Who really poses a threat to the world peace?

I wonder what people did for fun before the United Nations came into being. With each passing year, the annual General Assembly ritual appears to become more bizarre. The Western media interest in the proceedings of the UN, however, remains superficial despite the world body being headquartered in New York. Instead of focusing on the UN debates and real issues facing the world community, it tends to pick out the odd and colorful (to Western eyes) to keep their notoriously fickle audience engaged.
And there has never been any dearth of colorful characters at the UN — from the weird and wonderful to truly bizarre. We’re still regaled with stories about how an agitated Khrushchev responded to Western critique of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe by banging his shoe on his desk.
The same year, in1960, Fidel Castro also spoke at the UN setting an all-time record of the longest ever speech — four hours, 16 minutes. The Cuban revolutionary outraged his hosts by plucking chickens in his seedy Harlem hotel room and meeting African American Muslim leader Malcolm X. In 2009, Libya’s Qaddafi nearly outdid Castro with his 100-minute marathon during which he trashed the UN Charter and dismissed the Security Council ruled by the Big Five as “terror council.”
Hugo Chavez may not be so prolific but he seldom fails to entertain.
In 2006, the Venezuelan leader provoked peals of helpless laughter in the august house with his not so subtle a reference to Bush. “The devil was here yesterday,” Chavez said crossing himself. “He came here talking as if he owned the world. I can still smell sulfur!” Chavez came armed with Noam Chomsky’s book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, quoting from it for his audience’s benefit.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since he took over hasn’t missed a single UN session or opportunity to present an alternate reality to Western audiences, thumbing his nose at the “big Satan” and his little naturalized child. He was remarkably restrained this year though, even professing his “love for the Americans as well as other nations” in a CNN interview.
While Ahmadinejad stuck to the narrative, including over the “N” question, what’s remarkable is how Western journalists dutifully flogged the old, dead horse coming up with the same dud questions time and again-from Holocaust to homosexuality and of course his famous take on Israel and roots of this conflict. The script and narrative haven’t changed one bit caricaturing the Iran leader like an irksome Falstaffian jester.
Who are the real jokers in this theater of the absurd though? Can there be a bigger joke than the one Netanyahu has just sprung on the world body? Someone who presides over mountains of deadliest weapons known to man, enough to wipe out the entire population of the Middle East, never stops screaming about the clear and present danger that a besieged and economically crippled Iran allegedly poses.
A country founded on stolen land which went to war with five of its neighbors and still occupies Arab territory belonging to Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon sees no irony in lecturing neighbors on virtues of peaceful coexistence. Can there be anything funnier? Thousands of Palestinians had to die and the rest forced into exile and perpetual homelessness and humiliation so the “glorious state of Israel” could come into being. And the tiny part of what remains of the original Palestine has been turned into the largest open air, rotting prison on the planet.
Israel’s reign of terror with the empire’s blessings has transformed West Asia and the larger Muslim world into a tinderbox. Israel’s neighbors live in perpetual fear. So Netanyahu has got a real sense of humor to come up with that bravura performance with that bizarre skit about Tehran’s ticking bomb.
Drawing that red line marking the “90 percent limit” with a big marker while his menacing, narrow eyes watched his audience’s reaction was a rather original touch, ensuring maximum front-page coverage. A performance that would have made Goebbels proud. But can these theatrics blind the world to the enduring realities of the Middle East? Who really poses a threat to the world peace? A country that has perpetually been at war with its neighbors and is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity or the victims of its lies and aggressions? The world community can best answer the question. And it’s not just Iran that is at the receiving end of Bibi’s venomous diatribe. While the media understandably ran with the bomb sketch story, what went largely unnoticed and underreported is Israeli premier’s hate speech and brazen attack on Islam and Muslims.
While Israeli leaders’ speeches have been increasingly hateful in recent times, including the one Netanyahu delivered before joint session of the US Congress last year to repeated, rapturous applause, the UN rant has crossed all limits.
This at a time when the Muslim rage over the assault on the Prophet of Islam is still raw with Muslim states demanding UN action on Islamophobia. In the name of censuring Iran, Bibi chose the UN platform to launch a blistering offensive against the faith that urges highest respect for Jewish-Christian icons and no one batted an eye.
Why couldn’t the Arab and Muslim members have stood up and confronted the man? If protesting and booing don’t go well with the world body’s decorum, they could have at least walked out! Watching the whole circus on BBC, I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears at what was being aired out of the UN: “Israel wants to see a Middle East of progress and peace. The medieval forces of radical Islam, whom you just saw storming the American embassies throughout the Middle East, they oppose this. They are bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world. Militant Islam has many branches — from the rulers of Iran with their Revolutionary Guards to Al-Qaeda terrorists to the radical cells lurking in every part of the globe.
But despite their differences, they are all rooted in the same bitter soil of intolerance.
“That intolerance is directed at fellow Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, secular people, anyone who doesn’t submit to their unforgiving creed. They want to drag humanity back to an age of unquestioning dogma and unrelenting conflict!” Pure and unadulterated poison! If this isn’t hate speech, what is? While this coming from the Israelis given their long history of crimes against Arabs and Muslims is hardly surprising, what makes this truly audacious is the fact that this is being delivered from the platform of the world parliament, the highest international body.
What is the difference between these fulminations against the faith of one third of the world’s population and views of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik? They subscribe to the selfsame morbid mindset that demonizes and dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims, fueling and feeding on a pathological hatred of Islam, which boils over from time to time.
From lampooning Islam’s icons to incinerating its Holy Book and the sweetness and light that evangelists like Terry Jones and Pat Robertson spread around, they are all expressions of the same fount of wisdom.
You see it at work at another, more serious level with the Zionists, neocons and ‘new-American-century’ types perpetually plotting for global supremacy and victory over Islam. It’s this mindset that Bibi represents today, just as the Bush-Blair crowd did it yesterday. It cooked up two wars, ravaging two Muslim countries and upending the Middle East in the past decade. And the stage is being set for a third one as an indifferent, weary world stands and stares.