The General Assembly at the United Nations met today. What emerged from the meeting is thunderous silence, a silence that echoes through the conscience of sensible people.
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian parliament call for days of rage against Israeli citizens. Several Israeli’s including children and elderly women, have been killed many more injured. This is a new version of Intifada, violence to provoke. For Palestinian officials, the moment they seek is Israeli retaliation. At the point, the United Nations will be awakened. Israel will be censored. The wave of violence initiated by Palestinians will be a footnote to the deliberations. In the U.N. Jewish blood doesn’t count.
It is now clear, based on Dutch Safety Board investigation that Malaysian Flight 17 in 2014 was destroyed by a Russian made warhead installed in BUK surface to air missile system. The 283 passengers and 12 crew members lost oxygen in the freezing fuselage before the aircraft slammed to the ground.
Despite the kabuki dance on this matter, the U.N. has not (and will not) condemn Russia, already prevaricating that no one realized the conflict in eastern Ukraine posed a threat to civil aviation. Russian officials contend the missile was fired from Ukrainian controlled territory thereby exonerating Russia. Of course, no one suggests that the so-called separatists are not able to operate the BUK system and certainly didn’t develop this weapon in the first place. But the Security Council, on which Russia sits, is myopic on the matter. It sees, hears and speaks no evil whatever evidence is presented.
In October 2015, in open defiance of the P5+1 deal with Iran on nuclear weapons, the Iranian government tested on ICBM from Parchin. The Supreme Leader Khamenei argued that he will choose to accept only those aspects of the arrangement consistent with the interest of Iran. This gesture, on an agreement just recently signed by the Security Council, is an embarrassment to the U.N. and certainly to President Obama who argued Iran will adhere to the accord.
Yet remarkably, the U.N. and American officials have engaged in a verbal arabesque in order to suggest the violation is not strictly a violation. If admission about the obvious were aired, many in the Congress, who accepted the president’s word, would be obliged to question it. Similarly the Security Council would look foolish and ineffectual. As a consequence, there is a cover-up – a gross denial of the truth in order to justify diplomatic incompetence.
It seems to me appropriate to recall George Orwell’s words. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question – begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
Here is an encapsulated view of the United Nations at work. Apply vagueness to the truths that embarrass. Apply silence to the violence you will never condemn. Apply blindness to murder that may oblige you to act. The U.N. doesn’t think; it reacts instinctly. It is practiced in avoiding palpable dangers and chastising Israel for any infraction it can invent.
G.K. Chesterton said, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” Yet how can that be when the U.N. halts the thought that is necessary and promotes the thought that leads to a pathway of destruction?
Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book The Transformational Decade (University Press of America). You can read all of Herb London’s commentaries at www.londoncenter.org
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