Ruth King

On November 10th, 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on America, President Bush addressed the United Nations. His words soared with eloquence and resolve.
“And the people of my country will remember those who have plotted against us. We are learning their names. We are coming to know their faces. There is no corner of the earth distant or dark enough to protect them. However long it takes, their hour of justice will come.
“This threat cannot be ignored. This threat cannot be appeased. Civilization, itself, the civilization we share, is threatened. History will record our response, and judge or justify every nation in this hall. For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid. And it will be paid. The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice.”
He then challenged the United Nations:
“And, finally, this struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations, itself. And the world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world's most persistent violators of human rights. The United Nations depends, above all, on its moral authority -- and that authority must be preserved.”
Three years and two wars and thousands of victims of terrorism later -- in Indonesia, Madrid, Turkey, Russia, Israel -- the United Nations has not a shred of the “moral authority” which President Bush evoked in 2001.The UN has sidestepped virtually every binding resolution on Iraq, ignored genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, ignored its responsibility to isolate and punish states that harbor terrorists, squandered and misappropriated millions in humanitarian funds. Steeped in corruption, it continues to focus one half of its entire agenda on excoriating Israel. As Andrew C. McCarthy has written in National Review Online (September 16), “the risible, anachronistic, dysfunctional and quite likely criminal enterprise known as the United Nations is an international calamity that is doing far more harm than good.”
Nonetheless, in September, President Bush went to the belly of this beast to promote and defend his mission in Iraq. Assembled were the usual cast of despots and their emissaries, the sullen and spiteful representatives of "old" Europe who have derided and thwarted our war against terrorism, the assorted enablers of militant Islam’s agenda, and, of course, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, who only days earlier had called our mission in Iraq “illegal.” And as Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the President "offered not blood and iron -- other than an obligatory 'the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail' -- but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeleine Albright proud.”
Also the President described terrorists as “enemies of freedom,” a naive euphemism. Fidel Castro and several of the dictators of Eastern Europe can be called enemies of freedom. Barbaric Islamic terrorists and their supporters stretch the definition of "evil.”
But it was worse than that. In this UN speech, the President, rather than confronting the jackals, joined them. Incredibly he excoriated Israel, the only country, apart from the Sudan, criticized in his speech. Much of what makes the UN so morally odious is its obsession with using Israel as international whipping boy. And now President Bush applies the whip himself? Israel, said the President, "should impose a settlements freeze, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people, and avoid any actions that prejudice final negotiations.”
It is especially unseemly for the President to make this statement at the United Nations. The President could indeed have properly mentioned Israel -- to praise it for its exemplary restraint even in the face of threats and attacks. To praise it for its protection of the rights of its Arab citizens. Mr. Bush defends the Patriot Act and all efforts to interrogate and search possible suspects. Why then does he call Israel’s necessary security measures “humiliating?” Is it worse to be questioned and searched than to feel a terrible fear every single time your child rides a bus, or you or a family member goes to a movie or pizzeria or a cafe?
What the President did was to pander to the Arab and Moslem enemies of America who insist that the Arab-Israel conflict is the “root cause” of Islamic terrorism even though the President knows that Islamic terrorists (who beheaded a second American hostage even as the President made his speech) are faith driven barbarians for whom Israel is merely a rehearsal stage for the greater Jihad. On November 8th, 2001, in a speech to firemen, policemen and postal workers in Atlanta, Georgia, President Bush had said:
“We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill, kill all Americans, kill all Jews and kill all Christians.”
At the U.N. on November 10th, 2001 the President had said,
“…. there is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequence.”
I like George Bush. I want him to succeed. But America and Israel deserve more from him than was given at that sorry speech on September 21,2004.