So far, all of the uprisings across the Arab world have been domestic matters, deliberately so. By upping the ante against his own citizens to the point where the world had no choice but to intervene, Qaddafi has internationalized this crisis, and don’t think that he hasn’t calculated that into his plans. After all, every dictator needs some misdirection in the form of a foreign imperialist invader in the form of the United States or one of its “little Satan” allies. This could shift the whole tide and tone of this movement.

Obama, to his credit, doesn’t sound so eager to willingly take up that role. Action is needed in Libya, but Obama recognizes that there’s an optics problem if the US were to lead the charge. France and the UK sound tepidly on board, but support from elsewhere may be more moral than physical.

And with world attention still focused on Japan, everything else – Libya included – is taking a back seat. It’s hard to say who that benefits right now.

Of course, the question that nobody’s asking just yet is, what’s next? What happens after Qaddafi? What happens when any opposition movement gets tainted by the notion of being propped up by the Europeans or the Americans? Will whoever sends in troops be able to anticipate an exit date?

Stay tuned. This story isn’t getting any smaller.

Update: Canada is officially involved.

“The United Nations is a wonderful idea in principle, except for the little problem of giving barbarians a vote.”

That’s courtesy of PZ Myers, in a blog post WTFing the UN’s move to remove sexual orientation from a resolution that protects people from being summarily executed. In other words, according to the UN, it’s okay to kill gay people for no reason. Which, obviously, must make perfect sense to the vast majority of backwards, human rights-abusing, Israel-bashing, hyopcritical members of the corrupt-to-irrelevance UN. Anyone still taking them seriously at this point has got to be smoking something strong.

(HT: Andrea)

A mysterious blogger who set off an uproar in the Arab world by claiming he was God and hurling insults at the Prophet Muhammad is now behind bars — caught in a sting that used Facebook to track him down.

The case of the unlikely apostate, a shy barber from this backwater West Bank town, is highlighting the limits of tolerance in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority — and illustrating a new trend by authorities in the Arab world to mine social media for evidence.

Residents of Qalqiliya say they had no idea that Walid Husayin — the 26-year-old son of a Muslim scholar — was leading a double life

Known as a quiet man who prayed with his family each Friday and spent his evenings working in his father’s barbershop, Husayin was secretly posting anti-religion rants on the Internet during his free time.

Now, he faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for “insulting the divine essence.” Many in this conservative Muslim town say he should be killed for renouncing Islam, and even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.

“He should be burned to death,” said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public “to be an example to others,” he added.

At a time when the United Nations is trying to pass a resolution that would make blasphemy illegal, it’s important that we see cases like these as cautionary tales of what we can expect when we allow political correctness to trump free speech. There is no free speech in the supposedly secular, liberal Palestinian Authority. None whatsoever. There is no free speech in Iran, or in Saudi Arabia, or in Egypt, or in Pakistan, or in most of the countries sponsoring the resolution. And while the supposedly pro-freedom left marches and protests against the supposedly imperialist Israel and in support of the poor, suffering Palestinians, it can never be pointed out often enough just where the free speech limits exist in that part of the world.

Nor is it only in the Arab world where these laws exist. Ireland passed anti-blasphemy laws last year. Laws against blasphemy or religious defamation exist, to some varying degree, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Greece, in Finland… even Canada’s hate speech laws allow for a lot of grey areas and potential abuse depending on which way the political wind blows.

These types of “anti-blasphemy” resolutions and laws are just tools wielded by extremists to silence any voices of freedom or dissent. Speech – whether or not it’s offensive – should be protected, and the right to satirize, insult, offend or simply denounce religion is a right that we need to protect, for all our sakes. And that, in a nutshell, is the basis for my position on freedom of speech.

This is nothing new for the UN, which has regularly seen topsy-turvy things like Libya being elected to the UN Human Rights Council. The moral authority of the UN has basically been at zero, since the one nation, one vote structure means that small states with human rights abuses get to dominate the conversation.

But this time, Iran – a country where women are executed for adultery – presuming to speak up for women’s rights was just a step too far for nations like Canada and the USA, who successfully blocked its bid for a seat on the board:

Led by the U.S., several countries helped gather opposition to Iran’s campaign. They were joined by human-rights groups, who pointed to the recent sentence of death by stoning for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman convicted of adultery.

Before anyone gets too excited, though, it should be noted that this is just one blip in the UN’s steady march to redefine human rights in a topsy-turvy, Orwellian fashion:

You might think the regime’s habit of murdering women for imaginary crimes would earn it universal condemnation – especially from places such as the United Nations. You would be wrong. In April, Iran was given a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women, whose goal is “gender equality and the advancement of women.” No one explained how stoning women to death advances gender equality. This is a moral inversion so twisted that it defies satire. If you still harbour any illusion that the UN is truly interested in the rights of women, please abandon it now.

Iran’s ludicrous appointment was a consolation prize for its failure, despite fierce lobbying, to gain a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. That would not have been as bizarre as it sounds, given that its members include the rights-conscious nation of Saudi Arabia. The Human Rights Council is dominated by a bloc of Islamic and African states that refuse to condemn Iran for anything. Instead, the council spends most of its time denouncing Israel and the United States. “It’s tragic,” says Ms. Namazie, who fled Iran in 1980. “It’s like asking apartheid South Africa to sit on the commission for racial equality.”

The UN Human Rights Council has long been a joke. UN Women, the new agency, promises to be much of the same. Same shit, different day.

The U.N. nuclear agency on Thursday expressed concern for the first time that Iran may currently be working on ways to turn enriched uranium into a nuclear warhead, instead of having stopped several years ago.

Its report appears to contradict an assessment by Washington that Tehran suspended such activities in 2003. It appears to jibe with the concerns of several U.S. allies that Iran may never have suspended such work.

Really now? What tipped them off? Ahmadinejad has been playing nuclear chicken with the United Nations for years. What exactly caused the U.N. to wake up today and tentatively acknowledge blazingly obvious reality, instead of continuing to close its eyes as it has been all along? Why now?

That’s the big question, after all. For the United Nations to even make such a statement, there has to have been a sea change somewhere else behind the scenes that triggered it. If China or Russia is prepared to put more pressure on Iran, this could be indicative of a change in the game, even if the U.N.’s statements are, in and of themselves, essentially worthless. The world will be watching closely, that’s for certain.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog’s board censured Iran on Friday, with 25 nations backing a resolution demanding that Tehran immediately freeze construction of its newly revealed nuclear facility and heed Security Council resolutions to stop uranium enrichment.

The trouble is, there’s no backup to the “or else”. And Iran knows it, too:

Iran remained defiant, with its chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency declaring that his country would resist “pressure, resolutions, sanction(s) and threat of military attack.”

Delegate Ali Asghar Soltanieh of Iran shrugged off the vote.

“Neither resolutions of the board of governors nor those of the United Nations Security Council … neither sanctions nor the threat of military attacks can interrupt peaceful nuclear activities in Iran, even a second,” he told the closed-door meeting, in remarks made available to reporters.

Iran can taunt the world and continue to develop nuclear weapons with impunity, in flat defiance of the Security Council or anyone else, because it knows full well that the UN can’t and won’t back up its threats with anything concrete. There’s no action that they can take. They can’t go to war or invade Iran. They can’t attack its nuclear facilities. They can’t even impose sanctions, which would risk alienating the strengthening resistence movement within Iran.

By the time anyone figures out a course of action on Iran, it will likely be too late. If it isn’t already.

At a meeting in Geneva, Canada asked for a recorded vote to emphasize its complaint that the resolution drafted by Arab, Asian and African countries did not recognize that Israel acted to stop Hamas rocket attacks.

After years of waffling in the UN on these one-sided resolutions, Canada is finally showing some moral courage. Both the Conservatives and the Liberals have come out with strong statements on this matter, as they well should.

Unfortunately, the UNHRC is a joke and will continue to be a joke. But Canada is using its seat on the Council to at least register a vote of conscience, which is better than nothing.

(Hat tip: Daimnation.)

Damian links to this Times article from last week in which a janjaweed defector explains, in horrifying detail, the atrocities that he helped commit against civilians.

Except that we already pretty much all knew about them. And there wasn’t really anything anyone could do before, so what will really change here? The United Nations? Is anyone really delusional enough to think that this organization which is currently unable to do anything about the mass murder still ongoing in Sudan can do anything about North Korea? It’s not as though a UN threat of sanctions would be too scary to a country already suffering mass starvation. Or that anyone really believes anyone – US or otherwise – would use a military option. In short, a nuclear North Korea is pretty much a fait accompli, because the rest of the world has no options.

Damian thinks the only option for North Korea has to come from within:

Ultimately, the only ways Kim will be removed from power are a potentially catastrophic outside invasion, or an uprising from within. The former is a non-starter; the latter could work. From here on out, we should redouble our efforts to support those brave North Koreans who oppose their government, and to get news and information to the most hermetically sealed society on earth.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Damian on this one, for a few reasons:

1) North Korea has no real viable, organized opposition of any form; it’s the world’s least free and most oppressive regime, where opposition is systematically stamped out in its infancy.

2) North Korea is also desperately poor, has no real economy, no rule of law, no independent institutions… in short, it’s much, much worse than even Iraq. We mustn’t assume that the removal of Kim Jong-Il would liberate a country just waiting for the opportunity to instill a flourishing democracy. There is no indication that the removal of the dictatorship would leave anything but total chaos and anarchy. And a situation where chaotic anarchy meets nuclear weapons might be the only thing scarier than the current situation. At least we KNOW which crazy guy has his finger on the button now. What will happen when it’s a free-for-all?

The question we should be asking is, why now? Granted, Kim Jong-Il is crazy, but by some accounts he’s also crazy like a fox. This test was an in-your-face to the West, an in-your-face to the United Nations, and an in-your-face to Bush. And its timing was no coincidence. Given the geopolitical factors in the rest of the world, namely the mess in Iraq and Iran’s ongoing game of nuclear chicken with the U.N., Kim Jong-Il probably decided the time was ripe to flex his muscle a little bit.

But does this mean we’re on the verge of nuclear disaster? That depends on your perspective. The worry about Iran going nuclear is that Ahmadinejad might be crazy enough to actually not care about the consequences of launching a nuclear strike, so deep is his hatred for Israel and the West. Is the same true of Kim Jong-Il? Or is North Korea just trying to prove a point?

These are questions that were always hard to answer about nuclear weapons, but if we think this is the worst of it, then we’re kidding ourselves. To date, nuclear weapons have only ever been in the hands of countries, ranging from democracies to despotic dictatorships with crazy leaders, but all countries nonetheless. It’s only a matter of time until a terrorist group or rogue organization gets ahold of nuclear weapons. What then? What happens when there are no diplomatic options to even attempt?

We’d better start thinking about it, and soon, because if you think that this week is scary, I fear we ain’t seen nothing yet.

My solution? Send in our ultimate weapons: Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

The U.S. and British sponsored resolution would authorize the deployment of 20,000 U.N. troops and police in Darfur to take over from some 7,000 African Union troops, who have been unable to end bloodshed in the western Sudanese region.

Though the resolution, likely to be put to a vote on Thursday, would state that Sudan would need to agree to the deployment, it was expected to add pressure on Khartoum to drop its opposition to U.N. peacekeeping troops.

“Our judgment here is that we think we’ve found a formulation that would win acceptance on the (Security) Council,” U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters at the United Nations.

What about a formulation that would actually end the bloodshed?

This resolution – even if it passes – will be nothing more than symbolic. The U.N. is having trouble finding a few thousand troops to send to Lebanon; where will it find 20,000 for Sudan? Even if they go, chances are they’ll be equipped with nothing more than a blue helmet and a whistle. And, of course, for any of this to have made a difference, it would’ve had to have happened about four years ago.

As usual, the United Nations fell asleep at the wheel, and millions have been paying the price. If this resolution passes, it will be another case of far too little, far too late. Isn’t it time we admit that the U.N. is completely and utterly powerless to prevent, diffuse or end armed conflict and genocide?

Update: Similar sentiments from this Gazette editorial about Venezuela’s bid for a seat on the security council:

It’s not as if Chavez could make the Security Council less effective than it is now. Russia and China already take care of that, as we have seen in the case of Iran’s determined rush to acquire nuclear weapons. Sanctions? No no, say the Russians and the Chinese. Let’s talk and study for a few more months before we get to sanctions. What could go wrong?

From Rwanda to the Balkans to Darfur to Lebanon, and elsewhere, the Security Council has shown itself impotent and useless. Or worse than useless, as in approving a toothless resolution to disarm Hezbollah.

[. . . ]

Slaughter continues in Darfur, Iran becomes nuclear, Hezbollah re-arms. At the UN, meanwhile, urbane and well-dressed diplomats keep talking about process.

Venezuela on the Security Council? Hey, why not? It’s not as though other members such as Syria have exactly set the bar all that high.

Israel has begun pulling out of Lebanon. But the UN peacekeeprs aren’t going in – and nobody’s willing to hold Hezbollah to its obligations.

In the meantime, the Lebanese army is moving to take positions in South Lebanon… but not to displace or disarm Hezbollah. On the contrary, Hezbollah’s favourite puppet government has reportedly struck a deal to allow the group to keep its weapons. (Siniora now denies this, but actions here will speak louder than words).

Oh, and the kidnapped soldiers? Still not released.

What exactly is the basis for the claim that this cease-fire is in any way, shape or form good for Israel?

Palestinian protesters stormed the main U.N. compound in Gaza City on Sunday during a demonstration against Israel’s bombing of southern Lebanon that killed around 60 civilians, witnesses and U.N. staff said.

Hundreds of members of the Islamic Jihad militant group, some throwing stones and others firing assault rifles, attacked the compound at the end of a rally, witnesses said.

At least five people were wounded, police said.

[ . . . ]

Witnesses in Gaza said extensive damage had been caused to the U.N. compound, from where the world body directs its relief and aid operations for the Gaza Strip’s 1.4 million people.

The attack came hours after thousands of Lebanese demonstrators attacked the U.N. headquarters in Beirut, smashing windows and ransacking offices.

Several thousand people massed outside the building in the center of the capital chanting “Death to Israel, death to America. We sacrifice our blood and souls for Lebanon.”

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

Don’t count on a condemnation from Kofi Annan, though.

Well, things are getting worse there, believe it or not:

Fighting between tribal militia groups in Darfur is on the rise, driven by the prevalence of weapons in the region, the senior United Nations envoy to Sudan warned today.

The situation in Darfur’s north and west, where clashes have become more violent recently because of the greater availability of weaponry, is particularly tense, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative Jan Pronk told reporters during a press conference in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

He added that both fighting between the parties to the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) and other groups, as well as fighting among rebel groups, has heavily affected the civilian population.

That’s UN-speak, so for the uninitiated, here’s a rough translation:

Peacekeeping efforts are woefully inadequate, and there’s still all-out chaos in Darfur. Militia groups and rebel gangs are bringing in weapons and using them to kill displaced people in camps where they’re supposed to be under UN protection. Millions of people who were forced from their homes and raped and tortured and starved and saw their family members killed sometimes right in front of their eyes are still facing the imminent threat of death even after years of “monitoring the situation”.

And the world watches Lebanon and wags its finger at Israel and does nothing to so much as lift a finger in Sudan. As usual.

Anyone who still believes that the United Nations has a role to play in protecting people or brokering crisis situations should just take a long hard look at Darfur.

Cynthia Hess-von Kruedener said Tuesday’s attack was not the first on her husband’s outpost.

It’s difficult to blame a grieving woman for choosing to misdirect her anger. But her late husband apparently did not agree with her assessment. In fact, he placed the blame squarely on Hezbollah for the attacks that occurred on the UN post:

Six days before he was killed in an Israel Air Force bombing of a United Nations post in southern Lebanon, Canadian observer Major Paeta Hess-von Kruendener sent an email to his former commander in the Canadian army, in which he said that Hizbullah fighters were “running around” near the UN post struck by the Israel Defense Forces and that they were using the post as a sort of “shield” against Israel’s strikes.

(Emphasis mine.)

So far, the grieving widow blames Israel story is getting all the headlines here in Canada, and the Hezbollah uses human shields story is getting zero notice. Let’s see if anyone bothers to report the truth in the coming days.

Update Jul 30: The Gazette published my letter to the editor on this topic today, albeit a heavily-edited version. The link requires registration, but it doesn’t really matter, as the argument is much better-worded here than there.

The former commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who served as a UN commander in Bosnia, spoke about the email in a Canadian radio show. He said that Hess-von Kruendener wrote that the IDF strikes near the post had “not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity.”

“That would mean Hizbullah was purposely setting up near the UN post,” he added. “It’s a tactic.”

“My information from him is weeks upon weeks they’ve been firing on there,” she said. “They’re UN soldiers, that should have been the safest place to be — they should not have bombed that site, period.” She accused Israel of not playing by the rules anymore.

“They’re fighting a whole different war, and it’s changing all the time. And now they’re choosing to, bomb, you know, UN sites. That’s unheard of.”

The man has got to be on drugs to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting UN observers in Lebanon. What in the world would Israel possibly have to gain by killing and wounding representatives of the United Nations?

The answer is nothing, and it has everything to lose. And probably will.

Does that mean he feels that the world can afford a nuclear attack by Iran on its enemies. How would that affect the delicate world economy, Mr. Caruso?

• Iran chose now to press the nuclear issue, figuring the U.S. can’t do much because of Iraq and the rest of the world couldn’t ever do much about it.
• The U.N. is powerless to stop Iran from going nuclear, and no Security Council sanctions – even if agreed upon by Russia and China – would be strong enough to get Iran to cave.
• U.S. Intelligence estimates that Iran is “very close” to mastering nuclear weapons technology, perhaps as close as a year.
• Unlike with Iraq, the world cannot count on Israel to stop Iran from going nuclear, as it has neither the range nor the capacity to prevent disastrous reprisals for an attack. It would likely come down to the U.S. to take military action, if it were to come to that, and at the moment this seems unlikely given the war in Iraq.

All in all, the analysis paints a very bleak picture in which Iran is marching steadily towards acquiring a nuclear bomb that it may have every intention of using to wipe Israel off the map.

If North Korea was the number-one threat to the world not too long ago, Iran has suddenly jumped up a few positions. However, I don’t believe we’re headed towards World War III tomorrow. There are still steps that can be taken, if the world recognizes the dangers in allowing Teheran to acquire nuclear technology. I only hope that these steps are taken, and that they are effective.

“I am fine, I am fine … They gave me cigarettes and tea,” Bernardini told reporters, looking shaken but unhurt.

“I will never change my idea about the occupation,” he said, referring to Israel’s occupation of land that Palestinians seek for a state. “I am with the Palestinian people.”

An armed offshoot of Abbas’s own ruling Fatah movement said it carried out the kidnapping.

Fatah. Not Hamas. Not Islamic Jihad. But Fatah’s “armed wing”. Did any of the people relentlessly promoting Mahmoud Abbas as a “moderate” ever stop to think about why Fatah has an armed wing in the first place?

Oh, and there’s more:

Hours earlier, gunmen stormed a United Nations club in Gaza City and blew up the bar — the only place where alcohol is served openly in the conservative Muslim territory. Nobody was hurt, but the attack added to security fears.

The United Nations is generally seen favorably in Gaza, where it is the second biggest employer after the Palestinian Authority.

Wow, talk about shooting yourself in the foot! The Israelis leave Gaza and suddenly the Palestinians are attacking their best friends, the United Nations?

My predicted U.N. response: “We will never change our idea about the occupation. We are with the Palestinian people”.

S.S.D.Y.

The UN Security Council failed to agree on Tuesday on a statement condemning the suicide bombing in Netanya, after a dispute between the United States and Algeria, the only Arab council member, made approving the resolution impossible.

The statement, similar to one adopted by the so-called quartet of advisers to the Middle East peace process, would have “unequivocally” condemned the blast. It also would have urged Syria to close the offices of Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for Monday’s bombing that killed five Israelis and injured more than 50 people.

[ . . . ]

[The U.S.] said “Algeria objected to the reference to Syria and to the reference to Palestinian Islamic Jihad” even though the group claimed responsibility for the attack and the Palestinians said the orders came from Damascus.

[The Algerian Ambassador], however, said he was ready to discuss the mention of Syria but also wanted to say something about Israel’s “disproportionate use of force” which resulted in a death of a child during in the West Bank city of Jenin last week.

As usual, the U.N. proves itself incapable of saying anything that isn’t directed against Israel.

The General Assembly has long been a write-off but occasionally we’ve seen the Security Council do something useful. But today, we are once again reminded of the corrupt and ineffective way in which the U.N. is run. If this actually is a war on terror, the U.N. is increasingly making its case for why it should be considered on the other side.

Iran has begun processing a new batch of uranium despite Western pressure on it to halt sensitive atomic work, possibly harming attempts to defuse a standoff over its nuclear aims, a diplomat said on Wednesday.

[ . . . ]

Western countries suspect Iran of seeking nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian atomic program, which Tehran vehemently denies, saying it only wants to generate electricity.

Yeah, right. And hell is just a sauna.

Somehow I don’t think Iran is planning to wipe Israel off the map using mere electricity.

The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday unanimously approved a proposal to set January 27 as the “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” The decision was made at the end of a special General Assembly session that began at UN headquarters in New York on Monday.

[ . . . ]

It also rejects any denial of the Holocaust, condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity, and calls for the UN to establish an outreach program to encourage the public to engage in Holocaust remembrance activities.

The resolution, introduced Monday, was sponsored initially by Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada and Russia. Since the draft resolution was distributed for the first time in August, 91 UN member nations have added their names, including eight Muslim countries and several countries in Africa and South America.

Of course, we can’t expect an unconditional condemnation of atrocities against Jews from the United Nations:

Jordan’s UN Ambassador Prince Zeid al-Hussein called the Holocaust “a crime of the most colossal proportions” that was inflicted on European soil by Europeans against Europeans.

But he said it should not be used as a moral justification for the “continued domination of one people by another,” an obvious reference to Israel and the Palestinians.

That much is to be expected, but I find it amazing that so many Muslim countries actually passed the resolution in the first place.

So is this the UN’s “pound of flesh” that they can point to – an easy way to claim to be against antisemitism each time it condemns Israel for some pointless double-standard in the future? Or is the sentiment genuine?

Oh well… Whatever it is, it’s a step in the right direction.

High-ranking Syrian and Lebanese officials were involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, with suspicion cast even on President Emile Lahoud, a U.N. investigation said on Thursday.

The inquiry led by veteran German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis into the February 14 killing of Hariri established “that many leads point directly toward Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination,” said the investigative report submitted to the U.N. Security Council.

It was therefore now incumbent on Syria “to clarify a considerable part of the unresolved questions” facing investigators, the report said.

Harsh language. I bet the Syrian dictatorship is shaking in its boots happily ignoring the report because it knows how toothless the U.N. is to actually do anything about it.

Prediction: Next week’s U.N. report will find a way to pin Hariri’s death on Israel.

The former head of the U.N. oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, was accused on Monday of receiving nearly $150,000 in kickbacks, and another U.N. official was arrested on charges of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from U.N. contractors.

How much lower can the U.N.’s credibility sink?

The question is, who is left to stop the nuclear ambitions of one of the most dangerous theocratic thuggeries in the Mideast? Not the UN, which has never had the ability to do anything. Not the EU, which will hold an emergency session to see if they broke an agreement that was impossible to enforce in the first place. Not the US or, which after Iran have no political capital left to do anything even if they wanted to. Even Israel, which everyone is secretly hoping will play bad guy and repeat Osarik and then get chewed out by the world, can’t take that kind of risk to its security this time around.

North Korea’s already nuclear; it’s too late there. Iran is steadily marching toward that point of no return… and there’s nobody left to stop them. I fear that future generations of humanity will be paying the price for our spineless world for a long time.

Brazil, Germany, Japan and India have introduced a resolution to add six permanent seats to the council, four for themselves and two for Africa, and four nonpermanent seats.

The U.N. is already incapable of getting anything done. The General Assembly is a joke and nobody takes its resolutions seriously. The Security Council still has a teensy little bit of clout… and expanding it would strip that completely away.

Here’s an alternate proposal for true U.N. reform: give the democracies 5 times the number of votes as the dictatorships. That would be a good start, anyway.

The appointment of Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman as vice president to the upcoming UN General Assembly was approved on Monday.

[ . . . ]

Gillerman’s appointment is considered a diplomatic success, as Israel is more often than not condemned in the General Assembly, as well as in the UN Security Council.This isn’t exactly an exclusive post; there are lots of vice-presidents. But the last and only other Israeli to hold the position was Abba Eban, who was elected to the job in 1952.

And in related news, a temperature of minus five degrees was reported today in Hell.

The United States and Israel represent the real nuclear threat to the world, not Iran, Tehran’s chief envoy to the United Nations said on Friday after an abortive conference on controlling nuclear weapons.

Now we can watch the United Nations do what it does best: pander to Iran and condemn the US and Israel.

Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland, reading this stuff.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday the United States and Britain bore part of the blame in the Iraq oil-for-food debacle by allowing unsupervised oil exports that Saddam Hussein exploited.

Annan, addressing a seminar on the United Nations and the media, said most of the money Saddam earned was by oil sold to Jordan and Turkey outside of the $67 billion U.N. program.

Only countries like the United States and Britain had interdiction forces that could have stopped it. But he said they “decided to close their eyes to Turkey and Jordan because they are allies.”

Annan may be corrupt and useless but he understands his political stage flawlessly. The same morally bankrupt people who refuse to condemn him for his role in the scandal will be only too happy to blame America, public enemy number one.

Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean who was imprisoned by the government before defecting in 1997, told the commission that “there is absolutely no freedom in North Korea.”

“In a political prison camp in North Korea, one must forget that he or she is a human being,” said Kim, who spent five years in a camp and endured eight months of torture and interrogation.

“There were numerous people who spent 20 to 30 years in the prison camp simply because of some ludicrous crime their grandfather allegedly committed,” said Kim.

Mr Rammell said that the European Union will sponsor a resolution at the commission to condemn North Korea’s record of abuses, adding that he expects it to be passed by a large majority.

I’m absolutely shocked… not that North Korea’s human rights record is unimaginably bad, but that the UN Human Rights Commission would consider taking a 5-minute break from its full-time Israel-bashing activities to actually comment.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

This according to the United Nations, which displays its gutlessness even more glaringly as each day goes by. Cause calling the horrible situation in Darfur, Sudan by its rightful name would require the U.N. to actually do something, and they certainly want to avoid that:

A United Nations inquiry into the mass killing of black Sudanese in the country’s western Darfur region has refrained from calling the assassinations a “genocide” – an outcome Khartoum sought.

Instead, the UN investigators say the violence by Arab militia is evidence only of “genocidal intentions,” adding this constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The commission finds both the government and the Arab janjaweed militias “are responsible for … crimes against humanity,” including killing, rape and torture of black tribes in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

It said the attacks on villages aimed to “drive the victims from their homes,” but stops short of saying the government had a policy of genocide, saying rather that individuals had a “genocidal intent.”

[ . . . ]

Those designations fall short of the legally significant “genocide” label, which would have obliged the 15-member UN Security Council to take immediate measures under international law to stop the killing.

So what’s the U.N.’s brilliant solution to stop the violence which so far has killed more than 70,000 people?

The inquiry also says the council should use its power to have the UN’s war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court, prosecute people suspected in the killing.

That is likely to lead to a complicated three-way split among the Security Council’s five veto-bearing permanent members. While the United States, Britain and France support taking some sort of action, Washington opposes the ICC. Russia and China, meanwhile, have resisted taking any action. China has oil interests in Sudan, while Khartoum buys Russian arms.

This ought to destroy any delusions that anyone still had that the United Nations could protect the world. Lacking the will and the means to stop the genocide, the U.N. has taken the easy way out by refusing to call it a genocide. Like, if you don’t call it genocide, it never really happened. Or something.

In a poll released Monday by the Association for Canadian Studies, 35 per cent of Quebecers surveyed said they believe other nationalities – Poles, mainly – were the principal victims of the Nazis, not Jews.

That’s higher than any other province, but not by much: the Canadian average is 29 per cent.

In a separate question asked in the association’s telephone poll, only 36 per cent of Quebecers could identify six million as the correct number of Jews killed by the Nazis (the Canadian average was 31 per cent).

It seems the Holocaust-deniers have made some strides over the years.

I’d like to see the questions asked before I can judge this poll on its face, but it’s hard to fathom what lies ahead for the next generation, after those who bear witness are gone.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate author Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor, both questioned whether the nations had the will to stop mass murder 60 years after the massacre in Europe.

“If the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda,” Wiesel said.

A better question might be, when genocides are occurring, what will the U.N. do about it? So far, the answer seems to be not much

Being the U.N., of course, it was inevitable to hear things like this:

“What sense can we make of this important commemoration, when we allow through our inaction, year after year, one people to dominate another, to deny the latter many of its most basic rights, and so, with the passage of time, also degrade it as a people,” said Jordan’s U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the only Arab speaker.

There go those Jews-as-Nazis comparisons again. But hey, at least Jordan was represented. I suppose the other Arab countries would find it difficult to deny the Holocaust if they had attended.

Canada joined the United States and five other countries yesterday in voting against a General Assembly resolution on the right of Palestinians to mobilize support for their cause.

The U.S., Australia, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau have voted against the resolution – regarded as anti-Israel by the U.S. administration – every year when it comes up at the General Assembly. This time, Canada joined them in rejecting it.

The No votes did not stop the assembly from adopting the resolution, which voices support for a UN committee working to realize the right to self-determination of Palestinians, support the peace process and mobilize international support for the Palestinians.

What a shameful body the UN is, comprised of rogue states and other states too intimidated by the rogue states to do the right thing. The United Nations has repeatedly refused to condemn the death of innocent Israelis and has been a longstanding supporter of Palestinian terror tactics.

Canada has buried its head in the sand far too long on this issue. Having the courage to vote no instead of the cowardice to abstain says a lot.

Arguably, the UN didn’t really do much that day. The notion that Israel was created by a UN resolution is insulting and demeaning to the people who worked for decades to ensue its creation. Israel was built by pioneers, farmers, politicians, and many many soldiers who paid for the land with far too much bloodshed.

But the resolution for partition did accomplish two important things (and I use the term “accomplish” loosely). First of all, it paved the way for a Jewish state that was recognized by what was – at the time – a body that the world hoped would have some international legitimacy. (High hopes, as it turns out). And secondly, it established a longstanding political policy in the region of Jewish acceptance and Arab rejectionism… and of world appeasement of the Arab rejectionism.

Since that day, Israel has struggled to survive in the face of constant attacks and attempts to destroy it. The United Nations has degenerated into a body dominated by thug states looking to divert attention from their gross abuses by pointing their fingers at Israel… again and again and again. But still, Israel stands proud, and the UN hides its head in the sand.

The blogburst hosted by Israpundit commemorates November 29th and all that has ensued since.

Or else what, though? That’s the question nobody seems to be able to answer. Because military action is pretty much a non-option, and half the Security Council members won’t support sanctions, either.

Why does this seem suspiciously like an attempt by the USA to demonstrate the utter uselessness and powerlessness of the United Nations?

“The Secretary-General was deeply moved to learn of the death of President Yasser Arafat. President Arafat was one of those few leaders who could be instantly recognized by people in any walk of life all around the world. For nearly four decades, he expressed and symbolized in his person the national aspirations of the Palestinian people,” spokesman Fred Eckhard said in a statement on Annan’s behalf.

The spokesman said Arafat would be remembered for leading the Palestinians in a “giant step” toward peace in signing the Oslo accords in 1993 and, “It is tragic that he did not live to see it fulfilled.”

“Now that he has gone, both Israelis and Palestinians, and the friends of both peoples throughout the world, must make even greater efforts to bring about the peaceful realization of the Palestinian right of self-determination,” the statement said.

The emphasis, of course, is mine.

I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Annan heads the United Nations, which in the past few decades has engaged in full-time Israel-bashing. Since 1947’s partition plan, the UN has done nothing for Israel but fight to try and destroy it – from passing hundreds of one-sided resolutions to refusing to recognize even basic Israeli rights to live or exist. The UN gave Arafat his legitimacy. The UN – through its corrupt agency, UNRWA, perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem. The UN did everything possible to encourage Palestinian terorrism and give legitimacy to the PLO’s methods. The UN is the enemy here, not a neutral observer. What else could I have expected from Annan?

Debbye has thoughts on the CBC’s “Greatest Canadian” contest, something I’ve tried to avoid watching because I knew it would make me very very angry. Judging by the top 30, it seems we’re propagating our own stereotypes as a nation, voting in hockey players, any popstar or movie star with crossover American success, and iconofied politicians. The fact that this is a contest where Don Cherry can place in a top 10 alongside Alexander Graham Bell should say it all. *Sigh*.

Imshin is absolutely required reading, lashing out at those who believe that Israel should not exist. She also points to this article, published in the Guardian, about anti-Americanism and antisemitism in Europe.

And this is a little late, but Burnside has packed in his keyboard. Another casualty of the blogosphere. He’ll be missed.

Iran began processing uranium more than a week ago to prepare it for enrichment — a process that can be used to make nuclear weapons — in defiance of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, a diplomat said Wednesday.

But Iran’s president said Tehran would not give in to foreign pressure aimed at stopping what he said was a peaceful nuclear energy program, but which Washington says is a covert scheme aimed at building bombs.

A spokeswoman for the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the uranium processing was being closely monitored by the IAEA.

So what will the nice folks at the U.N. do with all the information they’re gleaning through this observation?

If Tehran fails to heed the demands, the board said it would consider possible “further steps” when it meets next month. Diplomats on the board said this included possibly referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which can impose sanctions.

In other words, nothing.

Something tells me that the IDF has training underway for a repeat of the Osarik strike…

“Oh I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another,” Hanson told CBC TV.

That was two days ago. Today, Hansen is singing a different tune. He’s demanded an apology from Israel for the latter’s call to the U.N. to investigate the former, after Israel accused UNRWA of letting terrorists use one of their ambulances to transport rockets.

Kofi Annan is sending a team to investigate. For the uninitiated, this is what is known in diplomatic circles as a “stall tactic”. Annan hopes that this show of action will mollify critics long enough for the story to blow over, and in the meantime, his investigators can get a nice falafel dinner and perhaps a soak in the Med.

Because, of course, everyone knows that the U.N. is so very even-handed when it comes to mideast politics…

The predicted North Korean response is: “Oh yeah? And if we don’t agree, what are you gonna do about it?” The predicted U.N. response is, well, silence.

In the meantime, the U.N. couldn’t be seen slouching on its regularly scheduled programming, so it resumed calls for a “nuclear weapons-free zone” in the Middle East – a call clearly aimed at Israel:

Israel has always said that it does not oppose signing the NPT, though only after there is stable peace in the Middle East.

It is an annual ritual at the IAEA annual conference that Arab and Muslim states try to get a resolution on the table that calls on Israel to give up its alleged nuclear weapons arsenal.

The last time they succeeded in getting such a resolution adopted by the IAEA General Conference was in 1991. Since 1987, the IAEA conference and U.N. General Assembly have passed 13 such resolutions. Israel has ignored them all.

Israel, by any normal standards, cannot be considered a threat to world security, and its neither-confirm-nor-deny policy is a necessity in a world that won’t let it defend itself from destruction by any means. Of course, since when are U.N. standards normal standards?

No, U.N. standards are more like these:

“Israel’s unsafeguarded facilities is a real threat to international peace and security,” Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Pirooz Hosseini, told the conference.

Excuse me for laughing. Iran, which has openly threatened to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, claims that Israel, who would never dream of using the nuclear weapons they allegedly posses, is the threat to world security? But Iran knows that the best way to divert attention from itself is to attack Israel, the eternal scapegoat.

Mah nishtana?

I have a feeling that most of the world expects and secretly hopes that Israel will deal with Iran’s nuclear program the same way it dealt with Iraq’s ambitions in 1981. Of course, everyone will condemn Israel for it and bluster and threaten. But none of them want to see a nuclear Iran either, and they know that Israel’s the only country that will actually do something about it.

Hypocrites.

“The Security Council has been bogged down in debating the issue,” said Martin, who pledged $20 million Cdn to assist the African Union in its drive to quell fighting between government-backed militias and rebel groups.

“While the international community struggles with definitions, the people of Darfur struggle with disaster. They are hungry, they are homeless, they are sick and many have been driven out of their own country. Tens of thousands have been murdered, raped and assaulted,” told the gathering.

“Our common humanity should be a powerful enough argument and that is precisely what is missing. Put simply, there is still no explicit provision in international law for intervention on humanitarian grounds.”

Martin also admitted that intervention in Sudan is too little, too late:

“We should have intervened last June when Canada called for it,” said Martin, who acknowledged progress had been made with a UN Security Council resolution last weekend that threatens sanctions if violence continues in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

“It’s been a long time in coming, far too long in coming,” he said.

We could argue that Canada’s aid is also too little, too late. But realistically, there’s very little our overextended military could do.

Martin has been relatively invisible on the international scene since taking office last December. This is his first effort to try to take a leadership role, in the spirit of Canada’s past reputation. And certainly, the crisis in Darfur needs more attention to be called to it – from a country other than the US, which has very little credibility right now thanks to the Iraq situation, the election, and general anti-Americanism.

Canada’s call to action is a step in the right direction, and I think Paul Martin deserves props for his speech today and his call to action. Unfortunately, the United Nations he is addressing is one that’s hell-bent on inaction.

In the strongest U.S. statement to date on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today said for the first time that “genocide” has been committed there and that the government of Sudan and Arab militias “bear responsibility.”

[ . . . ]

Powell’s use of the word “genocide” for the first time in describing the situation in Sudan followed a strong debate within the government. On one side of the argument, some human rights officials contended that a declaration of genocide would be a powerful statement that would draw world attention to Darfur and promote efforts to halt mass killings there.

However, some in the U.S. government argued that the explicit use of the word might alienate the Sudanese government and limit U. S. ability to pressure its leaders to halt marauding Arab militias, which have killed, raped and tortured black African refugees in the region.

Right. The Sudanese government. The people who armed the Janjaweed in the first place. Let’s tiptoe around because we certainly wouldn’t want to piss them off.

U.S. Congress already declared the situation a genocide, but the White House has been reluctant to say so until now. However, that’s better than the United Nations and the European Union, both of which are running scared from the term, because it would imply that action would be required by the international community.

Tens of thousands of people keep dying in Sudan. And the world refuses to do anything about it. Now that the Bush administration has used the G-word, will it really change anything?

The United Nations says it is concerned by Sudan’s lack of progress in bringing security to Darfur, where more than a million people have fled their homes for fear of militia attack.

Sudan has less than two weeks to prove to the U.N. Security Council it has made progress towards disarming marauding Arab militias known as Janjaweed, or face possible sanctions.

Let’s review, shall we?

Was the U.N. “concerned” about the years of fighting? Was the U.N. “concerned” about the ethnic cleansing and genocide (a word that they still refuse to say) that has so far cost 40,000 people their lives and sent a million more fleeing for theirs? Where has the “concern” been all these months while the Sudanese government backed and armed the janjaweed, who have been brutally killing, raping, and torturing tens of thousands?

But hey, it’s happening in Africa and it’s so far away, so who really cares anyway right? And what do we know about Sudan, or about Chad, besides that there’s a lot of people there starving and dying? And besides, it wouldn’t be politically-correct to say that what’s actually happening is Muslims killing black Africans. Especially because there’s no way to blame George W. Bush, and there’s no way to blame Israel.

Go read this horror story. Now imagine a million or two more like it. Then try to tell me that we should be relying on the U.N. to ensure international security.

The U.N. fucked up royally in Darfur, just like they fucked up royally in Kosovo, in Rwanda, in the DRC… in virtually anywhere else there’s been a conflict. And, as usual, it is the innocent who pay the price.

The UN nuclear agency will next year host a conference, including Israel and Arab states, to discuss steps to make the Middle East into a zone free of nuclear weapons, the head of the U.N. watchdog said Sunday.

As Israel is the only Middle Eastern country believed to have nuclear weapons, the talks would effectively boil down to what the Israeli government would require to abandon the nuclear option. Israel has never confirmed nor denied having the nuclear bomb.

At a time when the world should be raising the alarm about Iran’s nuclear program – which actually poses a great threat to the entire world – the UN has chosen to revert to type and once again focus its energies on the traditional scapegoat, Israel.

I can’t wait.

An EU military-civilian team that visited the region last week reported Monday that atrocities were being committed on a large scale, but declined to classify them as genocide. Team leader Pieter Feith stressed, however, that his trip was only five days and was not an expert mission.

“It’s up to the United Nations … to make this decision,” an EU official said Tuesday on customary condition of anonymity. “The aim of his mission was not to see if this was genocide or not. The aim was to see how the EU could further support” resolving the crisis.

So what else would you call 30,000 dead people, all of one background, being systematically murdered by people from another?

Oh wait, in Europe I believe they call that “Monday”.

Arab states at the United Nations are trying to foil a proposal to raise a vote condemning anti-Semitism in the General Assembly this September.

At a closed meeting held recently in New York, UN ambassadors from Arab and EU countries met and the Arabs made clear that they do not accept the initiative for the UN General Assembly to condemn anti-Semitism.

The blunt language used by the Arabs describing their opposition, and their plans to use diplomatic means to prevent the resolution from reaching a vote, shocked the Europeans, said a UN source.

Allison’s not shocked. Neither am I. Neither should anyone who’s been even semi-conscious in the last decade or so.

The lame reasons? They hardly even bear repeating, but for what it’s worth, here are some of the excuses:

Jordanian Ambassador to the UN Prince Ziad Hussein argued that the resolution would reinforce the tendency to call any criticism of Israel, anti-Semitic. Moroccan Ambassador Mohammed Banone, said that the seminar against anti-Semitism was a terrible idea and a decision would only divide the world body. Arab League Ambassador Mahamas Hani warned that a UN resolution condemning anti-Semitism would have a negative impact on the Middle East.

The Arab states are so blatant about their hatred of Jews that one would almost assume that they are making themselves look bad and doing their causes a disservice with how obvious they are being. But they know as well as we do that they can get away with it. After all, they’ve been getting away with it all along.

Israel has repeatedly tried to get the United Nations to pass even seemingly obvious resolutions condemning terrorism, suicide bombings, or even the targeting of civilian children. In each case, the Arab countries have blocked them from even coming to a vote. This time, the resolution is one that there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate argument against, and yet the Arab countries are again insisting that there is no place for a condemnation of antisemitism in the United Nations.

Why do we even bother? Why haven’t we written off the UN by now?

Frustrated by a chronic funding gap for the U.N. relief effort in the Darfur region of Sudan, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will issue an urgent appeal Wednesday to wealthy European, Asian and Middle Eastern governments that he believes have been too stingy in addressing the humanitarian crisis, senior U.N. officials said Tuesday.

It only took 30 thousand deaths, 180 thousand refugees fleeing into Chad, over 1 million people displaced from their homes, and more than 2 million in desperate need of food and medical treatment before Annan intervened.

It makes me think – not for the first time – that Mark Steyn said it best: “The problem is, by the time you’ve gone through the UN, everyone’s dead.”

The politically-correct will continue to rant and rave about the only “legitimate” action being that taken through the United Nations. But I bet if the 30,000 people who have already been ethnically cleansed in Sudan while the world stood idly by got a vote, they would have a few choice words about waiting for the UN to take action.

Israel, of course, will be ignoring the resolution, as it well should. After all, if Israel listened to the GA, all its citizens would long be dead:

Israeli UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman called the resolution “one-sided and totally counter-productive” and said construction of the wall will continue to keep out Palestinian attackers.

“It is simply outrageous to respond with such vigour to a measure that saves lives and responds with such casual indifference and apathy to the ongoing campaign of Palestinian terrorism that takes lives. This is not justice but a perversion of justice,” he said.

I’ve long maintained that they ought to just rename the GA the “body of the UN responsible for passing resolutions against Israel”. That’s all they ever do, anyway. So this, I suppose, was just business as usual.

Canada, in typical spineless fashion, abstained from the vote. Why does this even bother me anymore?

I won’t post excerpts because I urge everyone to read the entire thing. (Via Meryl Yourish).

But it wasn’t a mistake. And neither is Iran’s uncooperative attitude with UN weapons inspectors. Taken together, you gotta wonder whether there’s something else going on here, and we’re just ignoring all the signs. I don’t know, but I don’t like it one bit.

Israel has provided refugee status for 500 foreign residents from countries in which civil wars are taking place, according to the UN High commissioner for refugees’ representative in Israel Mickey Bavli.

Speaking to reporters on the occasion of World Refugee Day, Bavli said that over the past three years, status has been given to people from countries such as Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, as a result of which an inter-ministerial department that examines such requests was established two years ago.

At present, a further 200 applications are being examined.

Even while lobbying for urgently-needed reforms to the UNRWA – the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, which Israel claims is facilitating terrorism – Israel is working with UNHCR to help legitimate asylum seekers and refugees from elsewhere in the world.

The UNHCR representative in Israel explained the thinking last January, when Israel set up an internal body to review refugee claims:

UNHCR’s honorary representative in Israel, Mickey Bavly, said Israelis understand the plight of refugees, since more than three million citizens of the country were themselves forced into exile.

“The Israeli people have a very personal understanding of what it means to be a refugee, you don’t need a real effort to persuade them,” Bavly said. “But what was needed was to persuade the Israeli government to take the action and not rely solely on the U.N. [to examine claims].”

Israel has always been the safe haven for Jews all over the world. But these claimants are different. Israel is signalling its openness and willingness to reach out a hand to help people who need it, regardless of their background… as long as they want to live in the state, not destroy it. A critical distinction.

In predictable fashion, she ranted about the need to “choose” what Canada’s role would be in the world, and how “most Canadians” agree that force should only be used under the UN, and how Canada should expand its peacekeeping roles under the UN and distance itself from the “Bush administration” (the last bit was said with a disdainful sneer).

When she talked about needing to make the “choice”, I realized something: she – and many Canadians, both within the NDP and outside of it – still think that the War on Terror is a choice. They harbour the delusion that if Canada “chooses” to stay neutral, to stay out of it, that the terrorists will leave us alone.

They don’t get that we’re in a war whether we “choose” to be or not. The terrorists haven’t struck on Canadian soil – yet – but they’ve been planning to and trying to. We’re on the list of Evil Western countries, merely for being a free democracy, and none of McDonough or her ilk’s “choices” will change the fact that they have unilaterally declared war on us.

So the choice they’re really asking Canadians to make is between reality and denial.

Beyond whatever anyone’s opinion of all the NDP’s rhetoric about renegotiation free trade as “fair trade”, ending tax cuts to multinational corporations, or any of their policies… that is the choice that voters will be making on June 28th.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sharply criticized the United States on Thursday for seeking another exemption from the International Criminal Court, particularly in light of the Iraqi prisoner scandal.

“The blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value and I don’t think it should be encouraged by the council,” Annan told reporters.

Wow. I didn’t think that Kofi Annan was capable of using the term “wrong”. I figured it went against his moral relativist sensibilities. I guess criticizing the U.S. is an exception, right?

Iran is not fully cooperating with U.N. inspectors and must come clean about the full extent of its nuclear program within months, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.

Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran’s cooperation has been “less than satisfactory” and warned that the process of clarifying unresolved issues — particularly over Iran’s uranium enrichment activities — could not be allowed to drag on for ever.

I’m sure I’m not the only one hit with a sense of deja vu. Though if I were the type to gamble, I’d bet that the situation in Iran will never come to what has transpired in Iraq. The two are vastly different, and while Bush had grouped them under his “Axis of Evil” umbrella, it’s still like comparing apples to oranges.

However, ElBaradei would also do well to remember that his weapons inspections teams lost all credibility when they failed in Iraq. Countries like Iran might feel more comfortable flouting them now, knowing that the U.N. will not do anything beyond shaking a fist at a country’s failure to cooperate.

And of course, the worst-case scenario is that Iran is far ahead of anyone’s expectations in terms of development of nuclear weaponry. That would truly be catastrophic, because if the U.N. allows this lack of cooperation to drag for months, then a militant Islamist regime would have acquired nuclear capability, and does anyone have any doubts as to who the first victims would be?

Far more likely, of course, is that Iran is simply flouting the process to prove a point. In any case, the U.N. and most of the world demonstrated pretty clearly that they won’t do anything to countries who flout the inspections. That leaves us in a dangerous place. Iraq’s WMDs were nowhere to be found, so the United States ended up looking foolish. But remember the story of the boy who cried wolf: what happens when there really is a threat?

If you’re not reading Imshin, you should be. She has been blogging in her typically insightful fashion lately about Shavuot and Zionism’s true meaning, and about antisemitism at Berkeley.

LGF has the photo that proves just how little the UN can be trusted in the mideast. And Meryl has some biting commentary on the latest news emerging from Israel.

In Canadian news, the election talk that seems to be dominating the airwaves. But Damian Penny and David Janes have a disgusting story of racism interfering in custody cases that proves just how dangerous these “PC” policies can be for innocent children. As for the election, Paul Jané comments on the Liberals’ transparent scheme to make ridiculous healthcare promises at the eleventh hour that they clearly have no intention of keeping. (Anyone else remember the “no more GST” promise? Remind me again why I keep voting for these guys?)

Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where government troops are accused of backing Arab militia which pillage black Africa villages, raping and killing. The Khartoum government denies it is involved in ethnic cleansing.

This isn’t too surprising. The U.N. is a master of hypocrisy. After all, when Libya can chair the Human Rights commission, then it isn’t too much of a leap to see how we end up with a commission whose primary purpose seems to be condemning Israel while whitewashing all the human rights abuses taking place around the world by its own members.

But it does strike me as ironic that, while the UNCHR re-elects Sudan, another UN body, the UNHCR (not to be confused) is frantically trying to help over a hundred thousand Sudanese refugees who’ve fled into Chad because of the ethnic cleansing that Sudan denies is taking place. And UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that large-scale ethnic cleansing could take place without quick intervention.

So, to the United Nations, I have to ask: which is it? Is Sudan worthy being part of a human rights watchdog, or are they the guys the watchdogs ought to be watching? The UN’s schizophrenic behaviour shouldn’t surprise me anymore. It really shouldn’t.

The European Union (EU), backed by countries including the United States, expressed concern on Thursday at reports of grave and systematic abuses in North Korea, including “infanticide in prison and labor camps.”

The EU, in a resolution presented to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on behalf of 37 countries, also called for appointing a special U.N. investigator for the first time to go to the reclusive, Stalinist country.

I’m wondering if they actually expect the UN to get off their asses and do something?

April 7 will now be set aside in Canada to remember the victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the office of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin announced.

“April 7 marks one of the most profoundly tragic days of our time,” the statement from Martin’s office read.

It was on this day in 1994 “that the horrors of genocide were unleashed in Rwanda. Approximately 800,000 people were slaughtered over the ensuing three months,” the statement said.

“The Government of Canada has accordingly declared April 7 as a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.”

It would take me days to write about how woefully inadequate this token gesture seems.

“We didn’t know” was the excuse of most of the Western world and international community, who looked on silently while over 800,000 people – mostly Tutsis – were murdered.

Last week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan apologized for what he called “sins of omission” in allowing the genocide to happen:

“The international community is guilty of sins of omission,” Annan told the crowd gathered in New York for the summit.

The head of the UN peacekeeping agency at the time, Annan said he thought he did what he could.

“I believed at the time that I was doing my best. But I realized after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support,” he said in his opening speech.

To Annan, I have to say, far too little, and far too late. Canadian Romeo Dallaire, who had a front-row seat for the horrors, blamed the world’s leaders for failing to respond to his cries for action:

The UN force had a limited mandate and an insufficient number of troops and weapons, and that appeals for reinforcements were rejected, Dallaire told the court.

He specifically mentioned France, the United States and Belgium, the former colonial ruler which had the largest number of UN troops in Rwanda, as being “unco-operative.”

“… I did not get intelligence information from them,” he said.

Belgium ordered the withdrawal of its peacekeepers, the backbone of the operation, shortly after Rwandan troops killed 10 of their soldiers.

At least Dallaire went to Rwanda to face down his demons, and commemorate the date. Which is more than can be said for any of the leaders he blamed.

Rwanda is a testament to the complete and utter failure of the United Nations. Period. It’s been ten years now, and people are finally starting to wake up the fact that this international body is completely toothless, and will refuse to take action until it’s ridiculously, tragically far too late.

So we pause for a moment and remember.

But it’s not enough. Instead of a moment of silence for Rwanda, how about a moment of action – for North Korea… for Sudan… for Congo… for people anywhere their lives and freedoms are jeopardized. Because it’s one thing to regret inaction after the fact. Hindsight is 20/20. It’s another thing altogether to witness atrocities being committed right now, even as we speak, and fail to think about how people will think of our failure to act in 10 years from now.

That’s the true lesson of Rwanda. If we say “Never Again”, we ought to mean it.

It doesn’t matter if we make nice, and talk about “understanding” the motives of the terrorists. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we look for “root causes” or try to blame terrorist attacks on the actions and international policies of our governments. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we stand in the streets marching and chanting with the radical groups, holding signs equating Bush to Hitler or denouncing the United States. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we all flood classes about Islam to learn about the “religion of peace” and have long theological discussions about its true meanings. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we turn out in droves to throw out centrist governments at the polls and vote in socialists who are more inclined to appeasement in reaction to terror attacks. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we abstain from United Nations resolutions that would attempt to defend what’s right, or if we bury our heads in the sand on an international scale and refuse to take any action, or even if we turn on our allies. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter if we denounce Israel or give millions in aid to the Palestinians. They’ll kill us anyway.

It doesn’t matter what we do. To the terrorists, all that matters is who we are: Western, democratic and free. They don’t hate us for what we do, or don’t do. That’s just an excuse. They attacked Spain and people said it was because the Spanish were allied with the US and Britain in Iraq. So now the Spanish throw out their government, and we in Canada breathe a sigh of relief because we didn’t participate in the war in Iraq so we won’t be targets. But they attacked Morocco and Kenya and Bali and Turkey… how many of those places participated in the war in Iraq? If we Canadians think they won’t kill us anyway, we’re kidding ourselves. Given the opportunity, they would be just as happy to kill as many of us as they can.

They’re fighting a war. Oppression against freedom. Backwardness against civilization. They’ve gotten tired of oppressing the people in the middle east only, and they have decided to go global… and they won’t stop until we’re all dead. That’s how much they hate us. No amount of caving to their blackmail or changing our actions or ways of thinking will appease them either. Do you really think Osama Bin Laden cares how many people who died in 9/11 were registered Republicans and how many were registered Democrats? Do you really think he gives a rat’s ass whether any of the people who died when the World Trade Center collapsed had been out marching in an ANSWER rally a week before? Or had been out protesting Bush a month before?

No, they don’t hate us for what we do. They hate us for who we are. And they’ll kill us anyway. So there’s nothing left for us to do but to kill them first.

Israel, Palestinians Take Barrier Case to U.N. Court

Palestinians told the opening session of World Court hearings into the legality of Israel’s West Bank barrier Monday that the vast network of walls and fences would deny them a viable independent state.

Israel stayed away from the U.N. forum’s landmark foray into its conflict with the Palestinians, arguing that the court in The Hague had no right to rule on the case.

In the second paragraph, the article states clearly that Israel is staying away (actually, boycotting) the hearings. So then why the headline that suggests that Israel somehow instigated this sham of a case?

That appears to be changing, as Israel is at last acknowledging that sometimes it’s not enough to be right; you have to be snappy. This media strategy is sure to have an impact:

Jerusalem bus wrecked in a suicide bombing was readied Tuesday for a flight to the Netherlands as part of an Israeli public relations offensive surrounding a World Court hearing on Israel’s West Bank barrier.

Israel’s Zaka private emergency service said it was sending the charred skeleton of Bus 19, in which 11 people were killed on Jan. 29 when a Palestinian policeman blew himself up, as grim evidence of how Israel has “suffered from terror.”

The bus, taken in pieces to Ben-Gurion airport on a flatbed truck, was to be flown out Wednesday and displayed outside the World Court in The Hague during next week’s hearings on the legality of the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.

As an advertising person, this strategy is sound. It’s sure to make a strong emotional impact. But it’s funny… I’ve been arguing for so long that Israel should swing a few punches on the public relations front, and now that they’re finally doing so, it’s leaving a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I can’t help but feeling that it’s wrong somehow for Israel to stoop to the level of media ploys or one-liners. I’m in no position to criticize; the cynic in me knows that perception is reality. But maybe I keep thinking that it would be nice if Israel were above these cheap strategies… that it would be nice if the world recognized right and wrong instead of catchphrases and slogans.

Still, a reality check tells me that Israel is just presenting its case in the strongest way possible, and that it’s about time.

Yad Vashem is appalled by reports of North Korea’s use of gas chambers to murder and perform medical experiments on political dissidents and their families. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev has sent an urgent letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in which he calls for a full investigation of this insidious abuse of human rights. The issue is all the more severe due to North Korea’s status as a member of the UN. The internment, torture, and murder of North Korean political dissenters and their families was recently reported by the BBC.

In his letter, Shalev states with alarm that only six decades after the utilization of gas chambers to exterminate European Jewry, North Korea has apparently employed them against thousands of its own citizens. “The lives of untold thousands of North Koreans are in danger because their totalitarian government perceives them as a threat”, Shalev writes. “Although the rationale, scale, and context are vastly different, the chilling image of the murderers coolly watching their victims’ death agonies is all too reminiscent of Nazi barbarism.”

The important thing here is Yad Vashem’s reaction, not the seemingly ridiculously benign steps that it is requesting the UN to take. Everyone knows that in these situatuions the UN has no real power. But if enough organizations such as Yad Vashem start speaking out, maybe they can make a difference.

Iraq’s foreign minister accused the United Nations on Tuesday of failing his country by leaving Saddam Hussein in power for decades and appealed to the world body to assume a leading role in Baghdad immediately.

[ . . . ]

Zebari said the United Nations had failed to help rescue Iraq from “a murderous tyranny” that lasted more than 35 years and “today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”

“The United Nations must not fail the Iraqi people again,” Zebari said.

[ . . . ]

Zebari accused the 15-member Security Council of being divided “between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable” and said they should overcome the deep divisions over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

[ . . . ]

Appealing for unity in the council, Zebari said “settling scores with the United States should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people.”

Annan said Saddam’s downfall was “an opportunity for a new beginning in the vital task of helping Iraqis to take control of their destiny — of helping them to create a secure, stable and independent Iraq.”

Of course, anti-Americans will dismiss everything Zebari says on the grounds that he’s part of a US-installed government and therefore his opinion shouldn’t count. But then, the anti-Americans have a long history of ignoring the actual thoughts and opinions of people who live in a country, in favour of what they believe is in their best interest. That kind of supremicist “they don’t know what’s good for them, we do” attitude is something I was under the impression was against liberal beliefs… but then, tell that to the guy chanting the anti-Bush slogan and trying to pretend that Iraqis would be better off still under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

Thus, according to the Goodists, the great global challenges are poverty, hunger, disease and war. This may be true in the most general sense. But it sidesteps the hard fact that the real culprits are the foolish and sometimes ill-intentioned leaders whose policies lead to such things. Goodists would also contend that the real goal for nations at war is moral victory — if necessary, by means of surrender — rather than victory itself.

This is why the Goodists make a fetish of the concept of legitimacy. To liberate Iraq or not to liberate Iraq? About the only thing interesting about that debate was that so many “good” people actually believed that securing Security Council approval was morally a worthier goal than liberating 23 million people from the boot of a merciless tyrant. Or take the matter of Israel’s security fence: Here again, it is left to Right-wingers to fret about militarily defensible borders, whereas to Goodists what matters is whether that fence meets with the approval of The Hague.

There’s lots more.

Israel condemned the United Nations decision Monday sending the security fence issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), saying it is a “cynical manipulation” of an apparatus that is designed to promote world peace in order to further the interests of those supporting terrorism.

But officials agreed to cooperate with the court’s expected investigation, saying they would argue the fence is needed for self-defense against terrorism.

With 90 nations in favor, eight opposed, and 74 abstentions, the non-binding resolution asks the court to consider the “legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying power.”

“The Palestinians again used the automatic majority they enjoy at the UN to further initiatives that not only damage efforts to create conditions to renew the diplomatic process, but also damage the UN itself and the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission to preserve world peace and security,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Yonatan Peled said.

So what else is new?

The IJC is nothing more than a puppet court, an instrument used by a morally corrupt world to prosecute the countries that enjoy the freedoms which they hate so much. And the UN is nothing but a numbers game. The mere fact that Israel has to defend its decision to build a fence to keep out suicide bombers, while the Palestinians don’t have to answer for the bombers’ actions in the first place, is testament to how upside-down the UN has become.

Maybe Israel should split into about 90 independent states. Then each could have a separate membership and vote at the UN.

At the United Nations, the lives of Israeli children are worth less than the lives of Palestinian children, Israel’s ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman said Wednesday after he was forced to withdraw a resolution calling for the protection of Israeli children from terrorism.

[ . . . ]

On Nov. 6, the same committee adopted a similar resolution calling for the protection of Palestinian children from Israeli aggression by a vote of 88 to 4 with 58 abstentions.

The Israeli draft, the Jewish state’s first at the UN since 1976, was introduced earlier this month in response to numerous terrorist attacks that have targeted Israeli children, including a bombing at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa on Oct. 4 that killed 21 people, among them four children.

Gillerman withdrew the draft after a group of states from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), led by Egypt, demanded the inclusion of amendments that, if adopted, would have turned the draft into an anti-Israel resolution.

The list of amendments, cosponsored by Bahrain, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, included deleting of the phrase “Israeli children” from the text and replacing it with “Middle East children,” and inserting references to Israeli “military assaults,” “occupation” and “”excessive use of force” ahead of all mention of terrorism. Even the title of the draft was changed from “The situation of and assistance to Israeli children” to “The situation of and assistance to children in the Middle East region.”

Well, excuse me for saying this but, DUH. There’s a reason Israel hasn’t tried to introduce a GA resolution in over a quarter of a century. Israel should know better than to expect objectivity or even a modicum of fair treatment from a body dominated by its enemies, committed to wiping its existence off the map.

It won’t stop supposedly “neutral”, “objective” watchdogs and commentators from relying on the GA’s authority to criticize Israel, though, you can bet on that.

Israel’s security fence, dubbed the “racist colonial wall” and “expansionist conquest wall” by Arab envoys at the United Nations, is currently coming under harsh criticism by members of the UN Security Council.

At an open debate on a Syrian-sponsored draft resolution that deems the fence “illegal under relevant provisions of international law,” and demands that it be “ceased and reversed,” ambassador after ambassador has stated that in erecting the fence, Israel was over-reacting to terrorist attacks against its citizens.

Well, nobody will ever accuse the UN of overreacting to terrorism . . . or of reacting at all.

In it, Allison does a very good job of exposing how the very structure of the UN puts Israel in a nearly impossible position:

The UN’s anti-Israel bias is rooted in the organization’s very structure. In the General Assembly, 130 of the 190 member nations will, almost automatically, vote against Israel.

[ . . . ]

Given the UN’s overwhelmingly third-world majority, the official says, the case against Israel is easy for the Arab states to make. Zionism is depicted simply as an extension of the history of European colonization of Asia, Africa, and South America–and just as these powers withdrew from their former colonies and granted them independence, they argue, so should the Jewish residents give up “occupied Palestinian territory.”

Allison quotes Montreal-based MP and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler extensively. She discusses Israel’s exclusion prior to 2002 from any regional groups, and the effect it has had on the country’s ability to develop parity. She has plenty to say about the UN’s so-called “human rights commission”, at which 30% of resolutions are directed against Israel, and where accusations ranging the gamut from blood libel to Nazi equivalencies have been passed as resolutions. And she explains in layman’s terms why Israel remians a pariah state in the UN, while countries with much worse human rights records have been given a free pass:

“While theoretically this wide group does not need to vote together, their common history of fighting Western imperialism still binds them together,” says Becker. “Add to this the simple fact that, for the vast majority of these countries, it is simply not worth it from a practical point of view to anger the wealthy and oil-rich Arab world by opposing anti-Israel resolutions. They have a great deal to lose and not much to gain. It just pays for them to side with the Arabs.” “There is an institutionalized set of double standards,” adds Professor Cotler. Powerful countries with wide spheres of influence, or groups of countries, such as Russia, China and the Arab world, agree tacitly to ignore one another’s human rights violations. Israel has no such leverage.

The anti-Israel crowd loves to quote UN resolutions when it suits their purposes, failing of course to realize how biased they are. Other organizations have done plenty to expose the bias as well. AIPAC has a fact sheet, for example, and the Jewish Virtual Library keeps a record of all anti-Israel resolutions passed by the General Assembly by year.

The thing is, the UN’s anti-Israel bias isn’t exactly news. But sometimes it’s worth recalling some of these facts, because with all the shouting from the anti-Zionist crowd about resolutions that Israel is supposedly violating, it tends to get forgotten.

Syria’s drive for a U.N. resolution condemning an Israeli air raid on its territory stalled in the Security Council for another day on Wednesday as Damascus looked for possible compromise with a divided Europe.

All four of the council’s European Union states — France, Britain, Spain and Germany — have signaled Syria that its draft resolution had to be more balanced to win their support.

But while Britain was insisting, along with Washington, that the resolution must condemn Saturday’s deadly suicide bombing in Haifa, Israel, to win its vote, France was making no such demand, diplomats said.

After all, it was only a bunch of Jews who were murdered. Why should France concern itself?

“This incident today once again underlines that Iraq remains a war zone and a high risk environment, particularly for those working to improve the lives of the Iraqi people,” Kevin Kennedy, the senior U.N. official in Baghdad, said in a statement read out by Paradela at the scene.

Paradela said U.N. staff did not know why they were being targeted. “It’s not really for lack of security that this happens,” she said. “If people are willing to kill themselves there’s not a lot we can do.”

After the last attack, the general consensus was that the UN was targeted because it was a “softer” target than the American military bases. But now, the bombings almost seem calculated to deter the UN from getting drawn into an expanded role in Iraq, as the US has been encouraging it to do. Even if that wasn’t the intention, it may very well be the result.

Arab League:Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, said he hoped the veto doesn’t mean the United States supports Israeli policies “which are opposed by the whole world.”

Egypt:“The pretext saying that the draft resolution was unbalanced is baseless,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Wednesday. Maher echoed concern Israel might see the vote as a license to go after Arafat. He said that if nations don’t pressure Israel to desist from its “provocative and aggressive” policies, it would show the international community’s “powerlessness.”

Syria: Syria’s UN Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad expressed regret at the veto, calling it “extremely regrettable” and warning that it “will antagonize the feeling of Arabs in the region.

The Palestinians:“Clearly this is not a neutral position,” Ziad Abu Amr, a member of the outgoing Palestinian Cabinet, said. Senior Arafat adviser Nabil Abu Rdeneh told reporters the veto could jeopardize the U.S-backed “road map” for Mideast peace. The vote “is a real encouragement for the Israelis to continue their escalation,” he said. Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian UN observer, said the United States lost its credibility as an honest broker and warned that “serious consequences may follow.”

(It seems that “honest broker” has been translated as someone who condemns both sides of a dispute equally, regardless of who is at fault. That’s like a parent being criticized for grounding only one child and not both, when the grounded kid crashed the car and the non-grounded one brought home straight As.)

Jordan: In Jordan, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood said it was not surprised at the U.S. veto because “the Zionist lobby … controls the American policy in the Middle East.”

Oh, and I suppose we should include France: France said it regretted that the UN resolution on Israel didn’t pass. The resolution “had a balanced message that we believed could bring a consensus,” Cecile Pozzo di Borgo, the French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said in Paris.

Balanced??? I think Israel is making a political blunder by threatening to expel Arafat, but that doesn’t make the proposed UN resolution any more balanced:

The rejected draft resolution would have demanded “that Israel, the occupying power, desist from any act of deportation and to cease any threat to the safety of the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.”

It would have condemned Israel’s targeted assassinations of militant leaders and Palestinian suicide bombings, “all of which caused enormous suffering and many innocent victims.” It would also have called for a cessation of “all acts of terrorism, provocation, incitement and destruction.”

In other words, yet another UN condemnation of Israel without any mention of Palestinian terror. Sure, France, that looks balanced all right.

The UN seems to believe that a simple “majority rule” decides the difference between right and wrong. If the Arab nations and the Europeans gang up on Israel, then it must be okay, because they’re outvoting the US. More votes, more right? Only in a morally bankrupt world where right and wrong no longer exist. Unfortunately, this is increasingly the world where we live.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel’s attempt to kill the spiritual leader of Hamas, accusing the state of using excessive force and violating international humanitarian law, the U.N. spokesman said Monday.

So the U.N. doesn’t mind when innocent kids are killed. But G-d forbid anyone should try to take out a terrorist mastermind!

Postcards of a Palestinian child dwarfed by the Israeli fence, slide shows of Palestinian humanitarian crises allegedly caused by the fence’s construction, informational leaflets printed by the anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta, and maps of “Palestine” from the river to the sea from 1920, minus the caveat that Palestine was never a state, were all on display yesterday at UN headquarters in New York, where delegates from across the globe gathered for the International Conference of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People.

The theme of the two-day conference was “End the Occupation!”

Ridiculous allegations were also levelled against the security fence, delegates were urged to overlook and excuse Palestinian terrorism, and Rachel Corrie’s mother was called up to speak. ADL chairman Abraham Foxman wrote a letter to Kofi Annan urging him not to support this conference, which – surprise, surprise – was ignored.

And people wonder why Israel doesn’t trust the UN . . .

At the moment, there’s only one hyperpower (the United States), one great power (the United Kingdom) and one regional power (Australia) that are serious about the threat of Islamist terrorism. There’s also Israel, of course, but Israel’s disinclination to have its bus passengers blown to smithereens is seen as evidence of its ”obstinacy” and unwillingness to get the ”peace process” back ”on track.” What a difference it would make if one or two other G-7 nations were to get serious about the battle and be a reliable vote in international councils. But who? France? It’s all business to them, unless al-Qaida are careless enough to blow up the Eiffel Tower. Canada? Canadians get blown up in Bali, murdered in Iran, tortured in Saudi Arabia, die in the rubble of the UN building in Baghdad–and their government shrugs. Belgium? They’d rather issue a warrant for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld than Chemical Ali.

Yeah, read the whole thing.

Logic would dictate that the Saddam-loyalist factions still active in Iraq would want to direct their anger at the Americans, not at the United Nations. So this, of course, begs the question of who was responsible for today’s attack? And why? After all, the U.N.’s role in Iraq has been humanitarian, not military.

Was the HQ attacked because it was a “soft target”? Because it was a way to attack foreigners? Was the attack by a group angry with the U.N.’s resistance to Iraqi intervention? (That last seems highly unlikely). Was it all a big mistake?

Details may emerge in the coming days that clarify it . . . but don’t count on it. Iraq is in a state of mess right now, and it will probably take some time to get all the threads sorted out.

“What I felt was disappointing about a lot of Canadian opposition to the war was that very few people seemed to give a damn about the human-rights situation,” Ignatieff says. “Very few seemed to care that peace had the consequence of leaving 26 million people inside a really odious tyranny.”

Ignatieff also has some choice words about the UN, the organization to which his father was Canada’s ambassador:

“Touring Canada, what bothered me was that the only legitimacy that mattered to most of the audiences was the legal legitimacy of the UN,” he says. “Well, the UN screwed up in Rwanda, it screwed up in Bosnia — it screws up most of the time.” In a seminar for Kennedy School staff on his Iraq position, Ignatieff was even more blunt: “The United Nations is a messy, wasteful, log-rolling organization.”

An interesting read.

“We are of course agreed… that there will be a vital role for the United Nations in the reconstruction of Iraq,” Blair said after holding talks with Bush.

Bush used the same words, before spelling out their vision for the two remaining stages after U.S and British forces take administrative control in the immediate aftermath of war.

Analysts are saying that these promises are likely to anger many U.N. countries, especially in Europe, since Bush and Blair only see their role in a humanitarian capacity, as opposed to promising them the wider powers of administration and interim rule.

But shouldn’t they be happy about this? I mean, this lets them off the hook, doesn’t it? All that whining about “imperialism” and “colonialism” – surely they wouldn’t want to take part in what they find so distasteful. Most of Europe gladly let the U.S. and Britain do their dirty work for them so they could keep their hands clean. (Canada has been, too, but that’s besides the point). So why wouldn’t they want to stick to humanitarian aid, while letting the U.S. and Britain sort out the post-war politics and security? That way, U.S. could continue to be the convenient scapegoat it has been all along through this crisis.

Simply put, countries such as France and Belgium feel left out of the party. Before the war started they were absolutely opposed, but now that Chirac’s buddy Saddam shows absolutely no sign of being able to survive this thing, they’ve changed their colours. This isn’t exactly a surprise – everyone predicted it. And Bush and Blair are likely to go along with it at least somewhat in order to gain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the world, and to try to begin to heal the giant rift that has erupted within the United Nations.

Ramzi Sfeir, a 17-year-old from the Palestinian village of Bet Jalla, never believed that Palestinians and Israelis could agree on anything.

But after he was offered a chance to sit at a mock negotiating table with Jewish Israelis his own age, he says that many of his preconceived notions just faded away.

“I learned that you can talk without fighting,” he said, after participating in a model United Nations in Israel, aimed at teaching diplomacy skills to youth. “I also learned that Jews have convictions we can’t change and that Judaism is like a nationality for them. [The Jewish participants] also came to understand us better.”

Though there are hundreds of model UN programs in countries around the world, Israel is one of the only Middle East nations to host one; and is the only one with a special committee that brings Israelis and Palestinians together to negotiate regional issues.

This won’t create peace in the middle east. But it seems to be an extremely valuable step, because unlike other left-wing efforts to “bring together” Jewish and Arabic kids and teens in Israel, this one doesn’t shy away from the thorny political issues. Instead, it gives the participants a forum to attack them head-on, but in a non-violent, diplomatic way.

There are no miracle solutions. Only baby steps. This seems like a good one.

The Jerusalem Post has stories about how the Palestinian Authority’s representative at the UN Human Rights Convention publicly called for Israel’s destruction and made disgusting comparisons to Nazism, UNRWA was implicated once again in aiding and abetting terorrism, and Palestinians named a square in Jenin after the suicide bomber who killed 4 U.S. troops in Iraq. And all that in the past two days!

But sure, Israel should just give them whatever they want, and make nice, and all will work itself out. Yeah, right.

So if people want to talk about containing [Saddam Hussein] and don’t want to go in forcefully and remove him, how do they propose doing something about the horrors he is inflicting on his people who live in such fear of him?”

I did not cite “weapons of mass destruction.” Nor do I believe Saddam Hussein is a direct threat to this country, any more than the creators of the mass graves in the Balkans were, or the Taliban. And as has been evident for a long time, I am no admirer of George W. Bush.

The United Nations? Did the inspectors go into the prisons and the torture chambers? Would they have, if given more time? Did they interview the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s dreaded secret police?

An Iraqi in Detroit wanted to send a message to the anti-war protesters: “If you want to protest that it’s not OK to send your kids to fight, that’s OK. But please don’t claim to speak for the Iraqis.”

And on the other side, I was watching Bill Maher on HBO earlier, and guest Michael Graham said during discussion that (and forgive me for paraphrasing) for him it has nothing to do with the Iraqi people, it’s about protecting the interests of Americans and defending the US against the terrorism that Saddam supports. (To which Janeane Garofalo made some typical comment about our “world view” being wrong because how dare we tell Saddam that he has no right to torture his people anyway? But I digress.)

The point is, from a political standpoint every country does tend to act in self-interest. But I think the moral case for ousting Saddam Hussein is very strong, and it hasn’t been made clearly enough.

On the surface, I’d tend to agree with Graham more. There are many people in the world living in deplorable conditions. And while it’s altruistic to want to “liberate” them, I can understand a dose of skepticism about war based on those grounds. In general, countries go to war to defend themselves against a threat to their security.

Critics argue that the case has not been made that Saddam Hussein poses a threat to the security of the United States – or other UN members, for that matter.

That is just plain false. Every UN resolution that he ignored was a threat, because it weakened the power of the UN to take action against a rogue state. Every cheque provided to the family of a Palestinian suicide bomber was a threat, because it funded and encouraged terrorism which, left unchecked, can only spread. Every time Saddam Hussein juggled Western countries like little balls in the air, driving wedges between them, only served to up the threat.

Nobody in the world – not even France or Russia – actually believed Saddam when he claimed to have disarmed. They all know he has weapons of mass destruction, and they all know he’ll use them. The only people who are Saddam’s cheerleaders are the anti-war protester crowd, and even some of them are beginning to wise up.

Bush knows a war for altruistic purposes is easier to sell, so he dresses it up as being about the freedom of the Iraqi people. And I certainly won’t downplay their oppression. The horrors they have faced in the 33 years of Saddam’s regime are very real.

But if that in itself isn’t a prima facie case for war, self-defense can no longer be denied as an imminent one. So that’s why I say to the Americans, the British, and their allies: go kick butt! And to the Canadian government, shame on us for not being there with them.

There has not been, despite what some critics charge, an unseemly rush to war on the part of the United States and the United Kingdom. Six months have passed since George W. Bush first went to the United Nations, five months since he acquired the political authority from Congress to deal with Iraq and well over four months since the UN Security Council backed Resolution 1441 and provided Saddam Hussein with his final, final chance.

[ . . . ]

Now that British forces have been committed, the country should and almost certainly will rally around them. The Prime Minister deserves the support of all political parties. The peace may prove harder to win than the war, but war will still be a difficult endeavour. It rarely proceeds precisely as planned. Ulysses Grant, the general who took charge of the Union army after its rout at Fredricksburg, eventually received Lee’s and the South’s final surrender at Appomattox with the words: “The war is over — the rebels are our countrymen again.” His respectful tone was such that it prevented his men from cheering the defeat of their opponents. Mr Bush and Mr Blair must welcome the people of Iraq back into the civilised world in exactly the same spirit.

Worth reading.

Iraq is unlikely to use chemical or biological weapons to defend itself from a U.S.-led invasion because world opinion would turn against it, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Wednesday. “Saddam Hussein has certainly figured himself to be a sort of emperor of Mesopotamia, and the leader of the Arab world,” Blix said. “So I think he very likely cares very much about his reputation.”

Wait a sec . . . I thought Blix assured us that Saddam didn’t have any of those chemical or biological weapons.

“The co-sponsors of the resolution have agreed they will not pursue a vote on the draft resolution,” British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said. “The co-sponsors reserve the right to take their own steps to secure the disarmament of Iraq.”

Meanwhile, the White House said U.S. President George W. Bush would address his nation at 8 p.m. ET Monday (0100 GMT Tuesday).

This is the final countdown. We’re in it now, folks.

A senior U.S. official said the United States had positive responses from three African members of the Security Council — Angola, Cameroon and Guinea — which had previously been uncommitted. “We’re assured by what we heard from them,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Of course, France and possibly Russia or China may still veto such a resolution. And even without that, the U.S. is still two votes shy of the nine that it would need. Still uncommitted are Mexico, Pakistan, and Chile. If the U.S. wants to be able to claim that a resolution would have passed aside from a veto, it needs to get two out of the three onside.

Update: The U.S. now claims to have Pakistan’s support. That would put them only a single vote away from a majority. Pakistan, however, is not confirming this claim.

When asked about the Canadian proposal, Fleischer said Bush believes his resolution is the “way to go.”

“Time is running out, this issue must come to a conclusion,” said Fleischer.

Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell also discussed the proposal. Afterwards, U.S. State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said Canada’s proposal “only procrastinates on a decision we all should be prepared to take.”

While I understand Canada’s desire to forge a compromise and mediate between an increasingly polarized UN, I gotta agree with the Americans on this one. There’s nothing magical about March 28th. The anti-war protesters won’t have changed their minds by then. Saddam Hussein won’t turn into Mother Teresa by then. Really, nothing will change between today and March 28th on an issue that the world has been stalling on for months already.

The saying goes “procrastination gives you something to look forward to”, and that’s all very well and good – while I’m writing a paper or completing a project. But the only thing further delay will accomplish here is to increase anti-Americanism and to give Saddam Hussein more time to prepare weapons of retaliation. It’s time to act, not to delay. And it’s time for Canada to get on-side.

U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said Monday that Iraq must begin destroying its illicit al-Samoud missiles by Saturday and he did not expect any more talks with Iraq on the issue.

[ . . . ]

Blix last Friday ordered Baghdad to begin destroying the missiles, their warheads, engines, launchers and other components by Saturday after concluding they exceeded the 90-mile range set for Iraqi rockets by a Security Council resolution.

But without the U.N. agreeing to take any kind of action if these demands are not met, this threat is as empty as a scrawny kid telling the schoolyard bully to stop stealing his lunch money “or else”.

The United States said it had massed enough troops in the Gulf to attack Iraq, even as Turkey appeared to come round Friday to letting its territory be used to launch part of the expected assault.

Washington pressed on with its drive toward war by working on a U.N. Security Council resolution that it hoped would secure support from an international community not convinced of the need to use force against Baghdad.

While many nations say U.N. inspectors must get more time to establish if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, Washington, backed by its main ally Britain, says Iraq has already lost this argument and President Saddam Hussein must now be removed.

“If military force becomes necessary to disarm Iraq, this nation, joined by others, will act decisively in a just cause, and we will prevail,” President Bush said. “For the oppressed people of Iraq … the day of freedom is drawing near.”

A new UN resolution may not include a specific call for force, in order to obtain a majority vote in the Security Council. From the point of view of Bush, Blair, and their allies, a weaker resolution that passes is politically preferable to a stronger one that fails, because it will play better in terms of convincing the world that most of the countries do indeed back a hard line against Iraq.

1) Saddam Hussein leaves voluntarily and is followed by new leadership that abides by international law

2) Saddam leaves involuntarily

3) Saddam adheres to U.N. resolutions

It’s a big game of chicken now. The only question is, will Saddam Hussein flinch first?

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien says Canada will not be part of the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” in a war against Iraq unless the United Nations authorizes military action.

After weeks of dodging questions about Canada’s position, Chrétien ended the fence-sitting. He told MPs yesterday that if the Security Council refuses to authorize a war, the United States will have to do without the help of its closest ally and largest trading partner if it decides to pursue a military campaign to remove Saddam Hussein.

“We have not been asked and we do not intend to participate in a group of the willing,” Chrétien said in reply to a question from Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe.

“If (the Americans) want to go there all alone, they can go there all alone,” Chrétien said. “But we say they must go with the authorization of the United Nations. If they don’t, the international system of peace and security will probably be more destabilized than it need be.”

There are three problems with this statement: Firstly, the United States will certainly not be alone if it attacks without UN approval. Secondly, the UN Security Council has been unable to resolve the problem or to propose a solution other than endless appeasement of Saddam. Thirdly, if the United States decides to attack, they won’t exactly miss our military forces (or lack thereof). Three soldiers and a snowmobile aren’t exactly crucial to the American war plans.

Popular opinion in Canada is largely anti-war, so Chrétien took the easy way out of this one. But while it won’t hurt the United States or Britain or anyone else, it is likely to hurt the already-fragile relationship that Canada has with its largest trading partner and cohabitant of this continent. In the international scene, it is clear that Canada has no better friend than the United States . . . and there’s only so long we can keep making our friends do the dirty work for us and then berate them for having dirtier hands than us.

A panel of independent arms experts told the U.N. the range of Iraq’s Al Samoud 2 rockets exceeded by up to 24 miles the 93-mile limit laid down by U.N. arms controls.

“If these reports are correct…it is very serious,” Blair said after talks with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

“It would be not just a failure to declare and disclose information, but a breach of resolution 1441,” Blair said, referring to the November Security Council resolution threatening “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to disarm.

Russia and Germany are making their usual excuses for Iraq, but the U.S. and Britain are among those countries who are rightly pissed off. There’s a very good reason why Saddam isn’t supposed to have long-range missiles – because he’ll use them to attack long-range destinations.

The consensus of opinion around the world is that no action should be taken against Iraq until such time as the UN arms inspectors uncover proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. But can we trust the UN’s “neutrality” in this situation?

The UN has just appointed Iraq to chair its disarmament conference in Geneva next month (Gazette, Feb. 4). It appointed Libya to chair the Human Rights Commission. It allowed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a known terrorist, to address the General Assembly while openly carrying a weapon.

Where is the UN’s credibility as a neutral body supposedly promoting peace on our planet?

Aaron Muscott
Dollard des Ormeaux

Well, unfortunately, the UN has never had any credibility as a “neutral body”. This is old news. From the countless one-sided General Assembly resolutions against Israel, to the twisting of the concept of “human rights” to mean “rights for select humans”, the UN lost its credibility decades ago.

The problem is that most people seem unaware of this. The world is pressuring the United States to get UN approval before attacking Iraq, as though a rubber-stamp from the UN would mean that the attack is legitimate.

The UN needs to clean up its act – fast.

Via Damian Penny, who has this to add:

In a sane world, this would be more than enough to make the case that Saddam has not stopped trying to develop weapons on mass destruction, and that he never will do so. But some nations simply aren’t going to be satisfied until Iraqi VX has been released in the New York subway, and Iraqi missiles are raining on Tel Aviv. (This being the UN, maybe that’s the point.)

For God’s sake, how many more “second chances” are we supposed to give these guys?

Right on. To that I’ll just add that the strategy of these people has been to look fact straight in the face and make up a lie. It’s like a guy whose wife catches him having sex with another woman, and yet despite the evidence staring her in the face, he tells her she’s mistaken and makes up a lie so ludicrous, she believes it.

Well, the world has to start to trust the evidence. Saddam Hussein is winning by lowering expectations. Everyone expects him not to comply with the UN inspections. Everyone expects him to be developing forbidden weapons. But he’s managed to put forth the lie that there’s no justification for attacking his country, no matter what he does. What will it take for people to see the obvious?

“It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can,” he said. “Iraq appears not to have come to genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it.”

In general, though, Blix didn’t come down either for or against war with Iraq. It’s one of those on-the-fence reports that every country will spin in order to fit with its political positions. The United States will claim that it is further evidence that war is necessary, and countries such as Germany and France can claim that there’s no smoking gun, therefore no reason to go to war.

In short, this report changes nothing. And at the same time, it changes everything.

Today is a milestone. A turning point, if you will. With Bush’s State of the Union address tomorrow night, and the Israeli elections tomorrow, today is a pivotal day in world politics. It is getting to be the time where every country will be called upon to examine its concience and cast its loyalties. The only question is, who will inspire more loyalty – Bush or Saddam?

If we wait around for Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, I somehow doubt he’d even give the world a warning. With one push of the button he’ll obliterate Israel, attack the United States, and probably take over many of his neighbours. I mean, we’re talking about Saddam Hussein here.

The world has a responsibility to see to it that Iraq never develops nuclear weapons. If it is allowed to, G-d help us all.

It seems that everyone’s ignoring the obvious here. Saddam’s got a whole country in which to hide weapons, and he’s had nearly a decade in which to do it. He’s got a civilian population that’s so afraid of him, they’ll do whatever it takes to protect his secrets. He’s got an iron control on everything that goes on anywhere. His spies follow the inspectors around and anyone they talk to knows they’ll be facing a firing squad if they shoot their mouth off. He’s murdered thousands upon thousands of his own people, through terror tactics, shootings, bombings, and even chemical weapons. He’s even killed off his own family members.

And we’re supposed to feel better because the chemical warheads were empty???

A resolution is proposed criticizing Israel for the deaths of three UN workers. The United States vetoes it. A resolution is proposed condemning terrorism against Israelis in the Kenya attacks. Syria votes against it.

And the beat goes on . . .

Britain joined the United States yesterday in judging that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had failed the crucial United Nations test by supplying an untruthful declaration about weapons of mass destruction.

It seems to me that there was a lot of misplaced faith out there. Anyone who took Saddam seriously when he said he intended to cooperate with weapons inspectors should really get the word “Naive” tattooed to their forehead.

Iraq on Wednesday accused U.N. arms inspectors of being U.S. and Israeli spies and helping Washington prepare for possible war on Baghdad, but the United States cooled any talk of imminent military action.

You know what this reminds me of? A parent, entering the bedroom of their teenager who’s been smoking pot. The kid knows that it’s only a matter of moments till his stash is found, so he yells at his parents: “You hate me! You’re always accusing me of stuff I didn’t do!”

Well, Saddam, your stash is gonna get found, whether you like it or not. Enough with the excuses and denials already. Everyone knows what’s really up, and your days are numbered.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the document would seek international consensus on legitimate ways of fighting suicide attacks. It is to be submitted to the United Nations, but a date has not been set, they said.

On the surface, this appears to be a smart move. Israel is condemned by the international community at every turn when it tries to fight suicide terrorism on its own. This would, in effect, be a means for Israel to legitimize its methods at fighting terrorism, and to avoid the constant barrage of international criticism that rains down after every Israeli counter-move. Furthermore, it could serve as a roadmap for other countries, as suicide bombing inevitably spreads to their shores.

However, I can’t help but wonder what idealists are left in the Israeli government who are naive enough to still put faith in the United Nations. Once screwed, once shy. Twice screwed, twice shy. Three times screwed, give up already, the UN hates Israel and probably always will! I hate to say this, but like almost all of Israel’s moves of late, this one’s bound to backfire, as the UN will then have an excuse to condemn Israel for any counter-measure that does NOT appear in the final version of the convention. And since the convention is unlikely to include any measures that will prove effective, Israel will have effectively tied its own hands.

Who’s running political strategy over there anyway?