Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘united nations’

Iran has resumed its nuclear activity because it knows full well that the U.N. will always swerve first:

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.

Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day when this would happen: The United Nations has unanimously declared an international Holocaust Day in commemoration of the Holocaust and as a stand against antisemitism and genocide:

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.

A report by the United Nations says Syria assassinated Hariri:

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.

Two more U.N. officials are being accused of taking kickbacks:

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?

Iran’s going nuclear… openly and brazenly, not even bothering to try to sound convincing in their line about “peaceful electricity generation”.

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.

How could the U.N. possibly get any more irrelevant than it already is? Well, one way would be to adopt this proposal to enlarge the Security Council from 15 to 25:

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.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations was voted a vice president of the U.N. General Assembly today:

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.

Can anyone imagine a world in which this backwards statement would not obtain the support and agreement of most of the countries of the world? Me neither.

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.

Kofi Annan has learned the redirection game well, as he tries to deflect some of the heat from the oil-for-food scandal off himself and onto the U.S. and Britain:

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.

North Korea has the world’s worst human rights record, according to British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell. He urged the UN Human Rights Commission to pass a resolution condemning the country:

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.