Politics: With the world awash in disaster, the United Nations is spending money to send a "special rapporteur" to look into racism in one of its member nations. The country? Why, the United States, of course.

The rapporteur in question, Senegal's Doudou Diene, will investigate "contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" in a number of American cities.

In fact, the U.S. is the least racist nation on Earth. Diene's visit is a calculated insult to both the American people and President Bush, and an attempt to influence the upcoming U.S. election.

Sure we have our problems. But it's hard to say a country where the leading candidate for president of one party is an African-American, while the other party has in the past eight years named highly accomplished blacks, Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Carlos Gutierrez, Alberto Gonzales and Elaine Chao to the highest federal positions they've ever occupied, is actively racist.

The U.S. also has 40 million immigrants from virtually every nation on the globe, easily the largest such population of any nation. Will Diene look into that, too?

To see what a canard this idea is, one has only to look how America behaves globally. Each year, we spend billions of dollars, both public and private, to help less fortunate people around the globe -- including people who don't share our predominant skin color or our majority religion or our main ethnic heritage.

In the past two decades, the U.S. has intervened militarily on behalf of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, none of which is exactly American -- by race or religion.

When the tsunami hit Thailand in 2004, U.S. aid flooded the country – though some of the beneficiaries included those who applauded Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attack on America. A U.S. Navy ship dutifully anchored off the coast to dispense badly needed emergency goods. U.S. aid workers are still there today.

In Burma, a country that bears virtually no cultural, racial or ethnic propinquity to the U.S., we have aggressively sought to save lives following Cyclone Nargis.

American planes and ships filled with emergency aid and workers have been forced to wait while the murderous Burmese regime lets its people die. Why no U.N. action on that?

The record is clear: Total public and private sector aid from the U.S. to others totaled $130 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available. That's a 6% increase from the year before, and four times what the next biggest giver delivered.

Add in $500 billion-plus in defense spending -- much of which goes to protect other nations from the threat of war, terror or violent cutoffs of trade and the U.S. is far and away the most generous nation on the planet. Not exactly a sign of rampant racism.

Meanwhile, the U.N. itself is no paragon. It's directly responsible for holding Palestinians in camps for 60 years while passing inane resolution after resolution condemning the only peaceful, prosperous and completely democratic regime in the Mideast -- Israel.

The U.N. should investigate other members' rampant racism, which takes the form of extreme hatred for the West and its values.

Take South Africa, the country that hosted the U.N.'s Durban I Conference that, among other actions, equated Zionism with racism. Once the poster child for the left's politically correct kumbayaism, South Africa is wracked with violent ethnic cleansing as armed thugs rampage against immigrants.

Where, we ask, is the special rapporteur for South Africa? Or the one for Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe has engaged in a brutal ethnic cleansing to remove white farmers and kill his foes?

How about one for the Arab world, which has spent the last half-century expelling and denying rights to Jews and Christians?

As we said, the timing of special rapporteur Diene's visit is highly suspect.

Could the U.N. be playing the Barack Obama card here, tweaking Americans' consciences over alleged racism to influence the outcome of our upcoming election?

Keep in mind that Obama's rival, John McCain, has proposed a new League of Democracies that would circumvent the U.N.

America no doubt will welcome Diene and engage in a Mao-like frenzy of self-criticism. But we shouldn't. Instead, we should politely but firmly ask him to leave. Then we should ask the same thing of the organization that employs him.

Sourse: Investor's Business Daily