World Statesman of the Year

"I say these things not to counsel any particular action, not to wish any additional hardship on the long-suffering Iranian people and certainly not to advocate war, but rather so that we not shrink from recognizing evil in the world for what it is."
Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Prime Minister Harper spoke indirectly to the international community of a regime "where evil dominates", calling upon the world to make an effort to "step up pressure and isolate" the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The occasion was during his being awarded the World Statesman Award from the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, in New York.  A ceremony that took place at the very time when the United Nations General Assembly was reconvening.

Present at the opening of the UN General Assembly were heads of state and of government of well over one hundred member countries.  Many of whom made speeches from the General Assembly podium.  Prime Minister Harper made a judiciously considered decision not to attend.  And that decision without a doubt had much to do with the fact that the United Nations whose purpose is to foster peace and human rights within the international community appears to be failing.

Setting aside entirely the gruesomely absurd reality that one of the United Nations' last Secretary Generals had been a Nazi officer in World War II, implicated in the murder of Jews, utterly defiling the sanctity of the United Nations as a sanctuary from vile fascism, more latterly the world's latest fascist regime has been allowed to present its credentials there.  From Kurt Waldheim, former Austrian president, to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the United Nations has irremediably sullied itself.

And continues to do so, with little backward glance at the original purpose of the League of Nations in the wake of that dreadful world cataclysmic eruption, the Second World War.  It was not just the horrors of a Fascist covenant intent on overthrowing democracy, but the realization and acknowledgement of the world's failure in preventing the wholesale destruction of six million Jews during the Final Solution that resulted in the Holocaust.

And here, yet again, another lecture at the podium of the General Assembly in the holiest of human rights sanctuaries, by yet another fascist dictator state; the emissary from Tehran, speaking of an 'illegitimate state', the cancer of Judaism/Zionism, and the bland intention of the Islamic Republic of Iran, on specific orders from rabid Islamism to destroy the State of Israel.  A statement issuing from a country that is infamous for spreading and supporting terrorism and oppressing its own people.

The question should be why would any self-respecting head of state or government be complicit in permitting sanction to the right of one UN member-country to viciously slander and overtly threaten another so openly?  By their very presence, their willingness to sit and hear out the never-changing insults and assaults those in attendance were conferring respect upon the unrespectably indecent.

When Prime Minister Harper made the decision to absent himself yet again from the UN General Assembly it was with impeccable reasoning.  His government's support for the State of Israel, and his government's rejection of the legitimacy of a state that represses its own, tortures, imprisons and executes political dissenters, persecutes religious minorities, lends itself to brutal suppression of revolt in other tyrannical states should be widely supported and joined by other democratic countries.

"It is important to state, that whatever Israel's shortcomings, neither its existence nor its policies are responsible for the pathologies present in that part of the world."  After which, like a statesman, Prime Minister Harper went along to the United Nations to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and later to meet with President Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.