Dog-Feces Ice Cream

Mark Steyn is less than impressed with what the President served up at the UN.

For better or worse, we are defined by our differences — and, if Barack Obama doesn’t understand that when he’s at the podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela, and other unlovely polities, the TV audience certainly did when Colonel Qaddafi took to the podium immediately afterwards. They’re both heads of state of sovereign nations. But, if you’re on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States and sees where it gets you.

This isn’t a quirk of fate. The global reach that enables America and a handful of others to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply isn’t a happy accident but something that derives explicitly from our political systems, economic liberty, traditions of scientific and cultural innovation, and a general understanding that societies advance when their people are able to fulfill their potential in freedom. In other words, America and Libya are defined by their differences.

What happens when you pretend those differences don’t exist? Well, you end up with the distinctively flavored ice cream I mentioned at the beginning. By declining to distinguish between the foreign minister of Slovenia and the foreign minister of, say, Sudan, you normalize not merely the goofier ad libs of a Qaddafi but far darker pathologies. The day after the president of the United States addressed the U.N. General Assembly, the prime minister of Israel took to the podium, and held up a copy of the minutes of the Wansee Conference at which German officials planned the “Final Solution” to their Jewish problem. This is the pathetic state to which the U.N. has been reduced after six decades: The Jew-hatred of Ahmadinejad and others is so routine that a sane man has to stand up in the global parliament and attempt to demonstrate to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

One sympathizes with Benjamin Netanyahu. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & co aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They do so because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because in the regimes they represent the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality only a self-constructed one. In Libya and Syria and far too many “nations,” truth is simply what the thug in the presidential palace declares it to be. But don’t worry, Obama assures them, we’re not “defined by our differences.” Hey, that’s great, isn’t it? Yet, if you can no longer distinguish between the truth and a lie, why be surprised that the lie metastasizes and becomes, if not yet quite respectable, at least semi-respectable and acceptable in polite society?

I can't remember who I first heard describe the UN as a corrupt dictators club. My only problem with that description is that it is being far too generous to the UN. I do agree in part with Obama's claim that he was not naïve. It was not naïve, it was far worse than that.

As he was speaking to a group of people - the majority of whom practice real torture (the pulling-out-fingernails, electrodes-to-the-genitals types of torture) against people who've done nothing more than expressed a thought contrary to their own, on a daily basis, as a matter of the general course of business of the state - Obama mentioned the word "torture" only when speaking about his own country. The type of moral equivalence that Obama expresses is certainly popular in the leftist academic circles he travels in but is dangerous in the real world. It is precisely this type of thinking that has allowed the UN to be hijacked by the world's despots, thugs and tyrants.

The UN was conceived as an organization that would uphold peace and advance the cause of freedom and human rights throughout the world. But the countries that incorporate those values into their own governance are given no more of a voice than those who willingly and forceably smother them.

Thus, we end up with an organization in which Israel, the sole democracy in the midst of a variety of thugocracies in the Middle East, has been the subject of more scrutiny by the UN than any other nation. Its enemies in the neighborhood see the UN and its agencies as simply another tool in their ongoing war against Israel. Other dictators around the world are more than willing to assist in focusing attention on Israel, lest it be turned upon them.

The idea that President Obama, by sheer force of his personality, can change the culture of the UN and force it to adhere more closely to its values is absurd. The only way this will be accomplished is by the world's democracies forcefully defending and advancing their principles. This is exactly the opposite of the direction Obama is moving.