UN-Done at Debate Camp

For the second year in a row, my 16-year-old son went to Debate Camp. It was held last week at a local private school for young'uns who, like my son, enjoy making arguments for the sake of persuasion, and sometimes simply for the sake of arguing. Anyway, on Thursday, the second last day of camp, they had a model United Nations. The issue they were supposed to discuss had something to do with the possibility of Russia launching a nuke--sort of like a Cuban Missile Crisis, but this time involving, for reasons that aren't clear to me, Norway.

My son was the first one to speak, and knowing exactly how the UN operates, he completely ignored Russia's culpability and, cheek lodged firmly in cheek, launched into a tirade about "the Zionists." It was all the Zionists' fault, he shouted, and something must be done immediately about the Zionists. Catching on to what my son was doing, his friends, some of them Jewish, some not, joined in. They, too, began ranting about how the Zionists were to blame.

Needless to say, the model UN never did get around to considering the issue at hand.

When my son came home and told me what he'd done, I had a good laugh. I told him I admired his audacity and his insight into the UN's M.O. The guy in charge of the camp, though, had an entirely different reaction. The next day he lashed into my son for derailing the debate and for failing to, I kid you not, "take the UN seriously."

Caroline Glick, no fool she, knows that not taking the UN seriously is probably the sanest response to its hijinks. Here's a snippet of a speech she gave recently (it's posted today on the FrontPage Magazine site):

Everybody remembers the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 from 1975 that referred to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, as a form of racism. 

As Daniel Pipes said last night in his introduction to Ambassador John Bolton, Bolton’s role in having that resolution cancelled in 1991 was really decisive in terms of that happening. 

But the fact that the resolution itself was rejected or was cancelled in 1991 didn’t mean that the sentiment behind it in any way went into remission. That has, since 1975, been really the guiding principle around which the entire UN system revolves, which is to try to somehow or another act in a concerted fashion in order to remove the international legitimization that was given to the Jewish national movement and the Jewish national home in 1947 in the UN Partition Resolution of the General Assembly [when it won]. 

So this has continued to be really the central motivating factor of the UN system generally since 1975, despite the good efforts of the George H.W. Bush administration in the early 1990s.

 Seriously, what a sick joke!