Close the United Nations

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s talk at Columbia University was a wonderful comedy show. But while his reception at Columbia is one thing, the respect the United Nations accords him is quite another.

He started with a pathetic complaint about being treated rudely, because Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, introduced him by reading his CV. It includes such items as the imprisonment of journalists, sponsoring terror, executing children, threatening the destruction of a nation-state, fighting a proxy war against the United States and hosting a Holocaust denial conference. A rush transcript of the introduction, the speech, and the Q&A session is here.

Ahmadinejad proceeded with his usual deranged notions about global politics and made an asinine appeal to fellow academics for further research into the veracity of the Holocaust. He points out that “the key to the understanding of the realities around us rests in the hands of the researchers, those who seek to undiscover [sic] areas that are hidden, the unknown sciences”. Here’s to undiscovery, indeed. Perhaps if we undiscover the Holocaust, or apartheid, or the Inquisition, or the Crusades, or the present Jihad, they will never have happened. Wouldn’t that be nice?

He tells us, “Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation. Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of dollars equipping and arming one group there.” Something about a mote and a splinter comes to mind — I’m sure our Hezbollah-sponsoring friend knows the holy texts well enough to understand.

He used this rhetorical trick of inversion often. If such tactics fooled anyone (and judging by the applause in the audience, it did), he finished with an enlightening flourish: there are no homosexuals in Iran. Granted, in a country where homosexuality is punishable by lashes or execution, I guess Gay Pride marches, burlesque cabaret and rainbow bumper stickers aren’t really all that popular.

Perhaps his Columbia address, as Bollinger said he hoped, brings home to a few naive listeners the absurd regime over which he presides, and the nature of the enemy that faces those who love freedom and cherish civilisation.

What is less easy to accept is that this man remains — along with dozens of other leaders of unfree countries — a respected member of the United Nations. An excellent editorial at Investor’s Business Daily points this out, and calls for the failed global body to be closed for good.

The World Stage: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, sponsors terrorism and colludes in the murder of American troops. So why is he given the honour of addressing the United Nations on US soil?

To us, the answer is clear. The UN is as corrupt, brutal and morally compromised as Ahmadinejad himself. In its many affronts to civilisation and decency, the UN has long since outlived its usefulness and reason for being. Time to shut it down.

Sounds harsh, we know. Isn’t it better, you ask, to have a place where people can peaceably gather and talk out their problems?

Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. For the UN has been hijacked by a rather diverse group of kleptocrats, dictators and fanatics who have successfully used it to their own rather nefarious ends.

An old proposal, put forward by Senator John McCain a while back, would scrap the UN and replace it with a “league of democracies”. Great idea. Let that be the starting point for reform talks. Given the UN’s abysmal record and its epic depravity, there is no choice.

It cites numbers specific reasons, including the perversity that the worst tyrants and kleptocrats in the world get to chair commissions on human rights, nuclear disarmament and sustainable development.

It revives an excellent proposal by McCain to establish a club of free nations. Membership would be by invitation only, and subject to adherence to minimum standards of liberty, democracy and human rights. Member countries would agree a common defence and military support arrangement, much like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. As an inducement to non-members, member countries would agree to dismantle all trade barriers among them, but would not be so bound vis-à-vis non-members.

It is a capital solution to a huge and expensive problem the world has created in the UN. It was created for a different world. Its costs, morally and financially, far outweigh the limited benefits it has brought in that time. It’s time to end the perverse charade.

(First published on my own blog on September 25 2007.)