Counter-Terrorism According to Ban Ki-Moon

As long as Iranian news outlets were the sole source of reports that Ban Ki-Moon sent a congratulatory message to a “counter-terrorism” conference hosted this past weekend by the terror-masters of Tehran, there was just that slight chance the reports were wrong. Which is why, in the previous post, I put a question mark after the news that Ban had congratulated the Iranian fox for guarding the hen house. Scrap that question mark. The United Nations has now confirmed that Ban did indeed convey his blessings on the Iran regime’s perversion of a “counter-terrorism” conference.

Here’s the UN’s own summary, from highlights of the Monday noon press briefing by Ban’s spokesman:

Asked about a message delivered by the Secretary-General at a conference on terrorism in Iran, the Spokesperson said that the Secretary-General had sent a message to that conference and added that the Secretary-General believes that, since all States and peoples are affected by terrorism, they must all be involved in the fight against terrorism.

By this fascinating logic, it doesn’t matter to Ban Ki-Moon whether a state is fighting terrorism or sponsoring it — as long as everyone is in one way or another involved. This would be the stuff of good satire, except that Iran sponsors real terrorists, who use real bombs and guns to kill real people. In lending support to Iran’s “counter-terrorism” charade — which includes slandering such democracies as America, Britain and Israel, Ban isn’t just discrediting himself and the UN. He is actively helping to set the stage for more bloody attacks by an emboldened Iran.

If Ban felt compelled to send a message to this conference, there’s nothing in the UN rulebook that would have prevented him saying something genuinely useful, such as a public admonishment to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the first priority in fighting terrorism should be for Iran itself to stop engendering and supporting it. Ban could have called for the Iranian regime to scrap its backing for Hezbollah, stop sending weapons to Hamas and drop the weapons deals with North Korea. That would have been an edifying message, and a good use of the UN megaphone. Instead, Ban gave Iran’s UN-sanctions violating nuclear-bomb-seeking terror-sponsoring mullocracy a pat on the back, and left his spokesman to justify it with the Orwellian rationale cited above.

Which takes us back once again to the question of why Ban did it. Is he really such a fool as to believe the meaningless rationale put out by his own public relations department? And if he’s smarter than that — which would seem to be a minimal requirement for his job — then why did he do it? What’s in it for him, and who –beyond Khamenei and Ahmadinejad — is he trying to please?