Joseph Klein – Sep 17, 2007, FrontPageMagazine.com
The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples last week. Four countries voted against the text – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. They did so with good reason. The Declaration, which was more than twenty years in the making, is a muddled document that does not even contain a definition of the “indigenous peoples†it is supposed to protect. It is also superfluous. Individual and minority rights are already addressed in existing human rights treaties.
The Declaration’s purpose is to manufacture a synthetic global group identity among distinct, unrelated communities of people living within legally defined national jurisdictions all over the world. The characteristic that all of these folks are supposed to share in common, under the blanket title of “indigenous peoplesâ€, is that they claim to be ‘first’ inhabitants in a given area of land whom ‘colonialist’ outsiders have sought to wipe out or exploit. The Declaration’s proponents believe that today’s globalization is nothing more than a continuation of this exploitation, which they call ‘neo-colonialism’. In their anti-Western, anti-capitalist worldview, which the Declaration embodies, technology, multi-national corporations and global markets are all driving forces in the exploitation of countless indigenous communities which stand in their way.
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