THE United Nations is neither united nor meant for all nations. Seventy four years since the establishment of the UN, the world is divided as ever.
For as long as he has been prime minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been calling on the world body to be, well, a world body. Not just a private club for the permanent five members of the Security Council.
This flies in the face of the principles of democracy the Big Five keep hawking to the rest who make up the world. The Big Five’s right to rule the world is a simple formula: win the World War, give yourselves the veto power, and rule the world as you like. Call it the power of five.
Dr Mahathir is right. This structure — the Security Council and all that its veto power stands for — is what breeds war. The SC never ends a war. Europe may not be at war with itself. Nor the United States with European powers. But combined they make the rest of the world their playground for their war games.
The result: terrorism unbound. Terrorism isn’t a 21st century creation. Dr Mahathir rightly ascribes terrorism’s birth to the forced creation of Israel from land seized from the Palestinians. This has turned the Middle East, as one journalist put it, into the Muddle East.
War to end wars will never work. Instead, remove the root cause, which is the lack of justice. In this unjust world, the strong are armed to the teeth while the weak are trampled upon.
Feel what Palestinians feel. You go to bed one night and the next morning excavators flatten your entire village. If you are looking for the past tense of a home, look no further than Palestine.
Some 90 per cent of Arabs were expelled to accommodate European Jews who had no historical link at all to Palestine. Today, every inch of Palestinian territory is under the continuous threat of Israeli confiscation.
The UN is not able to do anything because it is hampered by the veto power of the Big Five. So long as the US supports Israel, the Zionist regime will continue with its scorched-earth policy.
European countries — many of which played a big role in muddling the Middle East — merely make perfunctory noises. Now, greedy global heavy equipment companies are shipping their excavators to Israel to help flatten Palestinian homes.
The world must be told: terror breeds terrorism. End terror, and you will end terrorism.
Little wonder Dr Mahathir has been going from one UN General Assembly to another trying to unshackle the world body. But the UN, therefore the world, remains a terrible place for the meek and poor.
Palestinians, Rohingya, Syrians and Yemenis, to name just a few. Like the one per cent of the rich who plunder the Earth for their benefit, the Big Five trample the globe carving out territories in the name of democracy and human rights.
We can do all the shouting from UNGA 1 to UNGA 74, but the Big Five will foxtrot all over the globe, planting their flags with their bloodied hands. Because the Security Council has designed a winner takes all world.