David Horovitz
Journalist & Author

Iran wants to see Israel destroyed, but it also wants to take the free world back to the dark ages. So even if they don’t care about Israel, why do the world’s democracies continually furnish Ahmadinejad with the platform to undermine them?

Poor old Ban Ki-moon. I mean, it’s not as though he hadn’t told that dreadful Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steer clear of the provocative anti-Israel material.

At their tete-a-tete earlier in the day, wailed the valiant secretary-general when it was all over, ‘I stressed the importance of the conference to galvanize the will of the international community toward the common cause of the fight against racism’ and ‘reminded the president that the UN General Assembly had adopted the resolutions to revoke the equation of Zionism with racism and to reaffirm the historical facts of the Holocaust.’

But, goodness gracious, shock, horror, would you believe it? The Iranian president simply ignored Ban’s stresses and reminders, and launched another of his insidious assaults on the despicable post-WWII world order in general, and the racist, genocidal Zionist regime in particular.

So clearly flummoxed was Ban by this astounding betrayal of his earnest advice, this misuse of his UN platform, indeed, that he had been rooted to his seat, evidently horrified into paralysis, as Ahmadinejad’s interminable toxic peroration continued – a scheduled seven-minute conference opener extending into an hourlong horror show.

‘I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite,’ the appalled secretary-general now solemnly declared. ‘We must all turn away from such a message in both form and substance.’

What Ban didn’t say, though, was: I won’t allow my organization to be a party to this any longer. What he didn’t say, though, was that so long as he had blood in his veins and air in his lungs, he would do everything in his power to prevent repeat performances of the grimly familiar Ahmadinejad-abuses-the-UN’s-global-platform show. What he didn’t say was that he was launching the procedures, as mandated by the United Nations’ own 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to prosecute the Iranian president for inciting and conspiring to commit genocide against the Jewish state.

What the head of the body that is designed to safeguard the international community didn’t say in the aftermath of his guest’s crystal-clear exhortation to bring down Israel – an assault which had occurred, with such bitter, un-ignorable coincidence, just as we prepared to begin our annual day of Holocaust commemoration – was: Never again.

THIS LATE into Ahmadinejad’s ignominious career, the faux naivety of the UN secretary-general and his oh-so deplorably misused platform simply doesn’t wash.

The Iranian president’s Geneva assault on Israel, on ostensible Zionist manipulation of international affairs and on the wider illegitimacy of the post-War World II order, was a patent inevitability from the moment he announced his intention to appear and his hosts chose not to prevent him from doing so.

It represented the completely predictable maintenance of a strategy he has pursued at his appearances before the supine UN General Assembly in past years in New York.

In 2007, at the GA, he castigated the selfish, domineering ‘big powers’ as the cause of global injustice and inequality, denounced an alleged over-ready resort to violence, critiqued promiscuous Western society, sketched a vision of a world without democracy in the image of his Iran, and warned the international leadership to end its ‘obedience to Satan’ or face calamity.

Last September, at the same forum, he gloated at the ostensible imminent demises of the Zionist regime (‘on a definite slope to collapse’) and the American empire (‘reaching the end of its road’), and blamed the former for the latter: ‘The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists.’

On Monday, he merely made the assault more brazen, condemning the ‘totally racist government in the occupied Palestine,’ branding Israel a ‘perpetrator of genocide,’ blaming Zionists and their allies for all manner of world ills, and demanding the remaking of the world order to eliminate the Zionists’ purported control of its affairs.

Of course Ahmadinejad trampled all over Ban’s pleas. Of course the leader of a brutal regime, which perverts Islam, kills its opponents and encourages the indiscriminate murder of those who don’t subscribe to its benighted religious outlook, abused the forum to mislead and manipulate a global audience about the virtues of his ideology and the ostensible ills of democracy and its freedoms.

The question is why the international community persists in letting him do so.

THIS COLUMN has repeatedly highlighted the skilled employment by Iran of the tools to seek Israel’s delegitimization and ultimate destruction. There is the relentless progress toward a nuclear capability. There is the arming, funding and inspiring of Hamas and Hizbullah at either end of our territorial sliver. And there is the drip-drip indoctrination about Israel’s perceived fundamental illegitimacy – the potent false depiction, repeated in Geneva on Monday, of modern Israel as a rootless European colonial implant, imposed upon the blameless Palestinians, rather than the tragically belated revival of historic Jewish sovereignty in the only place on earth where the Jews have ever sought to determine their collective national fate.

Year by year, this combined practical and rhetorical assault on Israel takes a greater toll, posing more acute security challenges (with which Israel strategically seeks to grapple) and more acute intellectual challenges (where Israel continually fails to adequately explain and advocate).

But the Iranian regime’s ambitions, as emblemized by the range of its missiles, manifestly extend far beyond Israel. So even as one acknowledges the dismal minority of steadfast international defenders of Israel, it is bizarrely self-defeating for the other nations whose freedoms the mullahs are bent on reversing to continually provide Iran with the military and propaganda means to pursue its mission.

Call him every name under the sun, but don’t accuse Ahmadinejad of concealing his goals. At every opportunity, he makes plain his regime’s intent to remake the world order in its image – to reform ‘the inequitable and unjust management of the world,’ as he put it on Monday.

A handful of nations did the right thing, or at least some of it, in staying away from Geneva. More walked out of his speech.

But neither the boycotts nor the walkouts will have troubled Ahmadinejad in the slightest. Indeed, they only reinforce his case, bolstering the argument he makes over the diplomats’ heads that the traditional centers of global influence don’t care about the underprivileged, that they don’t want to hear his ‘truth.’

His victory, yet again, was in the very fact of getting to speak – to speak to a global audience, his words carried live on network after network worldwide, his calculated oratory preying on profound, widespread, genuine grievances in less-developed countries. He was reaching out, again, to the poor and the ill-educated and the repressed, and offering his Islamist worldview as a panacea.

That it was Ahmadinejad calling attention to international injustice does not make such injustice any less acute. That it was Ahmadinejad, the public face of a repressive, misogynistic, homophobic regime, whose ‘solution’ would lead the world back into the dark ages, is a continuing case of canny manipulation by him, and shameful, appallingly counterproductive indulgence by his hosts.

Iran’s principal targets are a ‘great Satan’ that strives to protect and encourage freedoms and democracy, and a ‘little Satan’ that struggles to preserve the enlightened values its faith brought to the world. Again, in Geneva on Monday, the United Nations gave him the platform to pursue an expansionist agenda that places a brutal, narrow-minded and intolerant interpretation of religion above free world values, and applauded as he won over further converts toward achieving it.

© The Jerusalem Post