Diary
Another pitiful illustration of UN bankruptcy
5 February, 2012
In my latest Jewish News article, available here, I wrote that the UN, being 'worse than impotent' was a 'mischief maker of the most deplorable kind' and that it had 'encouraged' and 'assisted' terror. There can be no better illustration of this than in the obscene behaviour of Russia and China at the UN yesterday after both countries vetoed a Security Council resolution that condemned Syria's bloody crackdown on its population. The vote came after evidence emerged of a massacre in Homs where up to 500 people were killed by the Syrian state forces, though the total number killed thus far must exceed 5,000. The behaviour of these two countries is effectively therefore a licence for mass murder. Assad can now sleep much safer in the knowledge that he has effective (and powerful) international sponsors who will subvert all the norms of justice and morality to keep his Ba'athist regime afloat. Of course, both Russia and China are equally determined to prevent international sanctions from crippling the Iranian regime, largely out of self interest.
This deplorable episode shows us all too clearly the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the UN. This was an organisation which was created after the defeat of totalitarian tyranny and which is now, thanks to some of its members, facilitating the survival of fascism and tyranny. An organisation that is dominated by countries which are not free, which repress their populations, which subvert morality and justice and eschew democracy and liberalism, can only enable dictatorship, genocide and terror to flourish. It is not that the UN ignores these problems: it is actively facilitating them. Thus if we are to see the end of Assad's regime, an undoubted boon to the entire region, it will come from the determination of responsible member states that are prepared to use credible force, not from the meddlesome behaviour of the morally compromised United Nations.
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