Trump spoke the ugly truth to the UN
Unfashionable and hazardous as it is to say this, I’m with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaugural speech to the United Nations, “In over 30 years in my experience with the UN, I never heard a bolder or more courageous speech.” Moi non plus.
So refreshingly un-UNlike were Trump’s remarks that given the regularity with which he is parodied, I wasn’t sure if what I was hearing was actually his speech, or some spoof thereof. But it was the real deal.
I have little regard for the UN and its agencies, born of observation and some experience, though hardly as close up as that of this Israeli PM or any other.
Israel is, of course, the target of more vicious UN resolutions than any other country in the world. That Israel is also the only flourishing democracy in the Middle East has done nothing to militate against the routine denunciations against it.
Last year, when Syrian President Bashar Assad was putting the finishing touches on a massacre of his own people, the UN was busy passing a Syrian-drafted motion condemning, guess who, Israel for “repressive measures” against Syrians living on the Golan Heights.
Are you freaking kidding me?
As Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said at the time, “It’s obscene.”
In 2016, the UN passed a total of 20 anti-Israel resolutions, Neuer pointed out, with not one against “gross human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, China or Cuba.”
In fact, the UN General Assembly last year passed only six resolutions on the rest of the planet combined.
The consistent anti-Israel actions of the UN, however grotesque, aren’t the half of it.
Remember Rwanda, where Canadian MajorGeneral Romeo Dallaire, as he then was, and his tiny, illequipped and mostly ill-prepared band of peacekeepers — 10 of whom were slaughtered along with 800,000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis and about a third of them children — became the ghastly symbol of all that is terribly wrong with the UN.
As Postmedia’s David Pugliese first reported in 2002 (the piece was reprinted this summer), that 1994 UN mission was actively hindered by, no surprise, the UN.
The political staff and civilian police both worked only 8-5, with the usual twohour break for lunch.
The UN logistics system, which was supposed to supply the soldiers, was an abysmal failure.
Of 300 military vehicles shipped to Rwanda, 220 were broken when they arrived, and the other 80 couldn’t be fixed when they broke down because there were no spare parts and the mission had no mechanics.
The promised helicopters never arrived.
By the time the genocide was in full sweep, Dallaire’s only professional troops, the Belgians, were pulled out by their government, the UN civilians were quick to flee, the UN-hired civilian pilots wouldn’t fly into Rwanda, and the UN Security Council couldn’t even decide upon the wording of its next resolution.
Pugliese quoted from a Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs report on the genocide written the following year: Mobs went door to door, festively beating drums and blowing whistles as they hacked Tutsis to death with machetes.
I saw a smaller version of the same sort of thing unfold in 1992 in the former Yugoslavia, where people who had lived together under Communist strongman Tito turned upon one another as the country fell apart and nationalism, particularly of the Serb variety, flourished.
One of my most vivid memories is of watching planes land at the airport, which had just been reopened and was being held by Canadian troops as part of the UN mission there, as food boxes from the UN High Commission for Refugees were being unloaded by day — and being served the same food boxes that night, for a pretty penny, at the only functioning hotel in town.
The people of Sarajevo, surrounded by snipers and regularly mortared, would do without, while journalists and bureaucrats paid through the nose for stolen rations. It cemented my view of the UN, I’m afraid, as an ineffective, sometimes corrupt and occasionally insane bureaucracy.
That description is particularly apt of its Human Rights Council, which in its first iteration, the UN Commission on Human Rights, in 2003 proudly elected a woman from the murderous regime of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi as its chair.
As Hillel Neuer wrote in the Jerusalem Post last year, on the 10th anniversary of the council, “And faced with reports of torture in Algeria, forced child labour in Congo, attacks on dissidents in Cuba, abuse of foreign workers in Qatar, incommunicado detentions in the United Arab Emirates, the imprisonment of Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma and other democracy leaders in Venezuela, and arbitrary arrests in Vietnam, what has the council done over its 10 years to protect those victims?”
Nothing, Neuer said. “On the contrary, the UN elected every single one of these abusers as a council member.”
Most leaders who speak at the UN, as Canada’s Justin Trudeau did Thursday, adopt an uber-respectful tone the organization richly doesn’t deserve. The PM’s speech, a mea culpa really for Canada’s past wrongs against Indigenous people, was what the UN loves to see, a first-world country in full apologia.
Trump called it as it is, in delicious plain language — “Rocket Man” for the deranged North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and “rogue regimes,” which aren’t only represented at the UN, but which often are the leading foxes in the hen house.