Refreshing Intellectual Honesty

Sometimes, one finds a refreshing breeze of intellectual honesty.

After Carter, Anan, Finkelstein, Chomsky and others who have appeared in this blog - all negative, of course, try this analysis I plucked from this article:-

The Framers of the American Constitution, steeped in the majesty of British law and tradition, understood that real security required an accountability nexus between the political actors wielding power and the public whose lives hung in the balance. Today, by contrast, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, reading Article 51, claims the Security Council is “pre-eminent”—“the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force,” based on a Charter which, alone, “provides a universally legal basis for the use of force.”

The fallout abounds. For example, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations’ new Human Rights Council recently released a report on the “Prevention of Human Rights Violations Committed with Small Arms and Light Weapons.” In its haste to rid the world of guns, regardless of contrary national laws (such as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), the report breezily contradicts international law’s ancient origins, declaring there is no right to self-defense—neither for the individual nor for the nation state. At best, self-defense was said to be available in most jurisdictions as a defense to be interposed, not a privilege (much less a natural right) to be guaranteed. Thus, there is a right to life, but not to preserve that life.

This can have come as no surprise to Israel, a perennial victim of transnational progressivism’s infatuation with self-styled “freedom fighters” and “national liberation movements”—which is to say, leftist insurgents and jihadists. In 2004, the UN’s International Court of Justice (known, in its solipsism, as “the World Court”), ruled by a lopsided fourteen-to-one that the barrier constructed to shield Israelis from relentless terrorist assault—reducing suicide-bombing murders by over 90 percent and thus minimizing the need for Israeli Defense Forces to conduct responsive operations in the West Bank and Gaza—was an affront to international law. The tribunal reasoned that the fence, transparently derided as “the wall,” created disproportionate hardship for Palestinians. In the true spirit of Animal Farm, the ruling, rendered by justices hailing from countries that routinely repress various minorities, came just as the UN itself was burdening Manhattan’s already harried commuters by constructing a security fence around its headquarters.

How surprising was it, then, during this summer’s siege of civilian bombing by Hezbollah—an international terrorist organization whose animating purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state—that it was Israel, the victim, which Secretary General Annan chose to accuse of war crimes? And for what? For unintentionally striking UN forces that had, for years, enabled Hezbollah’s offensive operations.

Go on, read it all.