Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.
First was the obligatory call “to renew the purpose of the U.N.’s founding,” which apparently is “to observe and enforce international norms,” the most important being “to ensure that no nation can subjugate its neighbors and claim their territory” and to promote “the path of diplomacy and peace and the ideals this institution is designed to uphold.” Such phrases are so common and uncritically received that we forget “international norms” do not exist. Different peoples have different “norms” about, for example, the use of violence to achieve their aims. Nations will sign treaties that seemingly express our norms, but that doesn’t mean they believe in them. More often, such treaties are mere mechanisms for one nation to get what it wants from another. The sorry history of U.S. arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia, treaties the Russians violated for decades to improve their nuclear arsenal at our expense, is just one example.
As for seizing territory by force, the U.N. did nothing to prevent Turkey from seizing northern Cyprus, or China from seizing Tibet, and more recently Russia from seizing Crimea. The Serbs’ attempts in the ’90s to “claim territory” were stopped not by the U.N., but by American bombs. So too was Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Nor should we be surprised at the serial failure of the U.N. to enforce its lofty founding principles. Nations belong to the U.N. because they think they can use it to advance their interests, not “to enforce international norms,” especially when their own “norms” see nothing wrong with using duplicity and force to achieve their aims. Indeed, the continuing violence justified by other “norms” since the U.N.’s founding has claimed some 41 million lives. The U.N. serves the conflicting, zero-sum interests of the member states, not the “path of diplomacy and peace.”
From that preposterous beginning, the speech went downhill. “Islam teaches peace,” the President intoned. No, Islam teaches submission. There is no peace for those who refuse to submit, even for Muslims considered heretics by other Muslims, but especially for “polytheists” or “infidels.” In their case, Islam teaches jihad against them if they refuse to accept the “call” to convert. Far from being extremists “who have perverted one of the world’s great religions,” as Obama scolded, the proliferating jihadist outfits that are kidnapping, torturing, raping, beheading, and enslaving people around the globe are acting on the doctrines and past practices of Islam’s founding fathers.