International Day of Peace: Some kind of joke?

So, the United Nations Organization celebrated the International Day of Peace on Friday September 21. What a noble ideal... but looking around us, is this not some kind of a joke? The UNO is powerless to prevent conflicts, it is powerless to implement international law, it is powerless to uphold the terms of its own charter among signatory states.

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Therefore maybe we should remember September 21 as the Day of Impotence as the mechanisms of a growing international crisis swing noisily into motion as yet again the UNO stands back and does nothing more than sit on the sidelines calling names. It's a bit like seeing a two-year-old girl taking a 100-kilo Rottweiler for a walk in the local park and then when the animal flies into a rage, watching the consequences.

So here we have Ban Ki-Moon banging a bell in New York, a Japanese bell, just as Japan and China square up to each other over a few uninhabited islands - oh! and natural gas reserves - and just as the FUKUS Axis (France, UK, US) yet again supplies terrorist forces to wage war against yet another Moslem nation, Syria.

First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, now Syria, tomorrow Iran... their institutions derided, their infrastructures razed, their governments attacked by armed terrorist groups - a criminal act of intervention in sovereign states, precisely at a time when Islam and Christianity are at a crossroads.

True, there are several reasons for this. Intolerance and ignorance sometimes go hand-in-hand as Christianity itself knows only too well - how many people lost their lives, the tortured victims of witch-hunts, the murdered victims of the heresy trials, non-Christian victims burnt at the stake for having a different religion?

Printing images of the Prophet Mohammed at a time like this is an unnecessary act of provocation, for however puerile they are, they are also insulting. Making a film with equally puerile and insulting messages does not help, and there we have all the ingredients, the hand of that Pastor Terry Jones (of Koran-burning fame), an American-Israeli director and producer... and now a bounty of 100,000 dollars placed on his head by the Pakistani Federal Railways Minister Haji Ghulam Ahmed Bilour.

Now is not the time to insult and humiliate Moslems, now is not the time to bomb and murder Moslems. It is not the time to arm terrorists to overthrow governments which are less friendly towards the FUKUS-Axis, it is not the time to murder and ridicule people. It is time for dialogue.

With dialogue come the conditions for a de-escalation and with this, the conditions for development - and not deployment. A platform for dialogue presupposes that all sides are playing on a level field and approach the issues from a viewpoint of conciliation, forgiveness and commitment to set things right. This would presuppose that the terms of the United Nations Charter, international laws, agreements, conventions and covenants are to be respected by all; this also means that those who have broken them should be brought before a court of law.

Until such a court of law exists and its jurisdiction is applied to all, equally, and until the UNO has the clout to implement the terms and conditions of the treaties it promotes, then especially at a time like this when Humankind is once again at a crossroads and the sirens of war can be heard ringing loudly in the background, Ban Ki-Moon and his friends will continue to look and behave like a powerless two-year-old girl walking a Rottweiler in a park.

So having an International Day for Peace is like celebrating an International Day for Sodomy with video clips of US concentration camps and the shocking and horrific human rights abuses that go on in these gateways to Hell.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru