https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-nominated-to-head-un-terrorism-prevention-group/
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-the-butcher-joins-the-bench-irans-grim-joke-at-the-un/
The United Nations is the single worst enabler of human rights abuses in the world even as it claims to protect human rights.
As UN Watch reports, the United Nations continues elevating Iran, China and other human rights abusers to leading positions in shaping and determining human rights findings and enforcement.
And Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, in particular will be in a position to shape policy terrorism prevention.
On Wednesday, the UN’s 54-nation Economic and Social Council nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN’s Committee for Program and Coordination, which meets next month to shape policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention. ECOSOC’s nomination is effectively decisive, as the UN General Assembly customarily rubber-stamps such nominations without a vote.
In addition, ECOSOC by acclamation elected China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan to the influential Committee on NGOs, which oversees the work, accreditation and UN access of thousands of human rights and civil society groups that enjoy consulative status at the world body.
The United States was the only ECOSOC member to object, saying that Iran, Cuba and Nicaragua were “unfit.”
Henhouse meet fox. The UN can’t counter terrorism becomes the terrorism is coming from inside the house. The UN is the problem. And the sooner we get rid of it, the better.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-nominated-to-head-un-terrorism-prevention-group/
When the butcher joins the bench: Iran’s grim joke at the UN
Putting the Islamic Republic on a committee that oversees human rights and disarmament is a new low, even for a body that has long given dictatorships a seat of honor
There are jokes, and then there is whatever the United Nations has just done.
The Islamic Republic of Iran – a regime that treats women as a sort of troublesome sub‑species, that harvests political prisoners like a cash crop, that hangs gay men from cranes and arms terrorists from Beirut to Sana’a – has been nominated to a UN committee that will help shape policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament and terrorism prevention.
If satire weren’t already dead, this would have killed it.
One imagines the scene in some anonymous conference room on the East River. Delegates in grey suits, eyes glazed from years of drafting resolutions no one will read, politely nod as the Islamic Republic is put forward to opine on the very subjects it has spent four decades violating with almost artisanal dedication. Somewhere, Kafka and Orwell look at one another, shrug, and order another round.
Let us dwell for a moment on the sheer, operatic absurdity of it.
On women’s rights: Iran is a country where a young woman, Mahsa Amini, can be beaten to death for the crime of insufficient hair concealment, where schoolgirls are poisoned for daring to remove headscarves, where the “morality police” patrol the streets as if they were animal control and half the population a species to be managed. This is the state now invited to contribute to the global conversation on gender equality. It is a bit like asking Jack the Ripper to sit on the board of a women’s shelter.
On human rights: The Islamic Republic has turned the abuse of its citizens into a system of government. Torture is not an aberration but a technique. Trials are not hearings but theater. Journalists, lawyers, artists and students are jailed, flogged, disappeared. Minorities – Kurds, Baluchis, BaháʼÃs, Jews – are treated as internal enemies, laboratory subjects for the regime’s paranoia. Who better, then, to help the UN shape its priorities on human dignity and the rule of law? Perhaps they can offer a breakout session on efficient repression: “From Arrest to Confession in 24 Hours or Less.”
On disarmament: Iran’s record is one long love letter to the proliferation of things that go bang. Ballistic missiles, drones, enrichment centrifuges spinning away in underground caverns, shipments of weapons routed through every smuggling lane from the Gulf to the Mediterranean – this is a state that collects UN Security Council resolutions the way other nations collect stamps. To consult Tehran on disarmament is to invite an arsonist to draft the fire code.
And on terrorism prevention: One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – that dashing outfit of humanitarians – has spent decades recruiting, training and funding militias whose sole raison d’être is to terrorize. Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, various letter‑soup factions in Iraq and Syria – all beneficiaries of Iran’s singular devotion to “non‑state actors.” The regime’s fingerprints are on bombings in Buenos Aires, plots in Europe, rockets on Riyadh, drones on tankers. The only terrorism Iran has ever wished to prevent is the terrifying prospect that any of these networks might one day run out of ammunition.
And yet, into the committee room shuffles this theocracy, robes flapping, blood still wet on its hands, and the UN – that husk of an idea we once dignified with the term “international community” – smiles beatifically and hands it a nameplate.
Why?
Partly, of course, it is the mathematics of blocs. The UN has long since ceased to be a chamber where “humanity” deliberates, and become instead a bazaar where coalitions of the aggrieved and the authoritarian barter support. You vote for my resolution condemning Israel; I’ll vote for your nomination to a committee on disarmament. You look the other way while I repress; I will look the other way while you invade. Ethics are an optional extra, like heated seats.
Partly, it is moral fatigue. It is simply easier, bureaucratically and psychologically, to pretend that everyone is basically well‑intentioned, that every regime is a work in progress. To say, “No, we will not have Iran on this body because that would be an insult to every woman jailed for removing a hijab and every family who has buried a son after a sham trial,” would require a level of clarity and backbone that the UN secretariat and too many member states long ago mislaid.
But there is something deeper and more corrosive at work. When you invite a regime like Iran’s to sit in judgment on the rights it tramples, you are not merely being hypocritical; you are vandalizing the very concepts you claim to uphold. “Women’s rights” becomes a phrase so elastic that it can cover the compulsory veiling of children. “Human rights” becomes roomy enough to include show trials and mass graves. “Terrorism prevention” stretches to embrace the patrons of Hezbollah and Hamas. Words become costumes that any state can don for the duration of a committee meeting.
And victims notice. Iranian feminists – those astonishingly brave women who have faced batons, bullets and prison cells chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” – will not see this nomination as a charming quirk of multilateralism. They will read it as confirmation that the institutions supposedly designed to protect them are quite prepared to use their suffering as décor, while handing the microphone to their tormentors.
Dissidents in Evin prison, whose crime was to write a poem, draw a cartoon, attend a protest, will hear that the regime responsible for their torture is now sitting on a UN body discussing “human rights” and will learn a bleak but accurate lesson: that the world’s great talking shop is very good at talking, and less talented at recognizing a boot on a neck.
Nor is this some isolated bureaucratic hiccup. It is of a piece with a pattern: Syrian representatives a few years after barrel bombs; Saudi Arabia once elected to a women’s rights commission; Libya, under Gaddafi, heading the Human Rights Council; North Korea presiding over disarmament forums. The UN has turned the fox‑on‑the‑henhouse‑watch into a sort of performance art.
At some point, one has to ask: What is the moral cost of allowing this farce to continue unchecked? There is, to be sure, value in having a universal assembly where even rogues and butchers can be harangued. Diplomacy requires talking to regimes one finds repellent. But there is all the difference in the world between talking to a thug because one must, and inviting him to sit on the ethics committee.
Defenders of this latest appointment will mumble about “engagement” and “bringing Iran into the fold,” as if the regime were a shy debutante rather than a seasoned practitioner of hostage‑taking and mass murder. They will say that excluding Tehran would “politicize” the process, as though seating it on the dais were a lofty act of neutrality. They will argue that if you deny the Islamic Republic a place at the table, it will misbehave – to which one can only reply: compared to what?
What might be refreshing, just once, would be for a handful of member states with their moral faculties still intact to stand up and say, with polite but unambiguous disdain: “No. This is ludicrous. This is an offence not only to the victims of this regime, but to the language we use to describe their suffering. We will not participate in the charade.”
They will be told they are “unhelpful.” They will be accused of “double standards” by ambassadors whose personal definition of “standard” begins and ends with regime survival. They will be warned that their lonely stand will change nothing.
Perhaps not immediately. But someone must begin the slow, necessary work of re‑civilizing our institutions – of re‑establishing the quaint idea that those who legislate on human rights should not be in the business of trampling them, that those who shape policy on women’s rights should not be beating women unconscious in police vans, that those who sit on terrorism committees should not be up to their elbows in explosives and martyrdom videos.
The Islamic Republic’s nomination to this UN committee is not merely a bad joke; it is a confession. It reveals, more starkly than any speech, how far the international system has drifted from the moral architecture its founders imagined after 1945. If we are not prepared to be scandalized by this, we have not only failed Iran’s victims; we have begun to fail ourselves.
The least we can do, in the meantime, is refuse to applaud.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-the-butcher-joins-the-bench-irans-grim-joke-at-the-un/
