By Michael I. Krauss and J. Peter Pham
Every single day, hundreds of African tribesmen are killed in Darfur by militias acting with the blessing of Sudan's Arab Islamist government. Each day, Hamas bombs from Gaza deliberately target innocent Israeli civilians in Sderot: although the weapons are crude, they occasionally find their mark -- last week a Qassam killed Fatima Slutsker, a 57-year-old (Muslim) Israeli woman who was waiting for her (Jewish) Israeli husband at a bus stop. Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, has ratcheted up its campaign of violence this week, assassinating a Maronite Christian cabinet minister in Lebanon in a blatant attempt to provoke a constitutional crisis. (As of this writing, under the Byzantine Lebanese constitution, the terrorist group needs to eliminate only one more minister to bring about the collapse of the government.) The life-span of Zimbabweans is 34 years, and 550,000 have died over the past three years due to deliberate policies of the Mugabe dictatorship.
All of these barbaric crimes are human and moral tragedies that call for international action, prioritization, even obsession. But that self-proclaimed source of international legitimacy, the United Nations is not obsessed or even particularly concerned with any of them. None of these abuses of human rights by authoritarian regimes or movements was the object of the General Assembly resolution "condemning the military assaults...which have caused loss of life and extensive destruction...of property...in particular the killing of many... civilians, including children and women." For none of these violations of the right to life did the UN summon righteous indignation to "emphasize the importance of the safety and well-being of all civilians" and demand "the immediate cessation of military incursions and all acts of violence, terror, provocation, incitement and destruction."
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