{"id":116663,"date":"2024-10-29T17:00:13","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=116663"},"modified":"2024-10-28T12:40:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T10:40:28","slug":"29-00-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=116663","title":{"rendered":"Guterres Embraces the Authoritarians"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Guterres Embraces the Authoritarians<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Cohen \/ JNS.org<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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U.N. Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres meets with Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, the Turkish president, on the sidelines of the general debate of the General Assembly\u2019s 79th session on Sept. 24, 2024. Photo: Eskinder Debebe\/U.N. Photo.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s often said about antisemitism that Jews are the canary in the coal mine: What starts with them won\u2019t end with them, and sooner or later, the rest of society will suffer the consequences of this thoroughly anti-democratic ideology. I\u2019m not going to delve into that proposition here, save to say that while I don\u2019t entirely agree with it, there are times when its core observation can prove useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

A case in point concerns the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. Back in June, I\u00a0gave voice<\/a>\u00a0to the disappointment I know is shared by many other Jews over the evolution of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After initially appearing quite promising and making all the right noises on why antisemitism is a global threat that needs to be dealt with, Guterres transformed for the worse after the Hamas pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the chorus chiding the Jewish state on the international stage\u2014from Ireland to South Africa, from Spain to Chile, and all points in between. Particularly disgraceful was his decision to place Israel on a blacklist of countries whose militaries abuse children, alongside such paragons of virtue as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma\/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen. Other democracies, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, could easily end up on a list like this given the actions of their militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don\u2019t because the United Nations understands that the political costs of such an action are minimal only when it comes to Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now Guterres is burrowing deeper into the authoritarian, conspiracy-addled universe from which antisemitism springs. Last week, the U.N. chief arrived in the Russian city of Kazan for a three-day summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc of states, which bills themselves as an alternative to the economic institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that have dominated the post-World War II global order.<\/span><\/p>\n

The summit was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delightedly used the occasion to demonstrate that his illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine hasn\u2019t exactly robbed him of allies. More than 20 world leaders joined him in Kazan, among them Chinese President Xi Jinping, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan. Other states eager to enter the BRICS fold, including Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, also sent senior representatives to sit at Putin\u2019s feet.<\/span><\/p>\n

By attending the summit in Russia, Guterres was effectively spitting in the faces of both Ukraine and Israel. In doing so, he proved that when you flirt with antisemitism and legitimize its tropes, you open yourself up to embracing all of its associated baggage\u2014fake news, outlandish theories and the recasting of terrorism as a form of \u201cresistance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

BRICS isn\u2019t an exact copy of the Warsaw Pact\u2014the treaty organization that bound the Soviet Union to its Communist satellite states during the Cold War\u2014but it is certainly making moves in that direction. Among its five founders, only Brazil and India have an interest in keeping relations cordial with Western democracies, but they are no match for Chinese or Russian imperatives in this regard. Meanwhile, South Africa and those states that have knocked on the BRICS door more recently\u2014like Turkey, despite its status as a NATO ally\u2014regard the bloc as much more than an economic association. Critically, BRICS will provide rogue states like Iran and even North Korea with a veneer of legitimacy denied to them in Western circles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, none of the subjects that the Russian news agency\u00a0Tass<\/em>, quoting a Kremlin statement, reported as being on the agenda at a private meeting between Putin and Guterres concerned trade or economic development. \u00a0Their \u201cdiscussion will be given to pressing issues on the international agenda, including the Middle East crisis and the situation around Ukraine,\u201d the Kremlin said. What Guterres will hear from Putin is the standard Russian line, defaming Ukraine\u2019s democratic government as a collection of \u201cneo-Nazis\u201d and richly complaining, nearly three years into the invasion of Ukraine, that it is Israel\u2019s multi-front defensive war against an axis of Iranian proxies that is causing instability! Meanwhile, Iran continues to supply Russia with missiles and drones, while North Korea has\u2014according to South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence reports\u2014sent thousands of its troops to fight alongside the Russians.<\/span><\/p>\n

By feting a group of states who represent, in the words of\u00a0Kyiv Post<\/em>\u00a0commentator Orhan Dragas, \u201ca worrying mix of authoritarianism, anti-democratic governance, and war crimes,\u201d Guterres is compromising the basic values of the world body\u2019s founding charter. His presence amounts to an approval of Russia\u2019s actions in Ukraine and the deepening alliance between Moscow and Tehran. The only way to avoid that impression would be for Guterres to state clearly that Russia must withdraw entirely from Ukraine and that Israel, as a sovereign U.N. member state, has an unquestioned right to defend itself against an association of states and client paramilitaries seeking its destruction. He won\u2019t, of course, say anything that comes even close to that.<\/span><\/p>\n

The elephant in the room here is the US-led alliance of democratic states around the world. Over the last 80 years, there has been any number of reasons for them to ditch the United Nations in favor of a new world organization that doesn\u2019t allow its members to repress their own populations or sew regional havoc in the name of \u201cnational sovereignty.\u201d Yet they have not done so, mainly because they fear an outcome in which they are unable to influence or check the behavior of authoritarian states. And with the future of US foreign policy up for grabs ahead of the US presidential election on Nov. 5, Putin correctly calculates that now is the perfect time for him to strut the world stage, presenting a vision of international relations that will strengthen the positions of Russia and its allies while weakening ours.<\/span><\/p>\n

The practical effects of this weakness are already painfully visible. To take a few examples: Qatar\u2014an Iranian ally that practices a form of apartheid by disenfranchising nearly 90% of its population\u2014has been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council; UNRWA\u2014the U.N. agency solely dedicated to the descendants of Palestinian refugees\u2014continues to function despite copious evidence of the overlap between members of its staff and Hamas; and the U.N.\u2019s top official is breaking bread with a Russian leader eager to revive the threat posed by his country during the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n

I could go on, but it will suffice to say that the head-in-the-sand approach of Western leaders to our fracturing international institutions is in large part responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. The only real pushback that Guterres has received so far has come from Israel, which has declared him persona non grata. As welcome as that decision is, it is an isolated one that will have little impact until other countries pluck up the courage to follow suit.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Guterres Embraces the Authoritarians Ben Cohen \/ JNS.org U.N. Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres meets with Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, the Turkish president, on the sidelines of the general debate of the General Assembly\u2019s 79th session on Sept. 24, 2024. Photo: Eskinder Debebe\/U.N. Photo. \u00a0It\u2019s often said about antisemitism that Jews are the canary in the coal mine: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116663"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116680,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116663\/revisions\/116680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}