The American people, polite to a fault, have tolerated a lot of anti-American rants at the United Nations headquarters in New York during the past six decades, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez crossed the line Wednesday when he called President George W. Bush “the devil” —and neither he nor the U.N. should be allowed to get away with it. Only his suggestion that the U.N. leave the U.S. saved his speech from being total demagogic lunacy.
Chavez — another two-bit thug posing as a legitimate statesman — formed an alliance with Iran last week. The same Iran that refuses to adhere to U.N. regulations specifically intended to haltnuclear proliferation. The same Iran whose equally virulent president said publicly that he wants the state of Israel — a state created by this same international body in 1948 — completely wiped off the map. Chavez not only grievously insulted President Bush, but the entire U.N. as well.
Yet when this self-proclaimed disciple of Fidel Castro announced to the world’s top diplomats that he “could still smell the sulfur” from the president’s visit the day before, he was greeted with snickers and “a warm round of applause.” This revolting response should sicken every American, especially those living in New York and Washington — who got a whiff of real brimstone five years ago.
If any American — Democrat or Republican — had gotten up before this dyspeptic collection of diplomatic slackers and said the same thing, they would be pilloried in the international press. So where’s the outrage when the cloven hoof is on the other foot?
In a stunning display of biting the hand that helps feed the world, Chavez accused the United States — which provides more economic and humanitarian aid than any other nation on Earth — of a pattern of “domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.”
This little nastygram should be taken seriously next time Congress debates sending any more of our tax dollars to foreign shores. As the leader of the only non-Middle Eastern OPEC nation, Chavez and new best friend Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have plenty of petrodollars. Let them respond to the next earthquake or tsunami for a change.
Nor should these hypocrites be given a pass on the state of their own repressed countries, where most of the population still lives in grinding Third World poverty under political despotism while their rich rulers pompously strut across the world stage. Far from being a champion of oppressed people around the globe, Chavez wants the do-nothing U.N. to keep “studying” the well-documentedand ongoing genocide in Darfur while Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was also in New York for the three-day summit to mark the U.N.’s 60th anniversary, opined that perhaps CNN was part of a conspiracy to “dismember Sudan.” One could only hope.
But even raving madmen sometimes stumble over obvious truths. Chavez said the U.N. has outlived its usefulness. He’s right. He also wants to move this dysfunctional, ineffective and worse-than-useless institution out of New York City, and on this one point we couldn’t agree more. After paying our respects at ground zero, we’ll even help them pack.
