Chutzpah. For those not familiar with the word the classic definition is of the child who kills his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. Among the calumnies the west was subjected to this past week was the fiat of the Saudis warning Israel, the frontline state in the family of free nations fighting Islamist hegemony, that if it does not accept the terms of the Arab League plan concocted in Riyadh, it’s future will be decided by the “…Lords of War…” That warning was delivered by Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. He went on to say that “If Israel refuses, that means it doesn’t want peace…It has never been proven that reaching out to Israel achieves anything.” Al-Faisal has managed to trump the killer “orphan”.

This is the same Saudi Arabia that participated in the infamous Khartoum Conference that issued the three “nos” to Israel. “No negotiation.” “No recognition.” “No peace.” The same Saudi Arabia that has allowed Wahabbi fanatics not only to control the Kingdom’s religious, educational and interior affairs but to export and finance its brand of Islamist lunacy throughout the world. The same Saudi Arabia that has allowed a free flow of cash not only to Bin-Laden’s Al-Qaeda, but to extremist Muslim religious schools and radical groups throughout the world. The same Saudi Arabia whose royal family’s official construction company is called Bin-Laden, founded by Osama’s father. And the same Saudi Arabia out of which 19 of the 20 9/11 murderers sprang. This country is at war with the west yet has the temerity to demand that it be listened to. Now that’s chutzpah!

The principal demands of the Arab League and the Saudis are a return of the lands Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (an occupation, not colonization, fully in line with international law flowing from the self-help doctrine of defense against invasion) and acceptance of a Palestinian state. The Saudis and their Arab League cousins seem to have forgotten Israel’s Allon Plan that offered back all the lands right after the 1967 war in return for recognition and peace. The answer the Israelis got was Khartoum. They have also forgotten that only Israel accepted the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 thereby recognizing the Arab state of Palestine. The Arab League’s frontline cousins decided to invade and hold that territory captive until 1967. Arab “logic” now seeks to dictate that Israel - the victim of years of invasion, attack and terrorism - must now be complicit in its own self-abnegation and give the Arabs in peace what they could not get in war. I don’t know what they were smoking in Riyadh but we ought to get some.

Not content with threatening the frontline defender of the west, Prince Saud decided to flak for Iran, the mainline menace to the west. In an unparalleled display of “denial” being not just a river in Egypt, Saud declared that, “We have no inhibitions about the role of Iran. If you want to reach for leadership you have to make sure that your interests are taken care of and not damaged.” His butt-sucking prostration was nothing less than de facto submission to the Iranian regime. Saud was playing Mussolini to Ahmadinejad’s Hitler. Saud knows full well that the tinpot tyrant from Tehran and his Mullah bosses wouldn’t hesitate a moment backing a Wahabbi putsch against the Saudi royal family, Sunni-Shiite split or not. At the top, the thugs all play together. Saud is feeding the crocodile hoping it will eat him last. But eat him it will. The sight of this Riyadh-Tehran two-step is as sickening as Hitler’s jig after he had dictated the terms of surrender to the French at Compiègne. And coming as it did on the heels of the west’s feckless response to the Iranian kidnapping of British soldiers, will serve only to embolden the mad Mullahs of mayhem.

As the European Union celebrated 50 years of its descent into discountenance, it witnessed 15 of its citizens, British soldiers, kidnapped by Iran from Iraqi territorial waters. The kidnapping occurred, not coincidentally, one day after the UN Security Council passed a narrowly-worded resolution targeting sanctions against companies controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. How identity of ownership could ever be determined was not explained. But since obfuscation and playing both ends against the middle is the UN game, the resolution made the grade. Not that anyone really expected the UN or EU to do anything about the kidnappings, but the lame response of even the British surprised many. All we got was British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett assuring the House of Commons of “…private but robust diplomacy…” including a condemnation delivered by diplomatic note from the German President of the EU. Boy that really must have had Tehran shaking in its boots.

And not to be outdone by the appeasement of the Saudis and the Europeans the UN decided to make a deposit to its bank of credits with the theocratic terrorists that run that show. In an unprecedented move Luis Alfonso de Alba, the Mexican President of the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, threatened accredited NGO UN Watch’s executive director Hillel Neuer with having the latter’s remarks expunged from the record for daring to call the Council to account on its record of duplicity and deceit. Neuer had pointed out, in forceful terms, that the Council – established to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission – has issued not a word of condemnation on Sudan’s genocide in Darfur; or China’s repression of rights and occupation of Tibet; nor on any of the state-sponsored slaughters of Muslims by other Muslims. The only time it acts, Neuer said, is against Israel in order,”… to demonize Israeli democracy; to delegitimize the Jewish state; to scapegoat the Jewish people...”

De Alba made the extraordinary gesture of stating that for the first time he would not thank the speaker for his remarks since he considered them “inadmissible”. Though among the statements that have been admitted in Council records were the Iranian ambassador’s screed that the number of victims of the Holocaust was only a “historical claim”; a Sudanese official’s declaration that “incidents of violence against women in Darfur have been wildly exaggerated”; the Cuban ambassador’s description of his country’s human rights abuses as “…libellous…” and demand that the UN expert who wrote it “…should make a significant contribution by quitting…”; and the Nigerian ambassador saying of attacks on homosexuals that the, “Death penalty by stoning for unnatural sexual acts…should not be equated with extrajudicial killings.” Should we really be surprised? Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, who headed up a UN Commission that severely criticized the UN and the Human Rights Council on their inaction on Darfur, didn’t even bother to appear to present her report saying that since it was so critical of the world body she knew the UN would disregard and condemn it. And how could it be otherwise. Among the member states sitting on the Council are such noble beacons of human rights as Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Russia and….you guessed it….Saudi Arabia. No wonder the United States has declined for the second year running to stand for election to the Council stating that the body has “…thus far not proved itself credible…” Fully 29 of the 47 member Council is allied to, or a member of, the Arab League.

It is time for inaction and appeasement to be replaced with force. And while there is still time, that force, in Churchill’s words, is “Not necessarily war, but war if necessary.” The United States, which funds 20% of the UN’s budget, should just close the tap and put that malodorous cadaver out of its misery. The US should also tell the Saudis that if they want American protection for the oil industry Anglo-American know-how developed and that American might from Qatar now defends, they can’t dance on both sides of the street. Clearly and candidly America should tell the Saudis that if they continue to play footsie with Tehran, America may just take over the oil-rich sectors of the kingdom and let the Wahabbis have their way with the royals. As for Iran, all Iranian assets in the west should be frozen including the hordes of cash of former Presidential Mullahs Khatami and Rafsanjani. And since 25% of Iran’s exports go to the EU and 40% of its imports come from the EU, that trade should stop. The EU will survive. Iran won’t. When Iran gets the bomb it will be too late for measures like these to have any effect.

Those western nations, particularly in the EU and the UN, who continue to ignore the gathering winds of war, are whistling past their own graveyards. They will be dragged into a global conflict whether they like it or not. And old Prince Saud and the Iranians will face the real “Lords of War”. The only ones that have won any significant victories for liberty in the post World War II era. America and Israel. And for all its talk, that’s not a challenge the Riyadh-Tehran axis is prepared to face…. today. Tomorrow, however, does not yet belong to us.

Beryl Wajsman is president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal http://www.iapm.ca
publisher of BARRICADES Magazine http://www.barricades.ca
and host of Corus Radio’s "The Last Angry Man" on the New 940Montreal.
He can be reached at: info@iapm.ca