[Prefatory Note: The following post is a modified version of a text published in TMS (Transcend Media Service) on 5 October 2021. It assesses the record of the UN over the decades on the basis of its constitutional design, its operational experience, and the gap between UN capabilities and the global need for dramatically enhanced […]
President Vladimir Putin delivering a speech at the first Russia-Africa summit, October 2019, in Sochi. In a new essay he wrote for the American magazine National Interest, Putin praises the original agreements among the big three powers who created the UN for keeping “confrontation under control.” JOE PENNEY
The British-flagged tanker “Steno Impero”, heading for Saudi Arabia, was seized on Friday, 19 July 2019, by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in the Strait of Hormuz, after it rammed an Iranian fishing boat, whose distress call it ignored.
Forget the hype. Israel’s ‘security technology’ has nothing to do with why some African countries are eager to normalize relations with Israel.
What is it that Israel is able to offer in the technology sector to Chad, Mali and others that the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa and others cannot?
There is a rational explanation of why India and Brazil, two countries with vast populations and large and growing economies, are not permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
The Council – made up of 5 permanent and ten rotating members – was designed to reflect a world order that was birthed from the horrific violence of World War II. It was as simple as this: Those who emerged on the side of the victors were granted permanent membership and a ‘veto’ power that would allow a single country to defy the will of the entire international community.
Of genocide one thing becomes clear: the perpetrators are usually governments. The perpetrators may be cliques within the government, using the government, but the organization of such cataclysmic events is beyond the skills of amateurs. So it isn’t a surprise that the domain of preventing genocides is as tightly controlled as the mechanisms of punishment.
What is taking place in Palestine is not a ‘conflict’. We readily utilize the term but, in fact, the word ‘conflict’ is misleading. It equates between oppressed Palestinians and Israel, a military power that stands in violation of numerous United Nations Resolutions.
It is these ambiguous terminologies that allow the likes of United States UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to champion Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, as if the militarily occupied and colonized Palestinians are the ones threatening the security of their occupier and tormentor.
Ignoring the avalanche of evidence that prior sanctions on the DPRK are causing a devastating humanitarian crisis for the people of North Korea, especially the most vulnerable, on December 22, despite warnings of the catastrophic consequences to the people, the UN Security Council passed a new set of sanctions so draconian and inhumane that they must be compared to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is being choked into submission if not starvation by the UN Security Council, by a vote of 15-0; i.e. unanimously. None of the 15 UNSC states, let alone the five permanent members, have had the guts to say no to a killer Resolution, drafted and proposed by the United States of America, a name that increasingly stands for international rogue and crime nation.
