Meanwhile, Over at the UN: Cashing In On Terrorism?

While we wait for details of an Obama-Biden ticket that will surely propose an even deeper love affair with the United Nations than that of the Condi Rice State Department, here’s one of those United Nations conundrums:

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will be convening a UN symposium in New York next month on supporting victims of terrorism.

But the UN still hasn’t managed to come up with a basic definition of terrorism.

So if the UN can’t even figure out who’s a terrorist, how will the UN decide who’s a victim?

For a clue about where this latest initiative from Ban is likely to take us, check out the language in the UN press release linked above. Ban’s terror-victim forum, described as “the first of its kind at the United Nations,” is supposed to “help Member States to stand as one to support the victims of terrorism and to encourage civil society’s involvement against the scourge…” etc. etc.

“Stand as one”–?? Maybe Ban hasn’t noticed, but this is the fast track to the UN’s usual brand of Orwellian politics and moral bankruptcy. There are some UN member states — such as Iran — that like the idea of obliterating other entire member states, and support terrorists, such as Hezbollah, as a matter of state policy. (Although at the UN, Hezbollah cannot be regarded as a terrorist group, because there is no definition of terrorism).

For the UN, of course, it’s boom busines to keep ginning up new programs for an ever-expanding list of assorted groups of “victims.” Every new initiative becomes a rationale for more UN conferences, jobs, and solicitations for money. Whether any real victims are actually helped (or harmed) tends to become a secondary issue, if not simply irrelevant to the servicing and gourmet feeding of the UN organism — the conferences on Bali, the aid to dictators, the billions for peacekeeping forces that can’t keep peace and also can’t seem to keep their hands off the children they are supposed to protect. The UN has by now involved itself with so many categories of “victims” that by now the only victims for whom Ban is not convening forums or launching programs or dispatching envoys would seem to be the taxpayers of the developed democratic world, who fund most of the UN’s opaque, unaccountable patronage systems.

In this case, supporting victims of terrorism might sound worthy — after all, who wouldn’t be sympathetic to genuine victims of terrorism? But before Ban starts convening participants from “all regions, cultures and religions, representing a diversity of terror-victim experiences,” how about the UN producing a clear and reasonable definition of this experience Ban wants the world-as-one to address?

If Ban really wants the UN to do something useful to stop the scourge of terrorism, he’d do better to start by cleaning up his own house. Step one: Instead of holding a new symposium, he could stand up and call loud and clear for member states to stay away from the UN’s Durban II conference, now being planned for 2009 by the likes of Libya, Iran, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan — which shows every signs of becoming a replay of the malevolent 2001 hate-fest that was Durban I. Before the UN starts cashing in on teror-victims as a source of employment and per diems for the UN itself, His Eminence the Secretary-General ought to bestir himself to defuse the UN itself as a mothership of moral equivalence, and an incubator of hatred.