Optimism For Never Again

JR Oppenheimer once said that an optimist "thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it"

Here is blind optimism at work:

In one of his first acts since leaving his post as US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton will on Thursday call for legal proceedings against Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad for incitement to genocide.

Mr Bolton will join Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian attorney-general, and Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel in claims that a series of public statements against Israel constitute a crime under the Genocide Convention.

...

Mr Gold told the FT that while “most people think of [legal proceedings against] genocide in terms of setting up tribunals after the crime has been committed”, the challenge was to stop genocide before it begins.

“The question is, what specifically can be done? Let the Security Council meet and discuss the issue,” he said.

Read it all here.

The top two voting blocs in the UN are the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Nations, which means most African countries. Despite this, the UN failed to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and the genocides of Rwanda and now Darfur.

Add to that the UN's record of anti-Israel resolutions, and the Human Rights Council, which has surpassed its predecessor - the Human Rights Commission - in its obsessional focus and criticism of Israel.

Finish off with the UN Conference on Racism in Durban a few years back where Jewish and Israeli delegates were vilified and threatened - verbally and physically.

Now, revisit the attempt to get the UN to side with Israel in bringing Ahmadinejad to justice before he brings Armaggeddon to the Jewish state. Any wagers that this will succeed?

Mark Steyn gets it spot on here:

I think one of the horrible and contemptible aspects of our generation is that we're posers. You know, after 1945, everybody said never again. It's chiseled on the markers in front of concentration camps all over Europe. Never again. Never again. And we thought those words meant something. And in fact, the never again event turns up all the time. It turns up in Rwanda. It turns up in Darfur. it turns up when we sit by and listen to people like Ahmadinejad pledging to wipe Israel off the face of the map. And we think that that is just like a kind of rhetorical ploy in the opening of negotiations. We don't understand that he does mean it, that he wants a world, and certainly a Middle East, but preferably a world, without Jews. And I think we are morals posers, and these are perhaps the most hollow words of our time, those words, never again.

Is this going to be another case of "never again"?