[The following, by Daniel Greenfield, is crossposted from Sultan Knish.]

Good news everybody. Saudi Arabia now has a seat on the women's board at the United Nations. That's right, a regime where it's illegal for women to drive or leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian, where girls were pushed into a burning building because they were trying to flee without covering their 'obscene' female faces... will be a key player in the international effort to empower women.

I don't know what contribution the Saudis can make to the project, since in Ridyah, empowering women usually means strapping them into an electric chair. But in the Muslim world, human rights is usually read to mean banning criticism of Islam under the guise of Islamophobia. In Europe, Islamists are calling the Burqa a human right. That's probably what the Saudis will bring to the table, along with the condemnations of Israel that are De rigueur in every UN group and body.

Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called the Saudi win, "a very good outcome". I'm not sure what she would consider a bad outcome. Given her role in kneecapping Canada for the Security Council seat, Rice would probably have considered a victory by a country that actually gives women full equal rights to be a defeat. When your only goal is to pander to the Third World, particularly the Muslim parts of it, in order to defy the colonialist and phallocratic Western patriarchy, handing over power to a phallocratic Eastern patriarchy is just a means to an end. At least until it actually becomes the end. The end of everything.

The fallacy of the United Nations is its assumption that every member of the UN is morally equal. The truth is that the majority of the world's nations are dictatorships with limited human rights. The UN is nothing more than the representatives of dictatorships trying to talk about human rights without breaking up into gales of laughter. If you replaced 75 percent of the UN's representatives with members of American street gangs, you would still end up with a more civilized body.

But we look the other way. And now Saudi Arabia, along with the likes of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Libya are on the board. Their mission will be to promote global standards for gender equality. Which should in theory disqualify countries who don't believe in gender equality from membership. Of course since this is the UN, UN Women will have little to do with its stated mission.

Chilean leftist Michelle Bachelet, who heads up UN Women, praised Sudan for its commitment to gender equality in her opening statement. Yes, Sudan, a genocidal state which uses mass rapes as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign. And it's already clear that the focus of UN Women isn't to promote gender equality, but to intervene in conflict areas. Which means the odds are excellent that UN Woman will be used to crank out an endless stream of condemnations of countries that fight Muslim terrorists, while cloaking those condemnations in the name of the rights of women in the affected areas. And the Saudis are perfectly positioned to guide UN Women down that road.

Because the UN is not a tool for human rights, it is a tool of tyranny. From being a Soviet patsy to being a Muslim patsy-- the UN empowers dictatorships and promotes tyranny. It is a giant hive of lawfare directed against the free world, and funded by the free world.

Human rights don't come from international bodies. They emerge from freeing ordinary people to live the way they want to live. To choose their own systems and their own leaders. The UN does not represent those people, but the systems that rule over them. It is a vehicle for those people to make war on countries where individuals actually do have rights. The UN has done nothing to bring rights to the Muslim world, but it has taken away rights from Americans and other people in the free world.

The best thing we could do for human rights is to toss away the UN and its armies of bureaucrats and useless blue helmeted peacekeepers. Leave them by the side of the road, along with the World Bank and the WTO and all the rest of it, and actually build an alliance of civilizations based on countries that practice democracy and human rights. If you want a loan, don't cry to us about your poverty or your starving children. Hold free and open elections. Toss away your blasphemy laws and free your political prisoners. That is a lot more likely to bring about human rights, than funding building after building of scuttling bureaucrats moving around pieces of paper and dining out in posh restaurants.

But of course we won't do that, because the real goal is not human rights. It's the phantasm of world government. The great mirage of a united world and a united humanity. A Fourth Reich that will finally demolish nations and borders, and teach everyone to live just like in a Benetton ad. It's an ideologically driven goal, and like most such goals, leads to tyranny. The larger the system, the harder it is to maintain the rights of the individual within its spinning cogs and wheels. That is why the UN's only redeeming quality is its powerlessness. It's a pawn of international conflicts, rather than a king or a queen.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used the common element of Communism and Socialism to create a powerful coalition within the UN. Today Muslim countries use the common bond of Islam to create their own dominant coalition within the UN. The Free World could counter them, but it's run by leaders who no longer believe that they share a common set of values. Instead they focus on outreach to the Muslim world. And that's as good as writing up a document of surrender, sealing and stamping it, and then waving a white flag in the air.

By taking the UN seriously, we become the pawn of a pawn. The tool of a tool. We allow a puppet to pull our strings. When we listen to the UN, we're listening to its leftist and Muslim puppet masters. And when we give up our freedom in the name of human rights, then we will have neither freedom, nor human rights.

The left insists that human rights can only come from giving up freedom, and accepting government authority. That is the opposite of the principles on which America was founded. To give it credence, is to drink of the poisoned well of tyranny. The Obama administration shares with the UN a strong belief that freedom is antithetical to human rights. And that therefore free nations are rights abusers, while unfree nations, such as Saudi Arabia, are rights givers.

When compliance with the UN becomes the standard of human rights, then slavery replaces freedom. And the truth is that there can be no human rights without freedom. True human rights are not given, but taken. They are not created by "empowering" people, but by ending their disempowerment, by the same forces and organizations that take away their rights in the guise of "empowering" them. And the UN is one of those forces. The first step in fighting for human rights, is leaving the UN.