UN Bows Again to Kim Jong Il

The United Nations just can’t stop honoring North Korea’s dead mass-murdering tyrant, Kim Jong Il. Today, in tandem with North Korea’s funeral for Kim, UN offices around the world have lowered their flags to half mast — or so reports Xinhua, state news agency and self-described “important information organ” of the Kim regime’s best pal, the government of the People’s Republic of China. This UN flag-lowering for Kim follows last week’s moment of silence for Kim in the UN General Assembly.

It’s all a rich propaganda gift for the North Korean regime, now trotting out Kim’s son as the Great Successor and Supreme Commander, and tallying the condolences from places such as Equatorial Guinea and Sudan. Amid such company, it is quite a plum for the Pyongyang regime to see the U.S.-subsidized UN flags dipping worldwide in a show of respect for Kim.

Let us repeat — for the weeping, wailing people of North Korea, there is at least the excuse that unless they provide an impassioned public display of grief over the demise of the thug whose regime has sent hundreds of thousands to be starved, tortured, frozen, worked to death or executed outright in Kim’s prison camps, that same regime may inflict horrible punishment on them. But for the eminences and bureaucrats of the UN, there is no excuse. In dipping its flag to half mast, the UN is effectively delivering a message of encouragement to a North Korean regime which sustains itself by way of repression, murder and nuclear proliferation. This is not solely a symbolic case of UN protocol trumping human decency; this is an act cheap for the comfortable offices of the UN to engage in, but potentially so costly that at the far end of the message transmitted to Pyongyang, more people may die. A UN flag that is lowered to half mast for Kim Jong Il is a flag does not deserve to fly at all.