UN must clean house

Editorial

On any given week, it would be easy for a Jewish and Zionist newspaper to declare the world turned upside-down. We restrain ourselves many weeks

in the year, but this week is different from all other weeks. Recent days have witnessed acts of such heinous hypocrisy that, while we will not go so far as declare them unprecedented, given the historical record, nonetheless represent a new abyss in the legitimacy of the United Nations.

The African bloc of nations at the UN endorsed the nomination of Sudan for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, virtually assuring its election. The nomination was championed by Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, who has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court.

Also last week, the terror regime in Iran was elected to a top UN arms control position, even as they lurch toward a nuclear program and provide the blood-soaked Syrian dictatorship with material support.

Then there is the UN’s cultural arm, UNESCO, which has just created an endowed chair at the Islamic University of Gaza, an ideological training ground for Hamas that Israel claims also doubles as a bomb factory.

Finally, given the byzantine nature of UN agency elections, there remains conjecture as to whether or not Syria, currently in the process of a methodical slaughter of its own citizens, is still an official candidate for a seat on the Human Rights Council in 2013.

The number of atrocities taking place at UN agencies this month has been brought to light mostly by the small, tenacious Geneva-based agency UN Watch, without which, one wonders, if anyone would raise a concern at all.

Hillel Neuer, head of UN Watch, purveyor of amusing analogies (and naches-inducing Canadian boychik made good) says the Iran election is “like choosing Bernie Madoff to police fraud on the stock market” and that “electing Sudan to the UN body mandated to promote and protect human rights worldwide is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter.”

Neuer’s droll, somewhat outlandish, comparisons are probably learned by experience and necessity. Getting the world to pay attention to the most atrocious hypocrisies is more difficult than ever. The competition is fierce and the attention span limited. Competing with Kardashians and TomKat is a tough sell for Assads and Ahmadinejads.

Yet for all the outrage we should justifiably be spilling, it is possible to go too far. Another issue from last week is a lesson. Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a human rights activist, Iranian-Canadian, and, not incidentally, the spouse of Defence Minister Peter McKay, called for Canada to shut down Iran’s embassy in Ottawa, alleging that the embassy has been found to be engaged in efforts to recruit Iranian-Canadians to mobilize in Canada on behalf of the Islamist regime.

For many Canadians, the biggest news here may have been that there is a full Iranian diplomatic mission in Canada. We do not, by contrast, have bilateral diplomatic representation with North Korea – but there is a difference: there is a sizable Iranian-Canadian population in Canada. Because North Korea is a hermit kingdom with its borders effectively sealed, there are very (very) few Canadians of North Korean origin.

Embassies are more than conduits of international dialogue; they provide crucial services for individuals and families, in this case, for Iranian-Canadians (even though Iran does not recognize dual citizenship). Leaving aside political imperatives, shutting the embassy would have deleterious impacts on these Canadians and their families in Iran.

We introduce the Iranian embassy issue here not because it reflects the world-turned-upside-down theme of this commentary, but because it carries a cautionary message of a different kind. We might be tempted to “punish” the rulers of Iran by shutting down their outpost in Ottawa, but the real victims of such an act would be good Canadians of Iranian origin. Likewise, the absolutely mind-boggling atrocities perpetrated by branches of the UN should not lead us to abandon the institution as a whole. There are very serious, deplorable shortcomings of the UN, but we should resist declaring the entire institution a failed experiment. Every outrage we see in some branches of the UN eclipse the important and, indeed, crucial work carried out by 100 other branches. For the sake of the UN’s founding ideals, we should strive to fix it, not destroy it.

Neuer’s UN Watch does not seek to dismantle or destroy the UN. The organization’s mandate is “to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own charter.” The UN Charter, we need to remember, is one of humankind’s great documents of hope and optimism, drafted in the aftermath of perhaps humanity’s greatest failure.

The solution to the UN abominations is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater (though on weeks like this it is tempting to think so), but to exert pressure to enhance the positive work of UN agencies while somehow finding ways to prevent the coalition of dictatorships, human rights crushers and terrorist regimes that constitutes the majority of UN General Assembly members from perpetuating the series of atrocities that undermines the most vital international body we have.

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