Well Said

Obama's age of atonement

 

By Christopher Caldwell

 

Published: September 25 2009 22:43 in the Financial Times

 

There used to be a joke in San Francisco that the prettiest view of the Bay Area was from the top of the Transamerica building. Why? Because that was the only place in the city from which you couldn't see the Transamerica building. In a similar way, the rosiest view of globalization has traditionally come from the American governing classes – from which you cannot see the interests of the major globalisers, only the ideals. Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations this week is a sign that he is having no more success than his predecessors in figuring out where interests leave off and ideals pick up.

 

It is embarrassing to accuse an American politician of wishing for "global government" – a bête noire of uncouth anti-communists in the 1950s and 1960s. But Mr Obama's arguments are meant to move matters in that direction – away from self-determination and towards what is today called co-operation. "Like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people," he said, "and I will never apologize for defending those interests. But it is my deeply held belief that in the year of 2009 the interests of nations and peoples are shared." The key word in this passage, as anyone can see, is "but".

EDITOR'S CHOICE

More from this columnist - Dec-03

 

Mr Obama talks about giving "meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations. That is the future America wants." Well, if he is right, then Americans have been lying to pollsters for a long time. Naturally, there are good arguments that the US should submit to the same international norms as everybody else. But those arguments need to be made to Americans, not to foreign heads of state.

 

From the very beginning of the speech, Mr Obama sought to atone for the administration of George W. Bush. But he did this in a bizarre way. He presented the behaviour of the US over the past decade as a kind of fugue – an aberration caused by the toxic leadership of Mr Bush himself. Not for Mr Obama any Konrad Adenauer-style working through of the past – it was "Don't look at me! I didn't do it!" Mr Obama is entitled to say so, but he cannot speak for his country when he does. The Iraq war was enormously popular until the US began to lose it. One cannot mollify international detractors by referring to "the concrete actions that we have taken in just nine months".

 

The US character goes back more than nine months, and so do US interests. The new order Mr Obama has in mind will either be too easy (leaving the structure of US interests untouched and hoping the world will be satisfied by the mere lack of Mr Bush) or too hard (throwing out the interests, too). "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed," Mr Obama says. "The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world."

 

Mr Obama has committed his citizens to an expensive and open-ended period of reparation and repentance, and placed himself in a logical contradiction. He promised in his speech that the US would "be a leader in bringing about change", "lead by example", move "from a bystander to a leader in international climate negotiations" and accept an "obligation to lead" on the environment. But US leadership is a political fact, not a law of nature. The thing that the US leads is the world system that Mr Obama wants us to repudiate. If "the old habits and arguments are irrelevant", as he says, then why should the US lead? Why shouldn't someone else lead? Systems that elevate one nation over another can indeed be unjust. But the only alternative on the horizon is to let groups of nations with common interests (whether "the international community" or the UN) harass small countries they disapprove of, from Serbia to Honduras to Israel. Some may like the outcomes better. But it is no advance for legitimacy.

 

The UN speech gives a hint to why the percentage of the US population that is uneasy with Mr Obama has grown steadily. The coolness that was so appealing in the campaigner is a liability in the president. Mr Obama is more comfortable analysing the international alignment of interests than in defending the particular interests of the US. In fact, to say, as he does, that "the interests of nations and peoples are shared" is to say that national interest is an illusion in the first place.

 

Mr Obama prefers idealism to pragmatism. He notes that the UN was forged in an "idealism that was anything but naive – it was rooted in the hard-earned lessons of war". The idea that war cures people of their naivety is debatable. War can be a school for naivety, because naivety helps one survive a war with one's sanity intact. The treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand pact were all results of a naivety bred of the first world war. In the US, we owe those three great disasters of the last generation – urban renewal, the highway system and the Vietnam war – to the naivety bred of second world war.

 

A long US tradition made it possible for Mr Obama to talk the way he did this week. Presidents Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes decked out their foreign policy in a lot of shining-city-on-a-hill rhetoric – the belief that there is no conflict between US values and the values of ordinary people round the world. This belief is false. The conclusion earlier presidents drew was that the world should follow America. We know how the world reacted. The conclusion Mr Obama draws is that America should follow the world. Americans' reaction will not be hard to predict.

What length the lies?

With the revelation (well, not to some of us) of the "other" Iranian enrichment facility, the depth of Obama's lies has been revealed.

For months, he has been telling us that he wants to work with them, that he is waiting to see if they cooperate that there is a September deadline, etc. All the while, knowing that, in fact, that had an enrichment facility whose SOLE PURPOSE was military.

At long last, have you no sense of decency?

The Speech at the UN OUR President should have given…

..if he had any morality or knew what leadership was REALLY about.

 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events.

Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth. Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments. Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie? One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father's two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?
20
A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations! Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong.

History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.

Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated. The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization.

It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially.

It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances – by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after an horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind. That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will th e international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.

In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn't get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.

Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country's civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances. Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas.

We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove20the enemy's civilian population from harm's way.

Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice.

Delegates of the United Nations,

Will you accept this farce?

Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here's why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza an d promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us –my people, my country - of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

All of Israel wants peace.

Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace. In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples – a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it.

We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state. Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

20 Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more." These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city, in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem.

We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland. As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own. We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity.

But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel.

That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don't want another Gaza, another Iranian bac ked terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.

Churchill bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong."

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the "unteachibility of mankind" is for once proven wrong.

I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly

What doesn't the Senate Finance Committee want you to see?

For some bizarre reason, the Senate Finance Committee has refused to put the health care bill they are discussing online. Of course, everything ELSE is there.

 

They say that they will put selected pieces of it there.

 

Is it that they are going to pass another piece of legislation that they have not read, or do they not want US to read it?

A Bridge Too Far

I have, for as long as I can remember, decried the lack of civility in public discourse in this country.

I have largely laid the blame for this on the maturation of the two party system, and the concomitant need for entrenched authorities to

maintain their power. i.e. To do anything to stay elected by demonizing the "others".

 

As well, is the so called "talking" heads that are really screaming heads systematically reducing our sense of decency, politeness.

 

My view was that the split occurred on party lines, and I could never understand the obsessiveness with which these folks stuck so rigidly to party dogma.

 

This is largely true, but ultimately what it comes down to is simple. You are for light, or dark. Freedom or oppression, capitalism or socialism, democracy or totalitarianism.

The 21^st century or the 9th century.

 

What is so frustrating to me is the absurd wrongheadedness, the total lack of historical perspective, and lessons, of those who would choose the dark, the past, enslavement vs. freedom.

 

"With his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, President Obama took another step toward repairing America's battered image…"

 

So began the editorial in today's NY Times.

 

It is simple, you either believe this, or you believe what I do. That what this traitor, this refugee from all the failed experiments of history did in that speech was

throw away everything that has made America the light among nations.

 

Apologize? The world should apologize to us. Do we make mistakes? Of course! But we have spread more freedom, enabled more liberty, saved more people, than all

Nations in history combined.

 

This President shows such a shocking lack of national self awareness, is so devoid of any historical perspective, that I simply can no longer even listen to him.

 

The question is simple. The answer, not so. Which side are you on?

When Being President Just isn’t enough…

In an almost incredible move, indicative of the type of hubris that Barack Obama has, he has asked Governor David Patterson of NY to not run in 2010.

 

Paterson is incredibly unpopular here in NY, squandering, like the President, an early honeymoon period after the resignation of Elliot Spitzer.

He bungled the replacement for Hillary Clinton, allowed an uprising and shut down of the State Legislature and has generally shown himself to be, while a nice man, exactly the type of barely competent functionary that everyone assumed he was during his career, living off his father's name (Basil Patterson).

 

The idea of a President asking a sitting incumbent, and one of two African Americans, to NOT run for reelection is simply incredible.

I guess running the insurance, manufacturing, banking, unions, and health care industries is not enough. Now he has to run our state.

Al Quds Day

Al Quds is the Islamic name for Jerusalem.

 

Al Quds day was celebrated on Friday in Iran.

 

As background, there is no mention of Jerusalem anywhere in Islamic writings and it is mentioned only briefly in the Quran.

 

It was never an object of Muslim desires until 1967.

 

So what happened on Friday?

 

Well, simple. For those that continue to claim that Ahmadinejad was misquoted when he said that Israel must be destroyed, he made it clear in his speeches yesterday that not only was he not misquoted, but that indeed, it was the duty of ALL Muslims to destroy Israel.

 

Oh, and of course, he stopped pussy footing around claiming that the Holocaust simply needed further research because it hadn't been proven. He simply called it a lie.

 

And then compounded that statement by denying 3000 years of history, and 200 years of modern history and repeated our President's lie that Israel is a product of the Holocaust.

 

And this is with whom Obama wants to chat.

Internationalism

One of the things that I've discussed only briefly but mentioned in several comments to readers, is our kings' belief in the supremacy of international law, over federal law.

The "Koh-inization" of America, as it were.

Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law school, who teaches that the Supremacy clause of the constitution does NOT mean that international agreements cannot conflict with federal law, was appointed chief legal advisor to the state department.

The significance of the Sotomayor appointment was not the stuff you heard about in the news, but rather that she is a disciple of Koh's, as was Van Jones, the recently deposed Green Jobs Czar.

All of this is simply an indication of the continued view on the part of the Obamite's that the US is, in fact, "The Evil Empire" that needs to be controlled by international bodies such as the UN.

It is why he has placed us on the absurdly discredited UN Human Rights Commission, which all previous President's had boycotted because of its' rabid anti Americanism, and anti Semitism.

This has played out this week in the sacrificing of Eastern Europe back to the Russians with the announcement of the missile system not being deployed there for protection against the Iranians (more on that in a future post) and will be seen when Obama finally gives up Israel in his speech to the General Assembly next week.

So, below, the brilliant Caroline Glick on this situation:

Our iredeemable international system

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 10:42 AM PDT
Our international institutions are irredeemably corrupted. From the United Nations to the International Criminal Court and their affiliate and subordinate bodies, these institutions are rotten at their core.

It isn't that they don't function. They function just fine. The problem is that through their regular functioning, they advance goals antithetical to those they were established to achieve. Instead of promoting global security, human rights, freedom and international peace, they facilitate war and aggression, human suffering and tyranny.

The UN General Assembly is now convening its 64th session. As they do every year, heads of state from across the globe are descending on the Big Apple to participate in the proceedings. As they convene, their agenda will demonstrate the failings of the UN. On the one hand, they will consider the UN Human Rights Council's latest broadside against Israel, which comes this week in the form of the UNHRC's 575-page report of its probe of Israel's behavior in its military campaign against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza this past December and January.

On the other hand, they will not give the slightest consideration to the fact that Iran is about to become a nuclear power, in contempt of its international obligations, and so is poised to become the gravest threat to international security in the past 25 years. Moreover, they will pay no attention to the fact that as it sprints toward the nuclear finishing line, the Iranian regime is engaged in a systematic and brutal repression of its political opponents, who since the stolen June 12 presidential election have been clamoring for freedom and democracy.

Both in its treatment of Israel and in its treatment of the Iranian regime, the UN demonstrates that its practices are an inversion of its stated mission. Despite its leaders' and supporters' repeated claims to the contrary, the UN stands shoulder to shoulder with tyrants and aggressors against democrats and democracies seeking to advance the causes of freedom, human rights and international security.

MANY ISRAELIS reacted angrily to the UNHRC's probe of Israel's prosecution of Operation Cast Lead, claiming that its final report presents Israel - a liberal democracy - as the moral equivalent of Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization dedicated to the commission of genocide against Israelis. Yet in their anger, they missed the real problem with the report.

As Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University law school notes, Richard Goldstone's report does not present Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. Rather, it presents Israel as a terrorist and Hamas as a legitimate government.

The Goldstone Report does not accept as fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that consequently, in accordance with binding UN Security Council resolutions, all UN member states are required to work to disband it and give no quarter to its members and supporters. Instead it treats Hamas - which is charter-bound to a policy of genocide against Jews and rose to power through a campaign of murder and intimidation - as the legitimate governing authority in Gaza, which, the report's authors irrationally claim, is simultaneously governed by an Israeli occupation four years after Israel withdrew its civilians and military forces from the area. In the UNHRC's parallel universe, Hamas is the only lawful actor in town. Israel - and the Palestinian Authority under Fatah - are guilty of illegally persecuting Hamas by arresting its members.

Hamas, which is working to establish a terrorist Islamic theocracy in Gaza, is not seen as systematically violating human rights and freedom. Israel is. Since it downplayed the 12,000 rockets, mortars and missiles that Hamas and its terror affiliates in Gaza have shelled southern Israel with during the eight years preceding Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone Commission was unable to understand the overwhelming popularity the operation enjoyed among the Israeli public. Consequently, their report attributed that public support to Israel's abrogation of the civil liberties of the operation's opponents.

In contrast, the Goldstone Report downplays the importance of Hamas's systematic persecution of women, Christians and its political opponents.

And so it goes. For 575 pages, rather than promote the cause of human rights as one would expect from the UN's Human Rights Council, the Goldstone Report promotes a fiction of Israeli criminality and Hamas victimization. That is, it promotes the cause of human rights abusers against human rights defenders.

Many Israelis have expressed disgust with Goldstone, a South African Jew who purports to "love Israel."

This is a reasonable reaction, for Goldstone indeed disgraced himself by leading this commission. But the fact is that the report would have drawn the same conclusions based on the same lies regardless of who led the commission. By its very nature, the UNHRC is incapable of doing anything else. Like the UN itself, it is a body dominated by dictatorships and supported by leftist elites who love them. Its political agenda, of supporting dictatorships on the one hand and attacking Israel on the other, is indistinguishable from that of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

THEN THERE is Iran. Before he flies to New York for his annual visit, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intends to finish off his political opponents back home.

Friday is Jerusalem Day in Iran. Jerusalem Day is the day the regime organizes mass demonstrations throughout the country calling for Israel's destruction. The regime's democratic opponents, who since the stolen June 12 election have been doggedly maintaining their protests against Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the police state they run, are planning to use the day to stage renewed protests. Aware of their intention, Khamenei warned that anyone demonstrating for anything other than Israel's destruction will be severely punished. Reports abound of the regime's plan to use the day to arrest opposition leaders Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who both ran against Ahmadinejad in June.

Friday would be a good day to arrest them. After all, now that the US has agreed to hold negotiations with Ahmadinejad's representatives next month about whatever Iran would like to discuss, the Americans have lost any residual leverage they still held over Iran. Today it is Ahmadinejad, not the US or the UN Security Council, who sets the agendas and conditions for meetings. And Ahmadinejad can be certain that in light of this, no one will utter a peep if on the eve of his trip to America, he arrests or even murders his chief political opponents.

In the weeks following the election, before the regime began its crackdown and arrested, killed, tortured and raped thousands of its opponents, many of the demonstrators held signs demanding to know where the UN was. Why, they wished to know, was no one at the UN supporting them in their demands for democracy and human rights? Why was there no international community standing at their side as they sought to bring down the most dangerous regime on earth - a regime that has made genocide a strategic goal and is steadily working to acquire the means to commit genocide through nuclear war even as it murders its own people?

And that's the thing of it. The same UN that appoints a new commission to criminalize Israel seemingly on a weekly basis, has been a major facilitator of Iran's nuclear weapons program.

First, for three years, from 2003 until 2005, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency ignored mountains of evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and refused to refer the issue to the Security Council. Then, after the IAEA finally referred the issue to it, the Security Council failed to pass anything but the mildest of sanctions against Iran. Worse than doing nothing to prevent Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons, these Security Council sanctions actually facilitated the Iranian program. While passing ineffective sanctions, the council gave the appearance of addressing the issue and so made it impossible for individual states to convince other states to adopt harsher, and perhaps more effective measures - like for instance cutting off trade with Iran or divesting from companies that trade with Iran - outside the Security Council.

DUE TO the UN's unvarnished belligerence toward it, in recent years a consensus has formed in Israel that there is nothing to be gained from cooperating with this openly and dangerously hostile body. Reflecting this consensus, Israel's leaders, from former prime minister Ehud Olmert to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to President Shimon Peres, are united in their condemnation of the Goldstone Report.

For a time during president George W. Bush's first term in office, the US also recognized that the UN and the UN-based international system is irredeemably corrupt. Bush and his senior advisers spoke of the need to build international coalitions of willing governments to advance the causes of international security, human rights and freedom that the UN and its affiliated bodies are inherently incapable of advancing. Although this policy received public support at home, it provoked fierce opposition among the US foreign policy elites in Washington and in the media and among their allies on the political Left.

Due to their criticism, by his second term in office, Bush agreed to give the UN a leading role in dictating US foreign policy. He subordinated American policy to the Security Council on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program and cooperated with the UN as it advanced its openly anti-Israel agenda, even increasing US funding of such anti-Israel groups as UNRWA.

Bush's eventual surrender to the establishment set the course for what under President Barack Obama has become a cornerstone of US foreign policy. Unlike Bush, Obama has enthusiastically embraced the notion that the UN should by rights have a leading role in international affairs. He has also accepted the UN's basic notion that in the interest of world peace, the US and its democratic allies should bow to the desires of despots and dictators.

So it is that this week he abandoned US allies Poland and the Czech Republic in his bid to appease Russia. So it is that his administration has sided with ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, who, with the support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, sought to undermine Honduran democracy, against Honduras's lawful government and democratic defenders. So it is that the administration has sided with the genocidal mullahs in Teheran over their democratic opponents. So it is that the administration has adopted the view that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace in the Middle East and embraced as legitimate political actors Palestinian terror groups that refuse to accept Israel's right to exist.

Until Obama came along, Israel could afford not to make too much of the fact that its enemies control the UN-led system of international institutions, because it could trust that the US would use its Security Council veto to prevent these forces from causing it any real harm. This is no longer the case. With the Obama administration fully on board the UN agenda, Israel and other threatened democracies like Honduras, Poland, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Japan will have to loudly proclaim the UN-based international system's inherent moral, political and legal corruption and seek ways to undermine and weaken its power.

My letter to the NY Times

To the editor,

Richard Goldstone reveals his (and his "committee's) bias immediately in his article yesterday.  The blatant lie that his mandate was to address issues on all sides of
Israel's defensive in Gaza is in direct contradiction to the UN Mandate which established his commission.

UN Resolution A/HRC/RES/S-9/1 of 12 January 2009 which established his commission makes NO mention of investigating Hamas, or the so called Palestinians.
In fact, every clause calls on Israel, condemns Israel, etc.

The "action" clause reads as follows:

14. /Decides/ to dispatch an urgent, independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President of the Council, *to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory*, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and calls upon Israel not to obstruct the process of investigation and to fully cooperate with the mission;

(as a note - the continued reference to an occupation is telling.  Who is occupying Gaza?  Israel pulled out 4 years ago, and if it was occupied, it was occupied from Egypt)

There is not even a request of Hamas to cooperate.
What Goldstone fails to mention is that ALL of his interviews were supervised by Hamas terrorists.  That many of the interviews were of these same murderers.

The idea that Hamas did not use civilian shields is belied by the Palestinians themselves who OPENLY brag about it.  These videos are readily available.

Worse, Goldstone implies that an Israeli Supreme Court, which regularly finds against its' own government, is biased in the way that some non existent Hamas review would be.  This would be comical if
it were not so sad coming from an attorney.

The bias of the rest of the members of the commission was clear as at least one of the four, Christine Chinkin, wrote an article in the Sunday Times of London last January already declaring that Israel had committed war crimes.

Goldstone himself is severely compromised by his association with Human Rights watch, whose recent activities have included fund raising in Saudi Arabia by bragging about their anti -Israel bias and the recent suspension of their "military analyst" because of his sick preoccupation with collecting Nazi memorabilia.

The absurdity of the report and the accusations against Israel can be seen in common sense.  Israel could have leveled Gaza, but instead made 200,000 PHONE CALLS to residents to warn them, dropped HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS Of leaflets to do the same thing, opened field hospitals not for IDF soldiers but for Palestinian residents, sent in TONS of humanitarian aid to a population determined to kill them.

Finally, the idea of "proportionality" is the most absurd.  What Goldstone and other critics are essentially saying is that Israel, rather than using surgical strikes and modern GPS based missiles, should randomly fire 8,000+
missiles into the heart of Gaza to equalize what had been done to them.

Can you imagine the outcry if that had been their choice?

Please, we need to bring rationality to this discussion.

It is quite simple.  When Israel is held to standards that NO other nation is held to (where is the UN Commission investigated the US for the recent civilian deaths in Afghanistan) than there is only one explanation.