Good riddance to Qaddafi’s pal at the U.N.
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images You may have seen some of the recent over-the-top comments on the food crisis from Jean Ziegler, a Swiss sociologist and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food (thankfully, a largely ceremonial position). If not, here’s a sampling: “We have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who ...
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images
You may have seen some of the recent over-the-top comments on the food crisis from Jean Ziegler, a Swiss sociologist and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food (thankfully, a largely ceremonial position). If not, here’s a sampling:
- “We have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror.”
- “Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time — just as (Karl) Marx thought. It is rather that a murder is behind every victim. This is silent mass murder.”
- Multinational corporations are practicing a form of “structural violence” and “monopolizing the riches of the Earth”
- Biofuels are a “crime against humanity“
In previous years, Ziegler said the United States is an “imperialist dictatorship” that is committing “genocide” in Cuba and that Gaza is “an immense concentration camp.” Not exactly the most constructive comments, but par for the course for a guy who was nominated for his position by Libya and Cuba. Perhaps Ziegler’s finest moment was in helping to launch the “Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize” in 1989.
The good news? Ziegler’s mandate ends today. The bad news? He’s still going to be an advisor to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Blake Hounshell is a former managing editor of Foreign Policy.
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