The UN, Ahmadinejad and atonement

The following essay, by Hadar Sela, was published at The Commentator

Most of us would probably like to believe that in this modern age we are better prepared than our grandparents and great-grandparents were in the task of avoiding the kind of mass carnage which the League of Nations failed to prevent and which shocked the world into dissolving that body and establishing the United Nations in its place in the aftermath of the Second World War.

As the preamble to the United Nations charter reads:

“We the peoples of the United Nations determined: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…”

However, on Wednesday this coming week – a mere 67 years since those fine words were written – the President of Iran will yet again stand on the UN podium.

Chillingly, the very body established as a result of the world bearing witness to the consequences of racial hatred and genocide will host an anti-Semitic denier of that same genocide.

Shamefully, a regime which fails to uphold that organisation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even towards its own citizens, will be honoured with the right to address its General Assembly.

Shockingly, the representative of a regime which, according to the founder of “Genocide Watch”, Professor Gregory Stanton, has already taken six steps along the eight-step route to perpetrating yet another genocide, will be allowed to address the family of nations as an equal – despite the fact that the UN’s own Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide makes incitement to genocide illegal.

Read the rest of the essay, here.