The moral bankruptcy of the world.
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A pair of events this week graphically illustrated a striking symmetry in the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations, a global body ostensibly dedicated to peace and justice.
The UN General Assembly gave a platform to Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, whose terrorist regime has been in a state of self-declared war against the free world for more than four decades.
Raisi promptly used this platform to threaten to murder US officials in revenge for the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Yet while rolling out the red carpet for this tyrant, security officials frog-marched Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan out of the hall. He was already in the process of walking out after holding up a sign reading “Iranian women deserve freedom now” with a picture of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman who died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” after being arrested for not wearing her hijab in the prescribed manner.
Erdan was detained by security officials for several minutes outside the chamber before being released. He protested: “It should not be possible for a vile murderer who calls for the destruction of Israel to be given a platform here at the UN.”
Not only did the UN grant a genocidal monster like Raisi the status of a world statesman, but it treated the ambassador of the country that Raisi’s regime aims to wipe off the map like a criminal.
This fits the UN’s long record of sanitising, condoning or promoting human rights abusers while singling out democratic Israel for a campaign of harassment and demonisation.
Given the Iranian regime’s record in jailing and torturing dissidents, hanging homosexuals, oppressing women and killing untold thousands of protesters, it is beyond belief that in November Iran is to chair the UN Human Rights Council’s Social Forum.
The embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had it absolutely right when he told the UN Security Council this week,: “Humankind no longer pins its hopes on the UN.” He pointed out that as a result of Russia’s membership on the Council which gives it veto power on binding resolutions, the UN is impotent in the face of aggression.
Raisi used his UN platform to gloat over the world’s inability to restrain Iran. He taunted America over its powerlessness in the world, claimed that the hegemony of the west is “over” and declared that the sanctions policy has “failed” and the Iranian nation has “won”.
Although this stomach-turning spectacle was staged by the UN, the real responsibility for it rests with the Biden administration which has fallen over itself to appease, fund and empower Tehran.
Bafflingly desperate to conclude a deal that would enable Iran to develop nuclear weapons after only a short delay while benefitting from billions of dollars in sanctions relief, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to repeated Iranian acts of aggression against US interests.
Last month, the administration released $6 billion of frozen Iranian funds in a deal with Tehran to free five American hostages. This money will enable the regime to supply more weapons to armed groups in Gaza and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria in order to murder more Israelis. It will strengthen the regime’s crackdown on protesters within Iran. It will encourage the regime to take yet more Americans hostage.
In response to such appeasement, Iran has been supplying drones to Russia to use against Ukraine, has barred around a third of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s most experienced inspectors from overseeing nuclear sites in the country, and has ramped up terrorism against Israel from within the disputed territories.
It has also stepped up its aggression against America.
Last month, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah, issued a direct threat to the US, which has 900 troops deployed east of the Euphrates. “If the Americans want to fight, they’re welcome, and this is the real battle that will change everything,” he said.
As Jonathan Spyer explained in The Wall Street Journal, this reflects Iran’s strategy of a “unified” war between its allies and pro-western forces in the region.
In March, there was a terrorist incursion into Israel from southern Lebanon, from where 34 rockets were fired into Israel the following month. Also in March, a drone attack on a US position in Hasakah, Syria killed a civilian American contractor and wounded five US service members. In August, missiles were fired at a US position near Shaddadi, Syria.
The US is not alone in its astounding refusal to push back against Iranian aggression. Despite the fact that Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman believes Iran to be the biggest threat to the country’s security, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has doubled down on the government’s refusal to outlaw the IRGC.
You have to rub your eyes at this. In February, the Metropolitan Police reported that 15 IRGC terrorist plots against Iranian dissidents and British citizens had been identified in the UK over the previous year.
Back in 2015, Israeli intelligence agents enabled their British counterparts to disrupt a bomb factory in northwest London, including three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, that had been set up by Hezbollah under the direction of the IRGC.
In addition, the British government has never taken action against the Islamist centres in the UK, backed by the Iranian regime, that glorify Islamic terrorism and even recruit British Muslim students for the IRGC’s Quds Force.
Nor has it done anything about the Islamic Students’ Associations of Britain and Europe, a group based in west London that has hosted senior IRGC officials who promoted antisemitism and called on British Muslim students to join an apocalyptic army that would “bring an end to the life of Jews”.
Earlier this month, the Israeli government released a video in which IRGC officers detailed the group’s efforts to murder Israelis abroad.
Following this, the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, threatened that Israel would exact a price from the Iranians “deep in Iran, in the very heart of Tehran” if harm came to an Israeli citizen or Jewish individual or if Iranian weapon systems were infiltrated into Israel.
“We simply cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon ever,” he said. “We are not just sitting idly by.”
Barnea’s rare public warning was directed principally at the Biden administration. With 150,000 Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel from Lebanon, Israel certainly doesn’t want an outright war with Iran. But it may be left with no alternative as a result of America’s incomprehensible eagerness to empower the fanatics of Tehran.
The enemies of civilisation, such as Russia, North Korea and China as well as Iran, have all concluded that the US is now a toothless tiger trying to slink away from conflict.
They are watching as America tears itself apart. They are closely observing the identity crisis that is gripping much of the west, which no longer knows what its common values are, let alone wanting to expend blood and treasure in fighting for them.
Raisi’s taunt that western democracy has “reached the end of its journey” stung because the west appears to be making it come true.
It’s now clear that, in winning the war against Nazism in the 1940s, the west did not (as it so prematurely told itself) expunge the cultural corruption that had incubated the Holocaust. On the contrary, appeasement, wishful thinking and antisemitism are now off the charts.
What’s even clearer is that the continuing onslaught on the Jewish people by those intending to exterminate them, who are being aided and abetted by supposedly civiliwed global leaders, lies at the very heart of the moral bankruptcy of the world.
