Things that go together . . . but you wish they wouldn't

Neo-Neocon got hold of an Atlantic Monthly from October 1961 with a Martha Gelhorn article about the Palestinian refugees -- who were still a reasonably new phenomenom back then. Neo-Neocon's whole post, which excerpts large parts of the article is sad reading, and Martha Gelhorn sounds pretty prescient, but I wanted to focus on just one part of the article. Gelhorn has the following to say about the Arabs of 1961, which I think could pretty easily be said about the Arabs of 2005:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why...It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless.... Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them? There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser's solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

There are a couple of interesting things about Gelhorn's conclusion. First, I think it goes a long way to put to rest the Left's drum beat about our being the logical victims of Arab hate because of the things we've done to them. We are the logical victims of Arab hate because Arabs like to hate and we're the biggest, most obvious target. Second, I found this 44 year old language made a nice bookend to a book review that the American Enterprise Institute did about a book written by a U.N. insider (hat tip: Power Line). The book being reviewed is The UN Gang, by by Pedro Sanjuan, an American who served on the staff of the secretary-general for more than a decade. The reviewer is Mark Falcoff, and the review is entitled A Stagnant Cesspool in Turtle Bay. You don't need a lot of imagination or insight to realize that both the review and the book describe an organization that, since its post-WWII heyday (or maybe its post-Cold War heyday), is nothing but a money-wasting boondoggle for professional bureaucrats hostile to the U.S. (Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you.) What makes the review interesting for purposes of this post is the fact that the U.N. has gone from being a Western dominated institution, to being one in the thrall of multiple Islamic countries, who draw their U.N. salaries from the West, but are irrevocably (and corruptly) hostile to its interest and to Israel. In other words, they still are filled with hate, just as they were 44 years ago:

Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet hegemony at the Secretariat has been replaced by the growing influence of the Islamic bloc. Further, before 1989 the U.N. was basically a playground for representatives of irrelevant Third World states to pretend to be important (and enjoy shopping at Bloomingdale's), while the U.S. and the Soviet Union confronted one another in more important places. Since the collapse of the latter, however, the Secretariat has refocused on undermining the United States--and the U.N.'s other bugaboo--Israel. Indeed, the most shocking part of this book is the unwholesome obsession of the U.N. culture with Jews real or imagined, whether in Israel or the United States. Although Israel should have roughly 15 nominees working in the Secretariat, until recently there wasn't a single one; even now, a disproportionate number are Palestianians with Israeli passports. As for the United States, it is alleged to be wholly under the thumb of Jews. When congressional critics like Senator Nancy Kassebaum or the late Senator John Heinz raise embarrassing questions that have nothing to do with Israel--say, about the U.N.'s finances--they are blithely dismissed as Jews themselves. Apparently the first question put to Mr. Sanjuan himself when he joined the secretary-general's staff (by his Soviet deputy) was "So your father was a Jew, yes?") That such nonsense could take place during the tenure of a recycled Austrian Nazi like Kurt Waldheim can hardly surprise, but what are we to say when they continue under his successor, a low-rent Peruvian with the made-up name of Perez de Cuellar?

Can anyone remind me (a) why we're still paying U.N. dues; (b) why we're still demanding that President Bush allow the U.N. to dictate U.S. foreign policy; and (c) why we still allow the U.N. to call N.Y. its home? It seems to me that, lately, the only useful purpose the U.N. is serving is periodically to sound the alarm about Bird Flu, and that service does not justify this budget or this staff:

The principal characteristic of the organization, in Mr. Sanjuan's telling, is its massive waste of resources. The Secretariat alone employs 6,000 people at annual budget of more than $2 billion. What do these people do? Nobody can actually say, and it is considered bad form to ask. Its functionaries arrive at 10 a.m., take a three-hour lunch, and usually depart for their homes at 4 p.m. to avoid the evening traffic. Even during "working" hours many prefer to while away their time in a luxurious cafe-lounge on the top floor of the building. It's not clear, either, what useful tasks are performed by those who bother to remain on the floors below, since there is massive duplication of functions and no attempt whatever at rationalization or coordination. One example of expensive make-work is the U.N. publications department, which churns out thousands of documents that nobody reads in half a dozen languages, at a cost of $750 per page. Perhaps the most serious work being accomplished in the building takes place in the garage, where--during Mr. Sanjuan's time at least--a very sophisticated drug-smuggling operation was under way.

Don't rely on my summaries, though. Go to Neo-Neocon's original post, and check out the American Enterprise Institute book review.