Moral Obloquy

"UN Watch calls on U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, EU High Commissioner Catherine Ashton, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon to make clear that when the United Nations imposes four rounds of sanctions on Iran for illicit nuclear activities, condemns it for illegally arming the murderous Syrian regime, and denounces Tehran's massive abuse of human rights, this kind of appointment just defies common sense and harms the UN's credibility.
"We urge world leaders to declare that allowing Iran to chair a UN disarmament body is simply unacceptable, given the fundamentalist regime's illicit activities in precisely the opposite direction."
Hillel Neuer, UN Watch, Geneva

If any one single act of mindless complicity might be pointed at to effectively demonstrate the utter and absolute uselessness of the United Nations as a world-class institute of universal human rights and global peace being held in contempt without an utterance of denial, it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, a truly abhorrent regime, has been named to chair the United Nations' most vital disarmament conference.

"This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women's shelter", Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based NGO UN Watch, stated with disgust. "Any member state that is the subject of UN Security Council sanctions for proliferation -- and found guilty of massive human rights violations -- should be ineligible to hold a leadership position in a UN body."

This is, after all a conference funded from the UN budget. It reports to the UN General Assembly. But this by no means represents a unique occurrence in crudely inappropriate UN activities.

 Yet, in his years of monitoring the events that take place within the United Nations and the ghastly antics of many of its members, this must surely represent the ultimate in cynical oblivion to reality. This is moral bankruptcy at its most unappealingly vivid, in bruised purple shades of blessing the devil among us to go forth and spread the evil that comes most naturally to its black soul.

Iran, working alongside its soul-mates North Korea and Syria, last week blocked the passing of a treaty in the UN to prohibit the sale or transfer of arms leading to acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.And for obvious reasons, since it is precisely these regimes who hold the value of committing acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes in the highest esteem, as usefully utilitarian acts of tyrannical dominion over others.

Iran is busy supplying rockets to terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, ferrying them through Syria and Sudan. Where on several occasions Israel has seen fit to bomb the rocket shipments to disrupt their journeys into terrorist possession. And nor is Russia also any less guilty of supplying barbaric totalitarian regimes like Syria with weapons. Yet it is the State of Israel that is held within the United Nations to represent a universal pariah.

The United States imposed increased sanctions on Iranian companies in assistance and complicit with their country's nuclear program. Iran's banks and oil industries have been hit with crippling economic sanctions in an obviously futile attempt to pressure the country's theocratic rulers from their goal of building nuclear bombs. The international pressure brought to bear on Iran has been to little effect.

Iran does have its friends within the global community, and two powerful such friends sit on the permanent Security Council.

And it is without doubt that Russia and China are themselves quite complacent about the prospect of Iran taking up the presidency of the Conference on Disarmanent on May 27 holding the position for four weeks until June 23. Described by the United Nations as "the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community".

A moral farce so absurd as to make the devil fall off his perch in amazement that a mere mortal entity could be as evil as the fallen angel.