May 11
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
Executive Director, Center for Islamic Pluralism
Peace vs. Freedom
The Durban Review Conference held by the United Nations in Geneva last month featured peace offerings to radical Islam. Specifically, it provided a platform for the ignorant blustering of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for an unsuccessful campaign by Saudi Arabia to criminalize critical expression about religion. Although Ahmadinejad framed his denunciations as castigation of all the world’s ruling elite, his favored target was Israel. And while the Saudi campaign against “defamation of prophets” is phrased as a defense of all the monotheistic religions, it is clear the effort, which will doubtless be ongoing, is intended to suppress discussion of extremism and other problematical aspects of contemporary Islam.The Geneva meeting also enabled the dictatorships of Libya and Cuba, along with that of Iran, to usurp presumptive responsibility for the global defense of human rights. Some might leap to the assumption that the UN, and especially its Western European members, take such a position out of weakness in the face of an expansive and aggressive Islam. But UN pusillanimity when facing tyrannical arrogance is nothing new and did not begin with Islamic issues, notwithstanding the powerful influence in the world body of the Arab and other Muslim energy states.
The UN in Geneva has faithfully maintained the syndrome observed in its predecessor, the League of Nations; both were created to secure peace, rather than freedom. This reflects a dissonance between Europe, which historically favored peace over freedom, and America, which has supported freedom over peace. The American-European contradiction over freedom and peace has remained an unchanging paradigm, reflected in the failure of the League of Nations through appeasement of the fascist dictators, and the many and various misadventures of the UN.
In the name of peace, rather than the freedom of an elected liberal government, the League of Nations imposed a naval embargo on the Spanish Republic, contributing to its defeat in that country’s civil war. A desire for peace caused the French to surrender to the Germans. Love of peace drove the Dutch to provide the largest number of foreign volunteers to the Waffen-SS and hand over to Hitler’s minions the biggest national percentage of Western European Jews to die in the Holocaust. For the same reasons, Stalin was allowed to occupy half of Europe and granted three seats in the UN. As described in Geneva last month by my journalistic colleague, Khaled Abu Toameh, the UN and the European leaders of the so-called “international community,” by financing the corrupt Palestinian Authority, imposed a “peace agreement” on Israelis and Arabs that has failed to secure freedom for either nation.
But the evils of the UN in the Israeli-Arab chapter of Middle East history are old news. Everybody has heard of “war crimes” - but “peace crimes” can be more devastating, and more permanent. The UN has refused to act on Tibet, denying any assistance to a people demanding freedom from Chinese imperialism. During the Bosnian war of 1992-95, the Europeans and the UN reproduced exactly their attitudes toward the American and Spanish civil wars - they succeeded, in the interest of peace, in continuing the partition of Bosnia-Hercegovina and maintaining a mafia state, the so-called “Republika Srpska.” More ...
Source: Hudson New York
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