Posted on 07/29/2006 6:33:55 PM PDT by Clive
I'm certain that Israel hit that UN observation post in southern Lebanon this week by mistake. I'm less certain that this is a good thing. Perhaps Israel should have hit the post by design. Much as one grieves for the innocent observers, the UN as a whole is a worse enemy of Israel than Hezbollah.
Maybe bombing it by mistake was the military equivalent of a Freudian slip.
I can hear a sharp intake of breath. It's the Well-Meaning Reader sitting up, scandalized. Jonas has really gone wacko this time. He's way over the deep end. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Not just a worse enemy of Israel than Hezbollah, the UN is a worse enemy of civilization and its values. Less open in its hostility to Western-style democracy perhaps, but for that very reason more dangerous.
What limits the menace of groups like Hezbollah or al-Qaeda is the lack of respectability that attaches to their names. What increases the menace of the United Nations is the residual respect its name commands. It is, after all, an institution whose aims and principles, as laid down in its Charter, embodied the finest thoughts and best hopes of mankind. Pronouncements from such an institution carry some moral clout even after it has been infiltrated, permeated and finally hijacked by thieves, terrorists and (at best) their appeasers and apologists.
I'll take back "at best." It should be reserved for the dupes of the thieves and terrorists, not to their appeasers and apologists. Unless the three are combined in the same person, which isn't rare either. A terrorist's appeaser or apologist is often also his dupe.
Examples? Take almost every resolution on the Middle East. But the leading example continues to be the body charged with safeguarding human rights, the core value of the United Nations.
"Mr. Chairman, the UN's human rights mechanisms are broken," Mark Lagon, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organizations, told a House of Representatives subcommittee last year. He wasn't alone in this view: "Unless we remake our human rights machinery, we may be unable to renew public confidence in the United Nations itself." Some would say that the author of this second remark -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- has done as much as any person to erode public confidence in the United Nations -- but let that pass. As Assistant Secretary Lagon put it: "We agree with [Mr. Annan] fully when he said at the Commission on Human Rights 12 days ago, 'We have reached a point at which the commission's declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system.' "
By 2005 even the Secretary-General could see that the 53-member commission, under the chairmanship of Libya -- that's to say, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi -- and with such bastions of human rights as Sudan, Zimbabwe, China and Cuba as its members, had become a joke. The question was, would measures such as renaming it from "Commission" to "Council," reducing the number of its members, and putting former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour in charge, make it less of a joke? Perhaps it wasn't a real cliffhanger of a question, for as Luke 5:38 pointed out a long time ago, new wine ought to be put in new wine-skins, and no one would mistake Arbour, the venerable jurist and former chief war crimes prosecutor for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for a new skin.
If anyone doubted that the change from Commission to Council was barely cosmetic or that the old skin was still full of old wine, the most recent events in the Middle East demonstrated it plainly enough. Madam Justice Arbour re-entered the world's stage with a thinly veiled threat, not against the aggressor Hezbollah, but the defender Israel. She raised the spectre of prosecuting for war crimes those who use force against sites of "alleged military significance but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians."
She said nothing about those who target innocent civilians right off the bat, without any allegations of military significance -- in other words, about Hezbollah and its sponsors. Oh well -- as connoisseurs often note, old wine tends to be consistent.
Not to be outshone by his appointee, Mr. Annan commented immediately after the bombing of the UN observer post this week, long before he could possibly have obtained any evidence, that Israel's attack was "apparently deliberate." Hmm. Should it have been, Mr. Secretary-General? Do you know something we don't? Did the UN observers lend Hezbollah the odd cup of sugar?
It would be delicious to think that the UN has finally crossed the line from moral to material support of terrorism, and that Israel zapped the post because it has cottoned on to it. But we'll have to save it for the Hollywood version, I'm afraid. I wonder if Steven Spielberg might be in the market for another Middle East venture.
George Jonas ping
OOPS, pinged myself by mistake.
Wow, in my best alcoholic rant I could never have written that many words.
The UN is a criminal enterprise. I resent us funding it more than I can say.
I didn't have a lot of confidence in Bolton but he has done the best possible job and we don't want to ditch the U.N. right now.
Maybe later though - we ought to keep that option open.
Time to pull the plug on hijacked good intentions.
The UN is an enemy like hezbollah, actually worse. What the frickin' good is a "resolution" if it is not enforced. This resolution has been in place for 6 years and the UN let hezbullsh** stay armed and actually let them increase their capacity for war.
The UN is the greatest enemy the free world has because it is made up mostly of communist and left leaning governments which wish to bring down the US and we blindly fund these people and help them do it.
I'm in my early 40's and have been following the poltical scene for maybe 20 years. For the life of me, i can't figure out why most of the world is against Israel. Hizbollah, for crimy sakes, has about as much moral standing as Al Capone or the KKK. Israel has its dirty laundry. Neverthess, outside of Egypt and Iran, every country in that part of the world was basically formed in the early 1900's. If you people truly don't think Israel has a right to exist then what about Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Kuwait...etc? At some point, men of honor need to say enough is enough. The UN does not yet have enough men of honor.
I am not at all certain of that.
The "observers" let the delivery of the rockets get by them. If they were at all complicit, Israel would consider the strike to be justice.
Kofi was awful quick to call it deliberate. That may be because he had guilty knowledge himself.
If this the finest and best of civilization, the bureaucrats who told you that are playing a very cruel joke on you.
We can't seem to do that. It is discouraging.
Very discouraging. And on this one I do blame Bush. Very original, huh?
I really like YouTube.
You Tube is great. Thanks for posting.
That one's from June 2, 2004. Been on theunsucks.com along with an artcile from Michelle Malkin. The UN has always been jaundiced.
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