Acronym organisations... Who’d have thought?

Rowan Dean I 25 May 2024 I The Spectator Australia

The so-called rules-based order that the West has prided itself on developing and operating under since the end of the second world war showed itself barely fit for purpose this week. For decades, the assumption and promise has been that if the taxpayers of the free democratic nations finance a vast bureaucratic machine that included equal numbers of members from non-democratic nations, then inevitably peace and prosperity would be maintained, with the authoritarian despots behaving themselves in order to remain part of ‘the club’. Shock, horror! It appears that rather than bending to our democratic ways and adopting our Kumbaya values, those same authoritarians and despots have sought instead to subvert those once-noble and worthy institutions and turn them to their own advantage. Who’d have thought?

The International Criminal Court, which Australia joined back in the somewhat more carefree and optimistic Howard years, was designed and funded to prosecute rogue nations and war-mongering individuals for what would in most civilised nations be viewed as criminal activity. All well and good. Nonetheless, the Americans smelled a rat and did not join up. And this week, the reeking rodent was on display for all to see as the ICC announced that it was a) seeking arrest warrants for those individuals behind the savage murders, rapes, beheadings, torture and kidnapping of a group of civilians going about their daily business – good – and b) seeking arrest warrants for those individuals desperately trying to prevent any further such murders, rapes, beheadings, torture and kidnapping of innocent civilians going about their daily business – not only bad but wrong-headed, stupid, short-sighted and disgraceful. In an act so Orwellian and Kafkaesque that it reads like a comedy sketch, the ICC, preposterously at the insistence of the celebrity wife of a Hollywood superstar no less, is seeking arrest warrants for the terrorist heads of Hamas?and?the Israeli political leadership attempting to defeat them and bring them to account. ‘Moral relativism’, it appears, is now the official new creed of the globalist lawyer elites: the villains are on both sides, and one cannot distinguish between them.

Thus, one of the foundational pillars of the Western legal system (the right to self-defence) has been overturned in international affairs, perhaps irrevocably. This has only been made possible thanks to the concerted campaign since the atrocities of 7 October by the entire leftist global political movement, in cahoots with the usual suspects from within the Islamic world, to portray those vile acts as somehow a form of legitimate political resistance.

Despite initial (and reluctant) platitudes ‘condemning’ the Hamas attacks by some, there has been an all-consuming campaign by the left throughout the West to pretend this is a struggle in which both sides are equally to blame for the violence. Amongst those who have shamefully played this game, or at least failed to unequivocally distinguish between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, our federal Labor government sits in pride of place. Words matter and leadership matters. Every action taken by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – restoring funding to Unrwa, changing ‘disputed territories’ to ‘occupied territories’, voting for recognition of a Palestinian state – has helped lay the moral framework for the ICC’s disgraceful decision, and, arguably, towards delegitimising the state of Israel, which, it would increasingly appear, is the secret agenda of this hard-left duo who have repeatedly put Australia at odds with our most important allies.

Needless to say, others within the Labor government have happily jumped on the ICC bandwagon, presumably to curry favour with their Muslim constituents. Step forward the hapless Chris Bowen, the man that history will look back on as having done the maximum damage to our energy supplies, prosperity and manufacturing base of any single Australian politician in history. (Quite an achievement.) More disgracefully, the unelected mandarins at DFAT also felt it necessary to rush out a press release eulogising the ICC.

Whether it is the United Nations (pretending the Butcher of Tehran was worthy of paying respects to), the World Health Organisation (with its?Black Mirror?approach to pandemics) or any other of the multitude of supranational organisations that the Australian taxpayer funds to the tune of many billions of dollars, it gets increasingly hard to see how the benefits are worth the cost. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who took us into the ICC, is now suggesting it may be time to leave. The same could be send of some of those other once worthy, now increasingly dubious, acronym organisations.

Author: Rowan Dean