As America contemplates electing a mixed-race man for president, race is becoming an explosive issue. And taking this opportunity to stir the simmering pot of racial bitterness is none other than …

The United Nations.

A UN representative arrived Monday for a three-week visit to eight American cities—from New York to L.A., Chicago to New Orleans—at Washington’s unenthusiastic invitation. His mission: “to gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

That’s right. As Arabs enslave and slaughter blacks in Sudan, as violent anti-Semitism chokes the Middle East—this is how the United Nations Human Rights Council (unhrc) chooses to allocate its resources: by criticizing the freest and most universally prosperous integrated society on Earth.

Interesting timing. The racial climate in the U.S. at this moment is charged, and presidential power is in play.

Black voters overwhelmingly support Barack Obama—in some states, almost unanimously. Nevertheless, somehow it is white voters who are being criticized for allegedly voting according to skin color. Obama’s longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, preaches poisonous race-based conspiracy theories. However, sympathetic elites in politics, academia and media say that to even talk about his connection to Obama is itself racist.

As charges of racism fly in all directions, racial divisions are being unmasked and aggravated. Should Obama have the Democratic nomination stolen from him or should he lose the presidency, bitterness and division will grow. And one could foresee the problem becoming even worse should he win.

Now, into this fiery cocktail, drop what is certain to be an inflammatory, anti-American report with so-called international legitimacy.

Though the unhrc report on U.S. racism won’t be released until spring of 2009, we can already predict its outcome. Just consider the source.

The unhrc is the United Nations at its hypocritical best. Like the Commission on Human Rights that it replaced in 2006, the unhrc is filled with human rights abusers in high-profile positions who use it as a cloak for their own abuses. Among its current 47 members are human-rights luminaries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Cuba, China and Russia; the ngo Freedom House rates nearly a third of them “not free.”

In classic UN style, the unhrc has been too busy firing off resolutions condemning Israel (which constitute three fourths of the institution’s resolutions) to take action on human-rights disaster zones like Darfur. If it was really interested in combating “racism, xenophobia and intolerance,” it might want to look at Middle East nations where Jews are constantly vilified and publicly forbidden to practice their religion. Instead, it appointed as its rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories a man who compares Israel to Nazi Germany.

Any ideas as to what sort of judgment this institution will make on racism in America?

Already, previous UN envoys have criticized the U.S. for the racism manifested in its “race profiling” practices and its apparently substandard representation of minorities within the justice system. That America employs the death penalty already makes it an egregious human-rights abuser in the UN’s eyes. Last year the UN said the U.S. should restrict all death sentences and life-in-prison sentences until it rooted out racial bias in the courts.

The unhrc rapporteur is commissioned to search out “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” specifically “any form of discrimination against blacks, Arabs and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance ….” Yes, supposedly he’s looking for anti-Semitism, but those searches invariably come up empty.

So who is this man now walking America’s streets looking for possible problems? Dr. Doudou Diène, a lawyer from the Muslim nation of Senegal.

Diène’s favorite subjects of scrutiny are free, democratic societies. He has found institutionalized racism in Canada, Switzerland and Japan, among others. He is obsessed with Islamophobia, which he calls “the most serious form of religious defamation.” He criticized the Danish government for failing to condemn the newspaper that printed the Muhammad cartoons in 2006. He said the cartoons “illustrated the increasing emergence of the racist and xenophobic currents in everyday life” and viewed their publication as an abridgement of the freedom of religion. Last year he issued a report charging that Islamophobia had risen since the 9/11 attacks. He warned of how the “war on terror” is institutionalizing racial discrimination within democratic systems, manifesting itself in “restrictive policies regarding immigrants and asylum-seekers.”

At the same time, as Joseph Klein points out, Diène overlooked a Saudi newspaper’s printing of an anti-Semitic cartoon brought to his attention; he was likewise silent about schoolbooks issued by the Egyptian and Saudi governments that called Jews “a people of betrayal and treachery.”

Diène’s report on America will hold no surprises. The director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s human rights program is predictably ecstatic, calling the project “a critical opportunity to shed light on the pervasive and systemic problem of racism and discrimination in the United States.” Yes, that’s exactly what it will do, whether true or not—and whether it will help a problem or intensify it.

Even the fact that the U.S. government acquiesced to Doudou Diène’s proposal indicates the knife’s edge on which the situation sits. It apparently feared a greater backlash would occur if it denied him the right to report.

In the end, this report will accomplish exactly what America’s own race activists are achieving. Though they insist that they’re interested in resolving racial problems (most often, by simply “exposing” them), the reality is that the harder they work and louder they get, the deeper the divisions grow. The unhrc report will solve nothing. Rather, it will add explosive power to an already edgy situation.

And watch: Leaks as to its conclusions are sure to emerge far sooner than next spring. Why, after all, did the UN trigger this investigation in the midst of this election year? National Review points out that the UN “has a habit of interfering in U.S. elections.” The UN has sent envoys to the U.S. before on similar business, but never amid such a racially charged time as now. Whether Diène’s findings will help Obama’s presidential prospects or hurt them is difficult to foresee. But that it will stir the poisons in public debate before election day is sure.

Watch this situation closely, because the Bible’s prophecies, recorded millennia ago, speak plainly of racial discord seizing America in our day—and reveal its explosive outcome. They are explained in Chapter 4 of Gerald Flurry’s book Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet.

Understand: God does not take sides in the race issue. He condemns the hatred of any person of any color. The truth of the Bible is that God’s plan includes people of every race, tongue and nation. God “will have all men [and women] to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” You can read about this plan in Herbert W. Armstrong’s book Mystery of the Ages.

Still, our world today is ruled by human nature. And several factors at play are throwing sparks onto today’s racial tensions. Soon, regrettably, we can expect these tensions to combust into full-scale race wars.