Kidman Worries About Treatment of Women While Representing the…UN?

Nicole Kidman is a fine actress. I’ve enjoyed her work over the years, and heartily congratulate her for her long and storied career. I also congratulate her for getting out of her marriage to Tom Cruise, but that’s another story.

Now Kidman, like many Hollywood stars who want to prove that they’re more than just pretty faces, is involved in A Cause. Like Meryl Streep’s concern about healthy produce and Heather Graham for ObamaCare, Kidman wants to Save Something. To that end, she is the goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Fund for Women, known as UNIFEM and in that capacity, recently testified before Congress to plead for more support for the program (read: cold, hard cash).

The big story that came out of that appearance was Kidman’s concession that the film industry might play a role in violence toward women by portraying them as weak. That may be true, but it’s a topic for another day.

Kidman’s desire to help women in need is admirable. But she might want to consider an outlet other than the UN to do this good work.

The UN is not only one of the most corrupt and inept organizations in the world, but one with highly questionable values. Here’s a sampling of the UN in action:

• UN Agency Calls for Teaching Children 5-8 Years of Age about Masturbation
• Congo observers slaughtered after 6 days of unanswered pleas to UN for rescue
• Worldwide Taxes Come One Step Closer
• Committee: UN Allowed ‘Corrupt Behavior’ in Oil-for-Food Program

And this is the organization that tries to tell everyone else what’s what? The one that do-gooders like Kidman want so desperately to be a part of because it’s “respected?”

But perhaps one of the most egregious stories to come out of the fetid cesspool that is the UN is this one:

With the United Nations already under fire for the Oil-for-Food mega-scandal and other corruption, sensational allegations of rampant sexual exploitation and rape of young girls and women by the U.N.’s so-called “peacekeepers” and civilian staffers in the Congo is dragging the global body’s reputation to an all-time low.

In a new report referring to the widespread sex scandal as “the U.N.’s Abu Ghraib,” the London Times provides some specific examples, including:

• A French U.N. logistics expert in the Congo shot pornographic movies in his home, in which he had converted his bedroom into a photo studio for videotaping his sexual abuse of young girls. When police raided his home, the man was allegedly about to rape a 12-year-old girl sent to him in a law enforcement sting operation. As the Times reported, a senior Congolese police officer confirmed the bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, with a remote control camera on the fourth side.
• U.N. officials are worried that the scandal. which already has nettedd 150 allegations of sex crimes by U.N. staffers, will explode if the pornographic videos and photos, now on sale in the Congo, becoming public. “It would be a pretty big problem for the U.N. if these pictures come out,” one senior official told the Times.
• Two Russian pilots paid young girls with jars of mayonnaise and jam to have sex with them, the report adds.
• U.N. “peacekeepers” from Morocco based in Kisangani – a secluded town on the Congo River – are notorious for impregnating local women and girls. In March, an international group probing the scandal found 82 women and girls had been made pregnant by Moroccan U.N. staffers and 59 others by Uruguayan staffers. One U.N. soldier accused of rape was apparently hidden in the barracks for a year. Congo’s Minister of Defense Maj.-Gen. Jean Pierre Ondekane told a top U.N. official that all U.N. “peacekeepers” in Kisangani would be remember for would be “for running after little girls,” the Times reported.
• And at least two U.N. officials – a Ukrainian and a Canadian – have been forced to leave the African nation after getting local women pregnant.

Most of the sexual abuse and exploitation, says the report, involves trading sex for money, food or jobs. However, some victims say they were raped, but later given food or money to make the incident appear to have been consensual – “rape disguised as prostitution.”

Nice. And the abuse wasn’t limited to the Congo:

The United Nation’s “sex-for-food” scandal continues to spread. As the human rights group Save the Children documents in a new report, U.N. peacekeepers in the war-torn, refugee-rich Liberia have been accused of selling food for sex from girls as young as 8. They are the latest victims in a growing tragedy that includes girls from Burundi, Ivory Coast, East Timor, Congo, Cambodia and Bosnia, proving correct a prediction made last year by the assistant secretary-general at the United Nations for peacekeeping operations. “We think this will look worse before it begins to look better,” she said last May after efforts to investigate peacekeepers in Congo had fallen short.

The report found abuse at all age levels from 8 to 18, though the victims older than 12 were identified as being “regularly involved in ‘selling sex’.” But “all of the respondents clearly stated that they felt that the scale of the problem affected over half of the girls in their locations,” the report said.

How much has changed since these scandals were unearthed? I have no idea. But if libs have no trouble continuing to vilify the Catholic Church for its sex scandals years after their exposure and the Church’s attempt to finally do something about them, I have no problem continuing to vilify the UN for its disgustingly dirty laundry. Especially when that organization tends to see itself as the world’s moral arbiter, and demands plenty of money for its continued corrupt existence from nations it constantly lectures on matters of morality and fairness – like the US.

Until the UN cleans house, that organization’s lecturing and moralizing should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Then there’s the small matter of UNIFEM of Canada honoring Louise Frechette, former Deputy Secretary of the United Nations. What’s the problem, you ask? Well, there seems to have been “a systematic attempt by the Deputy Secretary-General, Canadian Louise Frechette, to block results of audits into the Oil-for-Food program from the Security Council”.

What a great organization!

It’s nice that Nicole Kidman wants to help women around the world. I wish her well in her efforts. But she should give as much care and research to the organizations with which she affiliates herself as she would to a role in a movie.