Smarter people than me have pointed out that the United Nations should be renamed United Governments, or better yet United Regimes. For all the wonderful aspirations the organization has put in writing, it's workings serve better as an illustration why there continues to be war, rather than how wars could be avoided.
It's still worth having, of course. But we'd all be better off if we recognized the limitations of the UN rather than clinging to the ideal as if the clinging would make it more real.
The UN conference on anti-Semitism is long overdue and much needed, but I'm forced to assert that it won't do anything to reduce antisemitism and may even increase it. There'll be a lot of talk, and then everyone will get back to hating Jews.
Anne Bayefsky may have been too polite in her opening remarks, probably because she was a) hopeful something good would come out of the conference, and b) didn't want to appear ungracious.
I'm at a point where I'd rather that the UN General Assembly and Secretariat give up any pretense that they are interested in fairness and tolerance. I don't know how Kofi Annan feels about Jews or even Israel, because I'm convinced that his #1 goal in life is to avoid pissing off the majority of regimes that are undemocratic, bigoted, and corrupt. I don't know what the #2 goal is, but it's a distant second. He knows that Israel and the US will always play according to the rules and can hold their own anyway, so it's safe to antagonize them.
Israel should, imho, use every opportunity to lambast the Secretariat, the General Assembly, and the Security Council for its blatant hypocricy and apparent antisemitism. It's not as if the UN could treat Israel any worse, after all. And the US, Canada, and any other government that actually cares about the ideals of the UN should follow suit.
The UN's treatment of Israel should become a source of embarrassment for democratic nations around the world; it should remind them that they're making nice with despicable governments and sometimes even despicable people. The UN should respect the sovereignty of its member regimes, but that doesn't mean it has to accept their moral legitimacy.
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