The types of momentos for sale in Gaza. The twin towers - aflame - are at the mullah's feet. He is holding the Pentagon.
Dec 20 2006
Like many in the free world, I was encourged by the news December 19 that the United Nations General Assembly had voted in favor of a new resolution condemning Ahmadinejad's Iran for gross violations of human rights. The past week alone has brought increasing reports of Iran's antics - even more public hangings of political dissidents, assassination in Italy by Iranian agents, and a violent crackdown on opposition student groups in Tehran.
Closer study of the U.N.'s censure and my digging for particulars of the story has, however, proved to be disheartening as I become aware of some of the accompanying political dynamics.
As a journalist, I have chased down details of this story from the time of its development until today, only by combing through internet sites put up by Iranian resistance bloggers and organizations, and reading foreign language news out of Europe's leading wire services. Interestingly - but hardly surprisingly given the current atmosphere in mainstream media - the story has not received much attention - if any - in North America.
"Who cares?" one might ask. We are aware of human rights issues in Iran and . . . so the U.N. did something. Big deal. Many people are frustrated when the U.N. issues any resolution nowadays. . .such actions seem to mean so little in the grand scheme of things. Why should this be major news at all?
The biggest news around the story may be that the resolution issued against Iran this week is one of 54 similar resolutions issued in the recent past. Evidently, none of the first 53 have been worded strongly enough: U.N. representatives emphasize that this is a "strongly-worded condemnation". ( Uh . . okay. )
Another point worth noting for anyone in the free world is that the vote was in fact a mere 72-50, against Iran's common practices of :
- "harassment, intimidation and persecution" of human right defenders, political opponents, religious dissenters, journalists, clerics, academics, union members and labor organizers.
- "continuing use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment such as flogging and amputations, public executions ...and stoning".
- "the continuing violence and discrimination against women and girls in law and in practice"
- "the increasing discrimination and other human rights violations" against members of ethnic and religious minorities, including Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, Christians, Jews, Sunni Muslims and members of the Bahai faith.
The resolution demanded an end to these practices. So why did 50 countries vote against the censure. . . . and why did 55 countries abstain from the vote? One would be foolish in failing to realize the implications of these numbers.
Increasingly, voices in the western world are asking more insistently what purpose the U.N. serves, given its obvious impotence. The connection cannot be ignored that within the U.N. itself are too many voices that actively support regimes which engage in mass violations of human rights and openly threaten to annihilate their more peaceful neighbors. Moreover, voices in America, from which taxpayer money pays for the very functioning of the entity of the United Nations, are questioning, "What type of ideologies are we funding"? These questions regarding the value of the U.N. in its current form are ultimately healthy and have become essential for the preservation of free forms of government. As we face increasing fascist military power in the middle east, and have only the international community upon which we rely to exercise the type of united political strenghth that can demand civilized behavior of renegade tyrannies and respect for human rights, can we afford to keep ignoring that the U.N. may be in fact more a hinderance than a help to free countries?
Lack of western media coverage on the U.N. resolution, outside of Europe, is also cause for concern. In a time when the American government struggles to help the American people understand the dynamics of the growing tensions in the Middle East, and why our involvement in it - for the future safety of our own lives - is imperative, the media is once again failing to tell the full story, in pursuit of a narrow political agenda of its own. A nation's media has enormous power to mold the thinking of average citizens, but we must demand that that power is used responsibly. For the media to presume the right to do less, is an arrogant patronization of the thinking public.
For argument's sake, let's examine what leading American media missed on Iran this week:
- Struan Stevenson, Scottish MP, from a European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg warned the West about the consequences of its continued appeasement of radical mullahs in Iran, as they step up torture of their own people and the advancement of violent global political goals.
- After the European Parliament's leaders very publicly condemned the European Union for its recent ignorant listing of Paris-based Iranian resistance organization The People's Mujahedin as an official "terrorist organization" - at the instigation of fundamentalist elements of the Iranian government - the EU passed a first motion to overturn the decision and will likely remove it from the list. This was an enormous show of support for the ex-patriot Iranians all over the world.
- Italian courts issued an official statement that the murder of a Rome-based representative of National Council of Resistance of Iran, a respected resistance group, was in fact planned by Iranian mullah in control of Iran, and carried out by Ahmadinejad's goons.
- In one story that did get some coverage, Tony Blair called Iran an "obstacle to peace" in the Middle East and to the safety of the western world. He insisted that the West must act firmly and in unison to deal with the growing threat posed by the Iranian mullahs.
It matters greatly that three of these stories were largely passed over in North America, because the stories taken together illustrate that there is a wide world consensus and growing concern about Iran, and its growing threat to the free world. Should the U.S. as the greatest available military power come to the point where it takes action against Iran, it is important that the American people first understand that there is in fact already a world support network in place, lest they think - as they were led to think in the early months of the Iraq war, - that military action was unilateral and without support. The present administration's frustration in getting pertinent information out to a confused public has never been unrelated to media bias, since the beginning of the Iraq conflict.
So what are the lessons in this censure - the latest whimper from the U.N. - against the growing monster that is the Iranian Islamofascist regime? Perhaps we can learn two alarming truths: that the U.N. is indisputably sympathetic to non-democratic, tyrannical regimes in greater force than that with which any free-thinking, tax-paying person should be comfortable; and that once again, western media's irresponsible performance of its job may be ultimately detrimental to us all.
