Our Irredeemable International System

Caroline Glick
Jewish World Review
18 September 09

Our international institutions are irredeemably corrupted. From the United Nations to the International Criminal Court and their affiliate and subordinate bodies, these institutions are rotten at their core.

It isn't that they don't function. They function just fine. The problem is that through their regular functioning, they advance goals antithetical to those they were established to achieve. Instead of promoting global security, human rights, freedom, and international peace, they facilitate war and aggression, human suffering, and tyranny.

The UN General Assembly is now convening its 64th session. As they do every year, heads of state from across the globe are descending on the Big Apple to participate in the proceedings. As they convene, their agenda will demonstrate the failings of the UN. On the one hand, they will consider the UN Human Rights Council's latest broadside against Israel which comes this week in the form of the UNHRC's 575 page report of its probe of Israel's behavior in its military campaign against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza this past December and January.

On the other hand, they will not give the slightest consideration to the fact that Iran is about to become a nuclear power in contempt of its international obligations, and so is poised to become the gravest threat to international security in the past twenty-five years. Moreover, they will pay no attention to the fact that as it sprints towards the nuclear finishing line, the Iranian regime is engaged in a systematic and brutal repression of its political opponents who since the stolen June 12 presidential elections have been clamoring for freedom and democracy.

Both in its treatment of Israel and in its treatment of the Iranian regime, the UN demonstrates that its practices are an inversion of its stated mission. Despite its leaders' and supporters' repeated claims to the contrary, the UN stands shoulder to shoulder with tyrants and aggressors against democrats and democracies seeking to advance the causes of freedom, human rights and international security.

Many Israelis reacted angrily to the UNHRC's probe of Israel's prosecution of Operation Cast Lead claiming that its final report presents Israel - a liberal democracy - as the moral equivalent of Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization dedicated to the commission of genocide against Israelis. Yet in their anger, they missed the real problem with the report. As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University law school notes, Richard Goldstone's report does not present Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. Rather, it presents Israel as terrorist and Hamas as a legitimate government.

The Goldstone report does not accept as fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that consequently, in accordance with binding UN Security Council resolutions, all UN member states are required to work to disband it and give no quarter to its members and supporters. Instead it treats Hamas - which is charter-bound to a policy of genocide against Jews and rose to power through a campaign of murder and intimidation- as the legitimate governing authority in Gaza, which, the report's authors irrationally claim is simultaneously governed by an Israeli occupation four years after Israel withdrew its civilians and military forces from the area. In the UNHRC's parallel universe, Hamas is the only lawful actor in town. Israel - and the Palestinian Authority under Fatah - are guilty of illegally persecuting Hamas by arresting its members.

Hamas, which is working to establish a terrorist Islamic theocracy in Gaza, is not seen as systematically violating human rights and freedom. Israel is. Since it downplayed the 12,000 rockets, mortars and missiles that Hamas and its terror affiliates in Gaza have shelled southern Israel with during the eight years preceding Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone commission was unable to understand the overwhelming popularity the operation enjoyed among the Israeli public. Consequently, their report attributed that public support to Israel's abrogation of the civil liberties of the operation's opponents.

In contrast, the Goldstone report downplays the importance of Hamas's systematic persecution of women, Christians and its political opponents.
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