Part of the Problem

Excellent interview on Frontpagemag.com with former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold. If your default position in life is that Israel is the root of all the world's problems, you of all people need to read this. And slap yourself while you're doing so, you deserve it.

For President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the UN was supposed to be instrumental in "nipping aggression in the bud," and by doing so, preventing a re-play of the Second World War. But the UN couldn't even define aggression until 1974 and even then its definition was full of loopholes. Worse still, the UN is a manufacturing plant for the worst moral equivalence that just cripples effective action to stop wars: in its international behavior, for the most part, the UN does not distinguish between aggressors and the victims of aggression. In Bosnia, UN forces were partial to the Serbs, and not to their Bosnian Muslim victims. In Rwanda, when General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander on the ground, proposed to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, headed by Kofi Annan, that it was necessary to destroy the arms of the Hutu militia before they were used to exterminate the Tutsi tribe, he was told by Annan's office to not take sides--indeed, he was instructed to remain "impartial". More than eight hundred thousand Rwandans were massacred within a few months.

Most recently, the UN General Assembly sought to activate the UN's judicial arm--the International Court of Justice in the Hague--to stop Israel's security fence. Annan's office supplied supporting documentation to the judges in the Hague about Palestinian grievances over the fence, without even relating to the wave of Palestinian suicide terrorism against Israeli civilians that caused the fence to be built in the first place (nor was there mention of other security fences built on disputed territory in Kashmir or Cyprus). Yet the UN holds itself up to be "the source of international legitimacy"--a beacon of international justice. It is clear, however, that the UN does not determine the relative justice in the claims of parties engaged in an international dispute. It can only reflect the sum total of the political power that a state or national movement can mobilize on his behalf within the halls of the UN. For many peoples, from Tibetan Buddhists to Rwandan Tutsis, to Lebanese Christians to Iraqi Kurds and Black African Muslims in Darfur, Sudan, (and not just the Jewish people) that leaves them completely unprotected if they have to rely on the machinery of the UN.

Gold doesn't think disbanding the UN is a good idea, and I suppose he's right. But it's been a disastrous failure, and you don't reinforce failure, you change the system. Not sure how that's going to happen, but it is necessary.