RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every so often the United Nations decides to dignify a tyrant, or a tyranny, in ways so in-your-face perverse that it draws public attention, provokes highly embarrasing protest — and the UN scuttles to back away. So it went with the recent decision by the World Health Organization to appoint as one of its goodwill ambassadors the longtime tyrant of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.

On Oct. 18, the director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, of Ethiopia, announced he was “honored” to name Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador. For good measure, Tedros praised Zimbabwe as “a country that places universal health coverage and health promotion at the center of its policies to provide health care to all.”

On Oct. 20, Geneva-based UN Watch put out a press release calling Mugabe’s appointment “sickening,” and noting that Mugabe’s brutal rule had turned Zimbabwe from the breadbasket of Africa into a basketcase, devastating its health care system along the way — while Mugabe went outside the country for his own medical needs. There was plenty of other protest, from the U.S., the UK, medical professionals worldwide, and so forth. On Oct. 22, Tedro announced he was rescinding Mugabe’s appointment.

So… problem solved?

Nope, not by half. For the UN, the embarrassment will likely fade. But the over-arching problem here — of which Mugabe’s fleeting four days as a goodwill ambassador is merely a symption — is a United Nations that inveterately dignifies and honors tyrants and tyrannies, though usually in less prominent fashion.

For a sampling of just how deep this problem runs, take the case of Iran — ruled since 1989 by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This is a regime that President Trump accurately described in his Oct. 13 speech on the Iran nuclear deal as “having raided the wealth of one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant nations, and spread death, destruction, and chaos all around the globe.” Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and leading predator of today’s Middle East, with a record of terrorist bombings and assassinations carried out by its agents and mascot terrorist groups from the Middle East to Latin America to Europe to Asia. Iran’s regime — a longtime client of North Korea’s weapons bazaar — spent years cheating its way around UN sanctions on its rogue nuclear and missile programs, and under the current UN-approved nuclear deal has carried on, with brazen bad faith, testing ballistic missiles. Iran’s regime brutalizes its own citizens, especially women, and in 2009 crushed mass protests by beating and shooting its own people in the streets. Remember the murder of Neda Soltan.

There’s a solid argument to be made that under the UN’s 1945 Charter, which says that membership is open to peace-loving states that respect human rights, today’s Iran does not belong in the UN at all.

But at the UN, Iran’s regime not only enjoys a seat as one of the 193 member states. It also enjoys the privileges of holding seats on a remarkable array of the governing boards of major UN agencies. These are positions less publicly prominent than that of a goodwill ambassador. But they are potentially more influential for directing the funds and activities of these agencies, accessing information, and horse-trading political favors behind the scenes.

Currently, Iran sits on the 36-member board of the UN’s flagship agency, the UN Development Program, or UNDP, which disburses billions annually, and in field offices around the world serves as chief coordinator for other UN agencies, and doubles, when needed, as a representative of the secretary-general. Iran has a clear affinity for the UNDP, where it chaired the governing board in 2009, while under UN sanctions for its rogue nuclear program. CONTINUE AT SITE

A top UK official told the BBC last week that ISIS terrorists from the UK returning from Syria and Iraq will not be prosecuted. Instead, the government will try to reintegrate them back into society because they were “naive” when they joined the genocidal terrorist group.

This came just two days after the chief of the UK’s MI5 spy service gave a rare speech warning that the terrorism threat was higher than he had ever seen.

Maybe, just maybe, these two statements are related.

Just yesterday, one government minister suggested that the best way to deal with returning ISIS terrorists would be to kill them. And it has been just over a month since an Iraqi refugee attempted to detonate an IED on a London subway, injuring 30 — a refugee who was already part of the UK’s “deradicalization” program.

The “no prosecution” policy statement for ISIS terrorists was made by Max Hill, the UK government’s new independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Hill told the BBC last Thursday:

We are told we do have a significant number already back in this country who have previously gone to Iraq and Syria.

That means that the authorities have looked at them and looked at them hard and have decided that they do not justify prosecution and really we should be looking at reintegration and moving away from any notion that we are going to lose a generation from this travel.

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It’s not a decision that MI5 and others will have taken lightly. They, I am sure, will have looked intensely at each individual on return.

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But they have left space, and I think they are right to do so, for those who travelled, but who travelled out of a sense of naivety, possibly with some brainwashing along the way, possibly in their mid-teens and who return in a sense of utter disillusionment. We have to leave space for those individuals to be diverted away from the criminal courts.

About 850 jihadists are believed to have left the UK to travel to Syria and Iraq in recent years, with more than 400 already having returned. In terms of raw numbers, this is second only to France:

Even though at this stage, M-103 is non-binding, as one of its supporters — Samer Majzoub, president of the Canadian Muslim Forum and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood — wrote, “Now that Islamophobia has been condemned, this is not the end, but rather the beginning.”

It sounds as if the next step is to try to make a non-binding resolution binding; and as if the eventual aim is to reinforce and legitimize the term Islamophobia, to limit freedom of speech, and to prevent Canadians from criticizing radical Islam, Islamic sharia, and practices such as wife- beating, honor killing and female genital mutilation (FGM).

Fear or anger toward radical Islam and Muslims are unlikely to be caused by an “irrational hatred and fear of Islam,” or “Islamophobia”. They are, however, likely to be triggered by global radical Islamic terrorist attacks and as more people become aware of the aggressive and intolerant nature of many Quranic verses, of the Muslims Prophet’s hadiths, of what Canadian Muslim clerics (imams) are preaching and of radical Islam.

The Canadian Liberal Party’s anti-Islamophobia motion, M-103, is not a law; it is a non-binding formal proposal, an opinion by Parliament. The motion’s text calls on the government to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.”

However, the House of Commons Heritage Committee heard on September 27 that it is more likely to lead to “thought control, oppression, disharmony and criminalization of non-Muslims, ” according to the National Post.

The hearing also revealed that there are many doubts about the motion’s vague language. Committee members spent much of the time, the National Post added, trying to explain exactly what M-103 means.

The controversial motion passed 201 votes to 91 in March, after months of bitter debate, and protests and counter-protests, across Canada, and in the aftermath of the January 29 mosque shooting in Quebec City, where six Muslim men were murdered.

(Image source: Parliament of Canada)

Careful, objective reading of the latest hate crime statistics in Canada, for 2015 (released in June 2017), exposes that the motion is biased in both its wording and priorities. It is also an act of favoritism in that it singles out Islam and only Islam for special treatment.

The motion sets forth the term “Islamophobia,” mentions it twice by name, places the government’s condemnation of “Islamophobia” first, and “all forms of systemic racism” and “religious discrimination” only after it.

Iran’s goal in this move? For Hamas to maintain and enhance its preparation for war against Israel.

Iran’s message to Hamas: If you want us to continue providing you with financial and military aid, you must continue to hold on to your weapons and reject demands to disarm.

Iran wants Hamas to retain its security control over the Gaza Strip so that the Iranians can hold onto another power base in the Middle East, as it does with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In a historic reawakening, Iran is once again meddling in the internal affairs of the Palestinians. This this does not bode well for the future of “reconciliation” between Hamas and Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction run by President Mahmoud Abbas.The re-emergence of Iran, as it pursues its efforts to increase its political and military presence in the region, does not bode well for the future of stability in the Middle East.

The Iranians are urging Hamas to hold on to its weapons in spite of the recent “reconciliation” agreement signed between Hamas and Fatah under the auspices of Egypt. Iran’s goal in this move? For Hamas to maintain and enhance its preparation for war against Israel.

A high-level Hamas delegation headed by Saleh Arouri, deputy chairman of Hamas’s “political bureau,” traveled to Tehran last week to brief Iranian leaders on the “reconciliation” deal with Fatah. During the visit, Iranian leaders praised Hamas for resisting demands (by Fatah) to disarm and relinquish security control over the Gaza Strip.

“We congratulate you on your refusal to abandon your weapons, an issue that you consider as a red line,” Ali Velayati, a senior Iranian politician and advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei, told the visiting Hamas officials. “The Palestinian cause is the most important cause of the Islamic world, and after all this time you remain committed to the principle of resistance against the Zionists despite all the pressure you are facing.”

During the visit of a high-level Hamas delegation to Iran last week, Ali Velayati (pictured above in 2016), a senior Iranian politician and advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the visiting Hamas officials: “We congratulate you on your refusal to abandon your weapons…” (Image source: Hamed Malekpour/Wikimdia Commons)

Arouri and his colleagues rushed to Tehran to seek the support of the Iranian regime in the wake of demands by Abbas that Hamas allow the Palestinian Authority to assume security control over the Gaza Strip. The “reconciliation” agreement stipulates nothing about the need for Hamas to disarm, and Hamas officials have stressed during the past two weeks that they have no intention of laying down their weapons or dismantling their security apparatus in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas views the demand to disarm as part of an Israeli-American “conspiracy” designed to eliminate the Palestinian “resistance” and thwart the “reconciliation” accord with Abbas’s Fatah. Hamas’s refusal to disarm is already threatening to spoil the “reconciliation.”

“Like making a pyromaniac the town fire chief.” That’s the verdict from Hillel Neuer, executive director of the NGO UN Watch, on the controversial decision to appoint the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the UN Human Rights Council. It’s a view shared by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who said that the DRC’s appointment proved that the HRC could not possibly view itself as a unified voice of moral clarity with the integrity to call out abusive governments. The US, which is rightfully reviewing its membership in the council, has called for competitive elections to put pressure on countries with such abysmal human rights records.

Unfortunately, it is not only atrocities within its own borders that the DRC is fueling – it is also sponsoring terrorism overseas. According to a new report, “The Terrorists’ Treasury,” the BGFIBank DRC – which is operated by the brother of Congolese President Joseph Kabila – has been diverting assets to enable the financiers of the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah.

This is not the first time that the DRC has been exposed as a state sponsor of terrorism. Earlier this year, the NGO Global Witness exposed how Congo Futur, a lumber company owned by major financiers of Hezbollah, had clandestinely created new companies and transferred ownership to proxies in order to circumvent sanctions and export more than $5.5 million worth of luxury timber from the DRC to the US market.

The news that the DRC continues to provide indirect support for Hezbollah comes at a time when the terrorist organization poses a greater threat than ever. First, Hezbollah has been boosting its stockpile of weapons across Lebanon, stoking tensions in the region and raising the prospect of war with Israel. Given the fact that since 1993 every confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has grown increasingly intense, the next inevitable clash will end up wreaking havoc in both countries.

Second, in addition to expanding its military capacities in Lebanon, Hezbollah has been playing an ever prominent role alongside Syrian government forces in the eastern region of Deir ez-Zor, where the US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces and regime troops are competing for Islamic State territory. Hezbollah has also been exploiting the de-escalation of conflict in south Syria as a vehicle to carry out reconnaissance work in the region, identifying areas in the country from which it could easily strike Israel without needing to be physically close to the border.

However, it is not only towards key US allies that Hezbollah is posing an increasingly menacing threat – it is also towards America itself. The terrorist group was recently caught conspiring to attack the US on its own turf, conducting fundraising operations in the country and positioning “sleeper agents” in places like Michigan and New York.

That the DRC feels emboldened to help Hezbollah restock its war chest should not come as a surprise. After all, the Obama administration and other Western governments have already taught the country – and specifically its President Joseph Kabila – that it can behave how it likes without risking censure.

In 2011, when Kabila came to power in an election marred by electoral irregularities and vote rigging, the US chose to turn a blind eye, believing that for all his faults, Kabila was the best guarantee for stability in the country.

Unsurprisingly the chickens are now coming home to roost. Kabila, a leader who achieved power by corrupt means, is now ensuring that he retains power through equally underhanded methods. Taking Western governments’ past acquiescence as carte blanche, Kabila recently announced that presidential elections originally slated for last December would be delayed until 2019.