Charles Krauthammer’s “Jenin: The Truth” excoriates the U.N. in the latest of what appears to be punditry’s growing chorus of antipathy and outrage toward that Manhattan-based goondoggle. Here he is undressing Kofi and the Annanites over that infamous West Bank slaughter in Jenin:

[…] What was the real story? That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation.

Palestinian apologists wave away this double standard with the magic mantra of ‘occupation.’

More nonsense. Twenty-one months ago, Israel offered a total end to the occupation, ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to the first Palestinian state ever. The Palestinians turned that down and took up the suicide bomb. By the Orwellian logic of today, the Palestinians are justified in perpetrating one massacre after another to end an occupation that Israel offered to remove almost two years ago.

For the ‘international community,’ as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong — the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich.

Churchill’s great gift to civilization was not just that he rallied good against evil but also that he pierced a suffocating fog of self-deception by speaking truth to lies. Where is the Churchill of today, the official of any government, prepared to tell the United Nations that its frantic hunt for a phantom massacre by Jews — while ignoring massacre after massacre of Jews — is grotesque and perverse?

Now, here’s today’s BBC story, “Arabs press UN over Jenin ‘massacre'” — which perfectly encapsulates the Arab PR strategy, and testifies to power these thugocracies exert over the UN. The plan? Forget that Human Rights Watch, Agence France-Presse, and even the Palestinian Authority (none easily confused with “Friends of Israel” or the creators of Seinfeld) have concluded that no massacre took place in Jenin, and instead, continue to insist that it did — loudly, persistenly — and then repeat the demands for an official UN investigation:

Arab states are to call an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly over claims that Israel massacred Palestinians at the Jenin refugee camp.

The move comes after an acrimonious debate in the UN Security Council over the disbanding of a fact-finding mission to the camp.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Israel and the Palestinians should “wake up” and seek a peaceful solution to the conflict.

[…] The UN Security Council held the marathon debate after its 15 permanent members failed to formulate a response to Mr Annan’s decision to abandon the mission.

The Palestinian’s UN observer, Nasser al-Kidwa, told the council it had failed to give its backing to Mr Annan and had given in to Israeli ‘blackmailing’.

Mr al-Kidwa said Arab states would take the issue to an emergency session of the 189-General Assembly, last convened in 1997.

The Associated Press news agency said it had obtained a draft resolution calling on Mr Annan to produce a report on events in Jenin within two weeks.

Arab delegates said they would ask the General Assembly to back a resolution accusing Israel of war crimes.

Most of the 38 speakers at the six-hour meeting denounced Israel for blocking the UN team.

By the way, here’s an interesting fledgling site for those of you wishing to keep tabs on the U.N.: The United Nations is Evil (sponsered by Capitalism Magazine)

A sample of the kind of useful info you’ll find: In 1999 alone, the American people […] furnished precisely TEN BILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY NINE MILLION DOLLARS to support the work of the United Nations. No other nation on earth comes even close to matching that singular investment.”

Yup.

[update: Following the Arab lead, “EU ‘Deplores’ U.N. Jenin Probe Cancellation.” Link via LGF]