About Ayaan, the U.N. and what not

Yesterday watched the Nova documentary on my hero Ayaan Hirsi Ali. How bad can it be to swap the life under a Islamic dictatorship, for a country which is so ruthlessly egalitarian it makes your head spin? If you don't fit in (don't conform), your head gets snapped, simple as that. Still, it makes you wonder who the author was of that set-up, of stripping her of her Dutch nationality and kicking her out of parliament and the country. I am not easily moved nowadays, but I found myself weeping from time to time. How can a country treat so valuable a person as Ayaan, so badly? She is now rubbing shoulders in New York with George Bush, Condi, Angela Merkel, Salman Rushdie, old Mr Realpolitik Henry Kissenger himself and God knows who else I've seen from the real world, all of whom are singing Ayaan's praises!. An enormous honour (but try get the diminuative country to appreciate that!): she received the AJC prize for Moral Courage ... good for her and I hope she'll be very happy! Guess she was just one size (or a good many) too big for the country, the size of a postage stamp.

- The U.N. and Mr Wood's book: apparently Christianity/Catholicism can be credited as well with the groundrules of international law and universal human rights, stemming from the time of Spanish colonisation of the New World! However I have a problem: everything and everybody being of equal value (as discussed yesterday: cannibalism, Christianity, Islam, bushmen, intellectuals, Stalin, Mother Theresa) it now so happens that ruthless dictators and mass murderers can call elected governments to account. (No wonder Pope Benedict is worried about run away relativism.)

I call to mind an appearance of former Secretary of State Colin Powell in a UN forum held in Africa a few years back, during which this most respectable and upstanding man was booed by the participants, while Mr Mugabe of Zimbabwe was applauded as if he were Father Christmas himself. I mean: how can this be right, ever? But Mr Woods is also warning, it would be a careless assumption to conclude that a body like the UN would be advocated by the Scholastics. A body like the U.N. merely shifts the Hobbesian problem up one level and does not solve it. But sanctions apparently do, about which I would beg to differ, especially with the UN involved, judging how the Oil-for-Food scandal, ehh ... program worked out.
- Here I have a question for whoever is willing and qualified to answer it (not Tom, Dick and/or Harry please, as I know their parrot answer and I'm not interested to hear it for the umpteen millionth time, unless they have a theological grade of the Christian persuation): people under a dictatorship by definition haven't asked voluntarily for such a regime. Have Christian nations no obligation to liberate them, as the Allies have done during WWII? I have never heard my parents yet complain about "friendly fire", by which half a city was destroyed in the effort of getting rid of the Nazis...?