OPINION
Is it time for the UN to go the way of the League of Nations? That body was disbanded in ignominy after it utterly failed to prevent the Axis nations from plunging the world into another World War. The UN may have helped steer the world through the Cold War, but its essential uselessness since has grown in direct proportion to its venality and hypocrisy. Who can seriously dispute, after all, that UN agencies did more harm than good during the Covid pandemic?
But it’s in its supposed prime role of preventing conflict and enhancing human rights that the UN has conspicuously not only failed, but become downright inimical. After all, it was largely under UN auspices that Libya collapsed into failed state status. The UN did nothing, either, to prevent the Rwandan genocide. Worse, under its so-called “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, the UN is openly undermining what is supposed to be its foundational principle: the sovereignty of member states. Something former Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted.
When it comes to Israel, the UN’s form is diabolical.
The UN has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than all other countries combined. More than Russia, China, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, or Venezuela. Its aid agency in the Palestinian territories has been complicit in distributing violently anti-Semitic “textbooks”. Satellite photos show UN offices directly across the street from Hamas rocket-launching sites.
Now, even its Secretary-General is letting the UN’s anti-Semitic slip show for all to see.
Israel will deny UN officials visas and has called on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign after he said the October 7 Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”.
A more asinine comment one could not imagine. Hitler did not happen in a vacuum, either. The post-WWI punishment of Germany via the onerous Treaty of Versailles — largely written up by the same people who created the League of Nations, as it happens — was instrumental in Hitler’s rise.
Does that mean that the Allies had no right to destroy the Nazi regime?
Even more revolting is Guterres’ outright slander of the Jewish state.
Opening the session, Mr Guterres said there was no excuse for the “appalling” violence by Hamas militants on October 7 but also warned against “collective punishment” of the Palestinians.
“I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza.”
The Australian
Naturally, where the odious UN goes, New Zealand’s grim, squawking globalist ventriloquist dummy is prattling right along. And, like all leftist midwits, she’s parroting the identical talking points, exactly as programmed.
A group of global leaders, including former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, say the collective punishment of civilians in Gaza as Israel targets Hamas is a clear violation of international law […]
To now see the people of Gaza as a whole subjected to this collective punishment is completely unacceptable and the stories we’re hearing of the lack of food, water, sanitation, the deaths that are occurring, it is truly horrifying.”
“Stories we’re hearing” means, of course, Hamas propaganda. The sort of propaganda useless idiots like Clark are only too happy to unquestioningly believe, when, say, Hamas blames Israel when its own rocket hits a hospital car park.
But if you thought Clark was done being revoltingly stupid, she’s far from done yet.
“Israel seems determined to destroy some 500km of tunnels, well they’re all under buildings, many of them are residential. Are we going to see basically the residential areas of Gaza be completely levelled as they carry out this crusade?”
RNZ
If necessary, yes. Just as the Allies bombed German and Japanese cities to rubble in order to cut the flow of war material.
What babbling morons like Clark are in short demanding is that Hamas be allowed to continue to smuggle terror weapons to their hearts’ content.
But Guterres’ and Clark’s slanders on the Jewish state cannot go un-rebutted. “Collective punishment”? “Clear violation of international law”?
Utter, steaming horse-dookey.
In fact, British Lord Guglielmo Verdirame KC, a specialist in public international law, a professor of international law at the King’s College London department of war studies, corrected these deliberate smears in the House of Lords.
On the subject of “proportionality”:
“It does not mean that the defensive force has to be equal to the force used in the armed attack. Proportionality means that you can use force that is proportionate to the defensive objective, which is to stop, to repel and to prevent further attacks.
Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality in the law of self-defence, given what Hamas says it does and what Hamas has done and continues to do.”
Proportionality also applies in the law that governs the conduct of hostilities, not only in self-defence […] That rule does not mean, even when scrupulously observed, that civilians will not tragically lose their lives in an armed conflict.
Proportionality does not mean, as too many prattling ninnies seem to imagine, keeping an even scoreboard of civilian casualties. Britain, for instance, suffered some 67, 000 civilian deaths in WWII. Germany, over two million. Were those two million proportional to the objective of crushing Nazism? Absolutely.
This will cause no end of pearl-clutching among Hamas’ useful idiots, but if it takes 10,000, 50,000 civilian casualties to eliminate Hamas, well, so be it. Gazans made that bed when they elected Hamas to power, every bit as much as Germans did when they elected the NSDAP.
And when a terrorist entity deliberately seeks to cynically exploit the laws of war by “putting civilians under its control at risk and even using them to seek immunity for its military operations, military equipment and military personnel”, the proportional force required only grows higher.
“Occupation” is another stupid lie. Occupation, under international law, requires physical presence in the territory. If the occupying power withdraws from an area, as Israel did with Gaza nearly twenty years ago, the occupation has ceased. That is “clear under international law”.
Finally, the Greens, Aunty Helen, and all the rest of the reeking clique of Hamas-backing, anti-Semitic, “pro-Palestine” demand a “ceasefire”.
In other words, they are demanding that Israel abandon the women and children stolen by Hamas. That Hamas go unpunished for its unspeakable barbarities.
Asking a state that is acting in self-defence to agree to a ceasefire before its lawful defensive objectives have been met is, in effect, asking that state to stop defending itself. For such calls to be reasonable and credible, they must be accompanied by a concrete proposal setting out how Israel’s legitimate defensive goals against Hamas will be met through other means. It is not an answer to say that Israel has to conclude a peace treaty, because Hamas is not interested in a peace treaty.
Hansard
What blithering cretins like Helen Clark are too stupid, or too blinded by hatred of the Jewish state, to comprehend or admit is that there cannot be “peace” with an entity whose primary, unwavering, codified rule is genocide of the Jewish people.
Our fathers and grandfathers were wise enough and resolute enough to realise that there could be no negotiated peace with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Only unconditional surrender or annihilation.
The onus, then, is on Hamas to surrender. Israel has no call to, indeed has a duty not to, make peace with a people fanatically dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish state.