UN Warns the U.S.

   A UN committee has demanded that the U.S. "reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country."
   The statement was issued August 23 from UN headquarters in Geneva, and called on the government "as well as high-level politicians and officials" to speak out, noting that "there should be no place in the world for racist white supremacist ideas or any similar ideologies that reject the core human rights principles of human dignity and equality."
   That was a week ago, but there has been little, if any, response from Washington, nor has the UN complaint received much exposure in the American news media.
   It could be, of course, that journalists were more focused on Hurricane Harvey and the president's pardon of ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio, but the UN warning could easily have been inserted in the Arpaio story, whose past record of discrimination led to a federal court order to stop (which he ignored), as well as followup stories about the violence in Charlottesville.
   The UN protest was immediately picked up by news media in Europe, which pointed out that similar warnings have been issued to countries like Burundi, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria.
   The principles of equality and human rights are specified and guaranteed in the founding documents of America, and the U.S. ratified the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1994.