Alan Dershowitz and others have recently suggested that Iran should be ejected from the United Nations. This seems to me to be the wrong way round. All civilised countries should now eject themselves from the UN. The disgraceful scenes of Ahmadinejad being treated this week as an esteemed member of the world community as he took the UN stage graphically illustrated the fact that the UN is not merely useless — it is the global Club of Terror, effectively run by, and in thrall to, tyrannies and corrupt despotisms which outnumber those member states that uphold human rights. The grotesque idea that such a body should be considered fit to arbitrate on international conflict — and even worse, be regarded as the ultimate arbiter of global legality and ethics — is the institutional reason why the world has ended up systematically rewarding aggression and ignoring or punishing its victims.
Some time ago, I wrote that the UN should be disbanded and replaced by a United Democratic Nations. Anne Bayefsky, who has done more than anyone to bring the terror and tyranny-supporting excesses of the UN to light, endorses that view in this article.
Shortly after 9/11 the UN created a new body to take the lead on responding to terrorist threats - the Security Council’s Counterterrorism Committee. To this day, the CTC has never named a single terrorist, terrorist organization or state sponsor of terrorism. What does such a record do for the war effort? It leaves the stewardship of the war against terrorism in the hands of an agent that cannot define it…
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently decided to go to Iran and shake hands with President Ahmadinejad. The message Annan delivered, in his own words, was that ‘the international community should not isolate Iran.’ Ahmadinejad has embraced genocide, called for the eradication of a UN member state, denied the truth of the Holocaust even though its ashes form the cornerstone of the UN itself, and broken his treaty obligations to end the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet the secretary-general still believes the president of Iran does not deserve isolation. What does such a message do for winning the war? It tells us to appease, apologize and run away.
The corruption — in every sense — of the UN is legion. It has been an enemy of civilisation for years. Yet as Anne Bayefsky reports in a second dispatch, President Bush not only appears to have given up the attempt to reform it but has even adopted its own language of moral evasion:
The real surprise of the day, however, was President George W. Bush. Last year at this time the president issued a list of reforms he expected from the U.N. in the near future: a new human-rights body which didn’t count abusers among its members, a comprehensive treaty against terrorism, meaningful institutional reforms in the area of oversight, accountability, efficiency. Not one of those demands has been met, but instead of issuing a failing grade, the president said nothing at all about U.N. reform. On Iran, the most he could muster was ‘Iran must abandon its nuclear-weapons ambitions.’ No talk of sanctions. No mention of consequences for Iran’s obvious refusal to abandon those ambitions. On Hamas he said ‘the world is waiting to see whether the Hamas government will…pursue an extremist agenda.’ Waiting to see? Just how many rocket attacks, kidnappings, speeches inciting racial hatred and violence, or murders does it take be an extremist? And on the Palestinian-Israeli front he said ‘the Palestinian people have suffered from…the daily humiliation of occupation’ — the exact language of…yes, Kofi Annan.
Iran is on the way to putting nuclear muscle behind its stated intention to destroy western civilisation. Hamas is committed to the genocide of the Jewish people and the Islamisation of much of the free world. If this is a ‘war on terror’, I dread to think what surrender would look like.
