes -- and we're not talking about superstitious masses here, but ruling circles. News agency reports say one week before Iran was offered a seat on the Status of Women commission, a leading cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, expressed the view that immodestly dressed women lead men astray and spread adultery, thereby increasing the frequency of earthquakes.

Interesting as any theory connecting sexual and seismic activity may be, Iran's link between adultery and earthquakes shouldn't alarm us unduly. It's of theological rather than geological concern, and I doubt if it will send actuaries into a frenzy of re-calculating insurance tables.

Still, when a society whose rulers think adultery moves tectonic plates is developing nuclear weapons, it should give us pause.

"Hey, Mr. Zookeeper, the chimps in the monkey-house are playing with what look like sticks of dynamite."

The UN seems immune to such concerns. Le Corbusier's magnificent shelter for the morally challenged on the banks of the East River invites Iran to serve on the Status of Women commission with the same effortless ease with which it invited Libya to head the Human Rights Commission in 2003. Thirty-three countries voted for putting Colonel Gaddafi in charge of human rights eight years ago, with three against and 17 abstaining. I wonder how the vote is going to go if, in a few days or weeks, the UN is required to sign the Colonel's death warrant?

To avoid misunderstanding, the corrupt duplicity of the UN seating Iran on the Status of Women commission as the world celebrates the centenary of International Women's Day (IWD) doesn't bother me. It would, I suppose, if I celebrated IWD and supported the UN. Then it would bother me very much that the UN is putting on its Status of Women commission a theocracy whose thuggish police beat and jailed hundreds of activists trying to celebrate IWD 2007 in Tehran. But as I neither celebrate IWD nor support the UN, it actually pleases me to see how the UN honours the 100th anniversary of IWD, an old Marxist-Leninist holiday.

This requires a footnote. International Women's Day, introduced as a concept at the Second Socialist International in 1910 and first celebrated the following year in Central Europe and Denmark, signalled the split of women's suffrage from its classical liberal trunk into several political branches. The socialists, and later the communists, did everything to exploit women's liberation and subvert it to their own purposes, just as they did various national liberation movements. IWD eventually came to symbolize Marxist-Leninist feminism in many parts of the world. Attempts to celebrate IWD in post-communist Europe were viewed as honoring communists, not women.

Elsewhere, IWD became a celebratory event for militant feminists whose interest wasn't gender equality but matriarchy. One such group set up burning crosses on the steps of a Roman Catholic church in Montreal, for instance, following an IWD march in 2000.

Classical liberals believe in the equality of all. Therefore, many think, as I do, that excessive attempts to press the cause of equality must inevitably lead to new forms of inequality.

Going beyond "formal" to "affirmative" equality is bending over backwards to be straighter than vertical. Many of the achievements celebrated at IWD's centenary, such as affirmative action, are Orwellian distortions of what's fair. They're nonsense of the "some are more equal than others" kind that need to be mocked rather than honored, which is why the UN putting Iran on the Status of Women commission doesn't bother me.

The strange bedfellows of theocracy and bureaucracy huddle under the covers of equality celebrating the centenary of IWD, while I hear the Red Army Choir belting out "Katyusha" as Colonel Gaddafi's female bodyguard marches him to hell. It's truly a weird world.


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