By happenstance, Monday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day fell on the 120th anniversary of the birth of Adolph Hitler, whose unspeakable Third Reich exterminated some six million European Jews and other political prisoners during World War II. But merely remembering the victims of Nazi brutality is not enough. Jews are being threatened with extinction again, this time by another rogue regime hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and it must be stopped.
The State of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948 in response to the crimes against humanity committed at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. So when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told diplomats attending a UN conference in Switzerland this week that Israel had been founded “on the pretext of Jewish suffering,” 20 delegates promptly walked out. They joined nine Western countries, including the United States and Israel, who were already boycotting the conference due to a controversial document attempting to link Zionism with racism. That’s a start.
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In 1948, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide condemned any “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This is exactly what Ahmedinejad is threatening to do in his repeated calls to wipe Israel off the face of the map. To its great discredit, the UN itself gives him an international forum from which to terrorize a fellow member state in clear violation of international law.
This is not the first time the UN – which was created to foster international law, human rights and world peace – has failed to live up to its main mission. Since Hitler’s day, millions of people have been starved or slaughtered in Bosnia, Cambodia, China, Darfur, North Korea, Rwanda, and other places. Yet the UN is more likely to condemn military action taken to prevent or stop genocide than to actually confront blood-thirsty tyrants like Ahmedinejad who publicly threaten to unleash it.
When a member state announces plans to annihilate its neighbor, there can be only one correct response from the UN: Total shunning by the entire international community, including ironclad economic sanctions, quickly followed by joint military action to shut down the rogue’s war-making capability if necessary.
Until that happens, the UN will continue to be nothing more than a weak and ineffectual international body of all talk and no real action, which the current and future Hitlers of the world will be all too happy to ignore.
