The Venerable United Nations

"[Peacekeeping is] an attempt to confront and defeat the worst in man with the best in man: to counter violence with tolerance, might with moderation, and war with peace."
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, 1998

Israeli bomb disposal experts collect the remains a rocket, fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip, after it landed in the courtyard of a kindergarten in the southern costal Israeli city of Ashdod, on August 26, 2014.

Credit: JACK GUEZ

There's idealism for you. If tolerance, moderation and peace can be accomplished in a manner that would pacify the violent ambitions of tyrants we've yet to see that accomplishment in the living colour of reality. Those words of high-minded flight into wishful thinking make one feel good about moderation and possibilities, but in the hard light of reality, accommodation and cooperation with the intentions of violently-disposed dictators have only served to validate their belief that no one is prepared to stand in the way of their war-mongering intentions.

To appease is to surrender to the corrosive effects of implied weakness in the face of tyranny. If there is no resistance to implications of impending conflict the path is left wide open to the intending warrior to proceed for there will be little reaction from those willing to oppose his plans for conquest. Time and again world events and the history that follows them prove that there are times when events cannot be ignored and must be met unequivocally, firmly and with intent to halt proceedings harmful to human progress.

The United Nations represents a global institute meant to dedicate itself and its membership to the promotion of cooperation, inter-dependence in the world order, and a never-ending striving toward preventing conflict. Above all, the United Nations was to be the leading global proponent not only of peace but of protection of basic human rights and the dignity of human existence. That, in any event was the high-minded idealism that gave birth to its evolution from the League of Nations.

And that was also before the rise of a different kind of imperialism, that of tribal war-mongering states suddenly enriched by the discovery of petroleum riches to be extracted and sold on the world market hungry for a reliable energy source with which to advance their economies. As those economies advanced the oil-rich kingdoms and sheikdoms of the Middle East rose to influential prominence and raised the esteem of the world's fastest-growing religion.

This was a religion that borrowed extensively from a far more ancient monotheistic religion, and spurned it when its faithful rejected the threat of death unless they abandoned Judaism and adopted Islam. The supreme irony is that the world's foremost religion was also a stepchild of Judaism, and those who became steeped in the Christian values adopted from Judaism were instrumental in destroying half of the world's population of Jews in Europe.

Islam waits now to destroy the remaining half. But Jews now have a state of their own, one of monumental irritation to both Muslims and Europeans; a nation stubbornly insisting that it will survive, as will its citizens despite all indications to the contrary. Even while it is a nation that is surrounded with ill-will and an intention by its neighbours to eradicate its presence and that of all Jews. One attack after another has failed, but the attacks continue.

And the United Nations Human Rights Council which has never, ever seen an accusation against Israel that it might fail to support, is downright irate that Israel continues to fend off attacks and insists on defending itself. The Human Rights Council has faulted Israel for war crimes in defending itself against Islamist jihadi offsprings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza intent on annihilating the state and its inhabitants.

The International Criminal Court stands ready to place the Israeli leadership in dock before a jury not of its peers but of its accusers, and within the United Nations they are legion. Hamas is delighted that though its crimes have been deplored -- mostly those against its own population, using them as helpless, hapless pawns in its propaganda war against Israel that so delights Europe -- Israel's reaction to Hamas assaults has been equated with the human rights abuses of Hamas.

All of which is fodder for those who fault Jews and Israel for all the ills of the world. If Israel is not guilty of causing all the problems facing the world today why would it be cited no fewer than 61 times by the UN's Human Rights Commission, while the rest of the world combined has been cited a mere 55 times? Syria, in the throes of self-destruction with a murderous regime in full throttle was cited 15 times.

The UN committee's judgement on last summer's 50-day Israeli response against Hamas's attacks from Gaza on Israeli border communities, the terrorist group's starving of the Gazans needs, using international aid funding not for needed infrastructure improvement but for tunnel construction into Israel, mere incidentals to Israel's presumably unprovoked response to the abductions of soldiers and teen-age boys and plans to attack Jewish villages.

All of which led the New York Times to post the headline: "UN Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Cries by Israel and by Palestinian Militants"; equating a legitimate state's internationally legal efforts to protect its citizens from violence and murder, with the attacker's intent to commit violence and murder.