A band of House Republicans has done the once-unthinkable and called for
the resignation of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. But giving Annan the
boot is only the first step. Because the entire United Nations
bureaucracy has become a haven to aging do-gooders who care more about
ideology than results.
Take the report,
Women
and AIDS, which was released by the UNAIDS two
weeks ago. UNAIDS
is the United Nations program charged with stopping the HIV threat.
The past 20 years I have held a front row seat in the unfolding AIDS
drama. I have seen persons being handed the death sentence that they had
contracted the HIV virus. I have witnessed the terrified look of AIDS
patients coming in to check their plummeting CD counts.
This is a disease that plays for keeps. If we are going to beat AIDS, we
need to use an approach that is based on hard science, not trendy
ideology. And that's where the UNAIDS report goes wrong.
The first step in stopping AIDS is compiling accurate statistics on the
spread of the disease. But if you look at the 2004 UNAIDS annual report,
you will find the HIV infection rates for women and children --
but
not for men. Is that because the lives of men count for less?
Last week Cliff
Kincaid revealed how the UNAIDS has been cooking its
statistics. For example, they once reported that 15% of the population
in Kenya had HIV. But later the UNAIDS cut that number to just 6.7%.
Bottom line: All those impressive-looking AIDS statistics coming out of
the UNAIDS are suspect, especially the ones that apply to men.
The Women and AIDS report contains a number of demonstrable falsehoods.
Here are two of them:
1. "Men tend to have better access to AIDS care and treatment.through
drug trials." Now go to the website
clinicaltrials.gov, which lists all
the AIDS studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and you
will see that the reverse is true.
2. "Violence against women is a worldwide scourge, and a massive human
rights and public challenge." But Linda Kelly
recently wrote in the
Florida State University Law Review, "Over the last 25 years, leading
sociologists have repeatedly found that men and women commit violence at
similar rates."
But the problem with the UNAIDS publication is not limited to its
factual errors. Of greater concern is that the report sets up the
boogeyman of patriarchy, and then casually lays the blame for the
epidemic at the feet of men.
The report lectures ad nauseum, "men tend to hold the upper hand" and
"the balance of power in many relationships is tilted in favor of men."
But a recent Washington Post editorial, "A Female Pandemic?," took
exception to this one-sided approach, because "high-risk groups are
stigmatized, and hence often ignored."
The bias of the UN report is confirmed by its refusal to admit that
women also contribute to the spread of AIDS. For example, the report
never admits the fact that one-third of all heterosexual transmission of
HIV is female to male.
Nor does the report reveal the slightest concern with HIV-infected
prostitutes, those Typhoid Marys who infect hundreds of male partners in
a single month. Maybe that's because radical feminists have no problem
with women selling their bodies, just as long as they are paid
equitably.
The UN report is not only palpably unfair to men; it's also dangerous to
women. The report
claims, "Women and girls often lack the power to
abstain from sex."
Once you start preaching the mantra of female powerlessness, you are
telling individual women there is nothing they can do to stop the spread
of AIDS. That message is not only perniciously false, it is the hallmark
of the totalitarian mindset.
Over the past three decades, feminists have developed a well-honed
strategy: Make women feel angry and fearful, induce guilt and shame in
men, and create an environment of hysteria.
On November 30 Peter Piot, director of the UNAIDS, came to Washington,
DC to unveil the Women and AIDS report and to sound the drum-beat of
female victimization. But US Ambassador Randall Tobias, who spoke at the
same meeting, would have none of that.
It was good that Ambassador Tobias ignored the UNAIDS report. But
side-stepping this radical feminist screed is not enough. The House
Republicans and the Bush administration need to come out and repudiate
the Women and AIDS document, a bonanza of gender bigotry.
