But should anyone be surprised? This is how the UN works. Being a despotic state that sponsors terrorism while pursuing nuclear weapons — while under multiple UN sanctions — is no bar to holding fancy posts at the UN. Clearly, Iran’s regime has become expert at availing itself of this setup. Currently, and through 2015, Iran heads the second-largest voting bloc in the UN General Assembly (the Non-Aligned Movement, which includes 119 states plus the Palestinian Authority). Iran also sits on the UN Commission on the Status of Women (of course), as well as the executive boards and governing councils of such major agencies as UNICEF, the UN Development Program, and the UN Environment Program. For a fuller list, here’s a link to my article last month, “At the U.N., Iran is a Powerhouse, Not a Pariah.”

In the case of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, the good news — in keeping with another of the UN’s dysfunctional aspects — is that this body has been gridlocked for years. When Iran takes charge, from May 27-June 23, that’s unlikely to change. The bad news is that this conference serves as a yet another UN platform for dignifying a procession of the world’s worst regimes. Among the 65 members of the conference, alongside such staple UN players as Russia and China, are Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe, as well as Iran. The presidency rotates through all the members in alphabetical order, so they all get a turn as president. When North Korea took the top chair, in 2011, I labeled it “Beyond Parody.” But let’s face it. Moves that in any sane or morally competent venue would qualify as beyond parody are treated as nothing out of the ordinary at the UN. They are standard procedure.

It is also standard procedure that some of the developed democracies that bankroll the UN, especially the U.S. (and in recent years, Canada), issue a denunciation of such proceedings as Iran presiding at the disarmament conference, and maybe even withdraw their ambassadors — but nonetheless, appear helpless to stop such outrages. So, let’s just note that there are ways to avert this sort of thing. Back in 2003, as the alphabetical rotation of the disarmament conference’s presidency would have it, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was due to take the top chair. It didn’t happen. Saddam’s regime did not get its turn that round, for the dramatic reason that the U.S. and a coalition of the willing toppled Saddam. Not that I’m expecting the U.S. administration to launch a ground invasion of Iran. Just sayin’ — if there’s no way to change UN procedure, and no way to change the alphabet, there’s still more than one way to clean up some of the monstrosities at the UN.

You remember Richard Falk — the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur who last month wrote an article blaming America for the terrorist bombings of the Boston Marathon. Falk suggested these horrific attacks were part of the post-colonial world’s natural “resistance” to “the American global domination project.” In response, more than two dozen members of Congress called for Falk — an American academic — to be fired from his UN post.

Now, according to a dispatch by Fox News editor-at large George Russell, the U.S. State Department is saying that Falk cannot be fired — because the rules of the Human Rights Council contain no provision for firing any of the Council’s dozens of special rapporteurs. That’s quite plausible; the UN also lacks any provision for removing a secretary-general (as became evident during the Oil-for-Food scandal, on Kofi Annan’s watch). It is also absurd, and in practice not quite credible. When UN senior officials want to, they can be quite creative about sidelining or ousting inconvenient personnel — though such maneuvers seem more often reserved for whistleblowers than for those peddling the anti-American or anti-Israel vitriol in which the UN specializes.

But in the case of Falk, it looks like both the State Department and the UN Human Rights Council will defer politely to the UN’s lack of rules for firing a special rapporteur. His earliest departure date will be May of 2014, when his six-year term expires. At which stage, as Russell notes, Falk could run for another post as a special rapporteur for the Human Rights Council, which is packed with countries sympathetic to his style.

It gets worse. Russell has also unearthed the information — buried in a 183-page report from the UN’s External Board of Auditors — that Human Rights Council special rapporteurs, such as Falk, are not required to disclose any support they might get from institutions or individual governments. The basic arrangement is that these rapporteurs usually work for a token $1 per year, but the UN Human Rights Council covers their expenses which, according to documents obtained by Fox, can range from about $240,000 to almost $600,000 per year.

In other words, while UN special rapporteurs appear to be doing altruistic work for a token fee, the Human Rights Council has effectively issued them a license to operate under the UN logo, expenses paid by the UN — and at the same time, allows them to accept funding from who-knows-whom with who-knows-what-agenda, and no requirement to disclose any of it. Oh, and P.S., there is no provision for firing them (see above, and read Russell’s piece in full). It may happen that some of these special rapporteurs try to operate with integrity. But this is yet another instance in which, if the UN had set out to design a crooked setup, it’s hard to think how they could have done a better job of it. It’s time to think bigger than firing Richard Falk. How about finding a way to fire the entire Human Rights Council?

(Artwork based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

Hezbollah is now believed to have more missiles and fighters than it had before its 2006 battle with Israel, when Hezbollah missiles forced a third of Israel’s population into shelters and hit as far south as Haifa.

“More missiles” may be putting it modestly. In 2011, Israeli authorities said that Hezbollah had rearmed to the extent of amassing more than three times the weapons it had prior to the 2006 war. Supplementing their allegations with detailed maps, Israeli officials charged that Hezbollah had created a network across southern Lebanon of almost 1,000 rocket and missile facilities, including 550 bunkers and 100 weapons storage units.

All of which raises the question of what’s going on with the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon). UNIFIL was beefed up, at significant cost, after the 2006 war, with the professed aim of ensuring that Hezbollah would not rearm. As spelled out in 2006 in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was supposed to secure peace, UNIFIL’s mandate included helping Lebanon’s armed forces ensure that southern Lebanon, bordering on Israel, would be — to quote from the UNIFIL web site — “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in the area.”

Obviously — see the information above — that mandate for ensuring an area free of Hezbollah munitions has not worked out. So what is UNIFIL doing?

But let’s connect a few more dots. Falk’s article ran not only on the boutique venue of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist’s blog site, where it appeared April 21st under the headline “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders.” The same article by Falk — in slightly shorter version — ran two days earlier on the web site of Al Jazeera, under the headline “Collective Self-Reflection in the Wake of a National Tragedy.” On Al Jazeera the sub-headline, plucked from the text, was precisely Falk’s contention that America is to blame: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” (One of Falk’s points being that “In some respects the U.S. has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks…” — In other words, the two Chechen brothers who received asylum in America, and then used bombs packed with nails to murder and maim Americans, were simply engaging in a bit of post-colonial response, brought on by American policies.)

That Al Jazeera would carry such stuff is no surprise. Falk has lots to offer a Qatar-based news network prone to whipping up anti-American sentiment. He is American — presumably the basis on which he presents his views as an exercise in “collective self-reflection” — and he comes wreathed in credentials as a Princeton University professor emeritus and a UN special rapporteur for Palestinian rights (though the result of his labors has been less to support the rights of Palestinians than to support the interests of the thugs who run Hamas).

And that brings us to former Vice President Al Gore, who just this past January, in a $500 million deal, sold his Current TV cable channel to Al Jazeera — the recent outlet for Falk’s meditations. Having acquired access to an American cable TV audience, thanks to Gore and his business partners, Al Jazeera is now preparing the launch of Al Jazeera America.  When Gore came under fire for this deal, he vigorously defended Al Jazeera as a marvelous addition to news coverage in America, describing Al Jazeera as “respected…capable,” and comparing favorably with American networks as an “honest-to-goodness news channel.”

Really? Will Al Jazeera America, like its mothership network, soon be bringing us the ravings of Richard Falk? Would Al Gore perhaps like to comment on this brand of commentary, and whether giving it a platform is a service to the American public?

Given the Chechen origins of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the search for answers has quite reasonably entailed a crash course in the history of Chechnya. The terrorism in Boston was clearly a case of jihad, and Chechnya over the past generation has become a jihadi hub; though plenty of details have yet to be discovered about the precise path that took the Tsarnaev brothers from emigre boys to terror suspects — one now dead and the other in custody after a manhunt that shut down all of Boston.

But creeping into this discussion is another line of analysis, of which we should be very wary. That would be the suggestion that the terror in Boston was the product not only of radical Islam, but more broadly a result of the agonies suffered over generations by the Chechens. For instance, in a meditative article on the two brothers, The New Yorker’s David Remnick writes, “The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before — by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort.”

Remnick is quite right that the Chechens have endured a long history of hell. The conquest of Chechnya by Czarist Russia in the 18th century translated into the brutalities of Soviet rule in the 20th century. During World War II, to prevent the Chechens from collaborating with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population in cattle cars to Central Asia. Many died. When the survivors began returning to Chechnya, in the late 1950s and 1960s, many found ethnic Russians living in their homes.

One such item turned up among the April 18 KCNA postings, headlined “Palestinian Ambassador to DPRK gives reception.” It caught my eye, as an interesting bit of background to North Korea’s frenzy of threats plus missile and nuclear tests. Although a lot of attention has been paid lately to the ties between North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Iran’s terrorist clients such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the news has not been rife with stories about how Palestinian Authority officials are amusing themselves these days in Pyongyang — which treats the Palestinian Authority as a state, complete with embassy (scroll down here for a photo). According to KCNA, it’s a case of mutual affection, with the Palestinian envoy to Pyongyang, Ismail Ahmed Mohamed Hasan, recently delivering to Kim Jong Un, on behalf of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, a floral basket to celebrate both the birthday of North Korea’s founding tyrant, the late Kim Il Sung, and the first anniversary of Kim Jong Un’s ascension to first secretary of the North Korean Workers’ Party.

As shindigs go this PA reception in North Korea sounded as dreary as the surrounding streets of the Pyongyang diplomatic district (or maybe you had to be there to appreciate the more festive aspects).  KCNA provided a perfectly tedious account of how the Palestinian envoy “gave a reception at his embassy on Thursday to mark the birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung.” There was a list of North Korean officials who attended, and a reminder of the special bonds between Pyongyang and the Palestinians, going back to the days of Kim Il Sung and Yasser Arafat. The recitation closed with the North Korean assertion that “The Korean people will extend invariable support and solidarity to the Palestinian people in their just cause to retake the legitimate national rights and found an independent state with Kuds as its capital.”

No surprise there. But it did leave me wondering. If the Palestinian Authority maintains in Pyongyang a facility that North Korea regards as an official embassy, complete with receptions and gifts of floral baskets, then what does the North Korean government enjoy, in the way of reciprocity, in Ramallah? Presumably there are experts who know the answer, but I have done some looking online, and have yet to find it. Is there an office? A trading company? A restaurant?A news service? Just asking…

But here’s an aspect of that axis that few in the West now seem to recall. It didn’t begin with President George W. Bush linking the two countries in a post-Sept. 11 speech. It goes back much earlier than that. It’s an axis that specifically received a joint and personal stamp of approval more than two decades ago from North Korea’s founding tyrant, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Great Leader and Supreme Leader met in person in 1989, when Khamenei traveled to Pyongyang, to lavish praise on Kim Il Sung for daring to confront the Great Satan, the country that Khamenei described as their mutual enemy, the United States of America. Khamenei told Kim, Sr., that anti-Americanism could be “the most important factor” in Iran’s cooperation with North Korea.

To this day, the Kim family totalitarian regime continues to explore the limits of just how much regimes profoundly hostile to America can get away with, and Iran avails itself of the findings. This grows ever more dangerous, as North Korea discovers it can carry out long-range missile and nuclear tests, threaten to incinerate Washington and Seoul, advertise its intentions to conduct additional tests, and the U.S. superpower will do … nothing that actually stops this trajectory. More about this in my column on “The Pyongyang-Tehran Proliferation Playbook.”

Here they are, up close, hand-in-hand, the Axis of Supreme Leader and Great Leader, Dateline: Pyongyang, May, 1989. (Khamenei was then president of Iran; he became Supreme Leader following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, less than a month after this meeting in Pyongyang took place.)

That is what came to mind while I was reading today about North Korea’s warning to foreign diplomats to consider leaving Pyongyang before April 10. Though, before I explain, please allow me to add that of course, Pyongyang may have had much bigger reasons to issue this warning. North Korea’s  barrage of threats in recent weeks — coupled with such matters as its February nuclear test, its proliferation links to Iran, and the inexperience of its third-generation young tyrant — has provoked all sorts of speculation about what’s really going on.  Maybe this is an extreme version of North Korea’s time-tested nuclear extortion racket — prelude to seeking concessions at a bargaining table. Maybe it reflects young Kim’s efforts to consolidate power at home. Maybe the new dictator is so gung-ho, or so out of touch with reality, that he really thinks it’s a good idea — almost as thrilling as a visit from Dennis Rodman — to provoke a hot war. Maybe he’s not really in charge, and the threats are emanating from an internal struggle we can’t see. Maybe, maybe… Though whatever is going on in the big picture, to credit the Pyongyang regime with kindly concern for the welfare of foreign diplomats just doesn’t wash; this is a state that doesn’t mind hanging on to foreigners it has forcibly abducted from their home countries.

The pace of the rocket attacks is picking up. Prosor’s latest letter, dated April 4, notes that “Over the past four days, Gaza terrorists have fired 11 rockets and mortar shells at Israeli civilians and cities. Yesterday, two of these rockets landed near the Israeli town of Sderot just as children were making their way to school for the first time since the Passover holiday.” The children and their families ended up racing for the bomb shelters that are a staple of life in Sderot, which is located within easy range of Gaza.

Urging the Security Council to condemn these attacks, Prosor writes that “The only thing more deafening than the sirens that go off in Israel when a rocket is fired is the international community’s silence.”

Actually, Prosor is being more than polite in his summary of the UN scene. While the Security Council may shrug off Gaza rocket attacks on Israel (unless Israel acts to defend itself), some UN officials have been piping up. On April 3, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry, urged that there be restraint — not by the terrorists, but by Israel.

To be fair to Serry, he also said that the UN “condemns the indiscriminate firing of rockets into civilian areas.”  But that’s the stock formulation in such UN statements. There’s no sign that the terrorist overlords of Gaza are particularly concerned about such toothless UN locutions.

On the other hand, the accompanying UN references to Israel have been evolving since February, in a direction that places the onus ever more heavily on Israel — the UN member state that is under attack. Back in February, Serry labeled the resumed rocket fire out of Gaza “totally unacceptable,” and the UN press office headline for his statement was, “UN voices concern as rocket fire from Gaza hits southern Israel, breaking ceasefire.” By March, a UN spokesperson was urging “restraint by all parties.” Now, in April, comes Serry’s statement, for which the UN press office headline is no longer calling for restraint from all parties, but instead homes in on just one: “UN envoy condemns rocket firing from Gaza, calls for restraint from Israel.” One might well wonder — were these rocket-firing Palestinian terrorists attacking UN offices, instead of Israeli schoolchildren, would UN officials still be demanding that the party under attack be the one to show restraint? Or would they perhaps be demanding in no uncertain terms that someone restrain the terrorists?

What does this look like in practice? It’s quite a whirl. Let’s go to UN headquarters in New York (for which U.S. taxpayers, on top of paying for roughly one-quarter of the UN’s annual systemwide budget of more than $30 billion, are also chipping in almost one quarter of the $2.1 billion tab for renovating the UN’s building complex). Iran’s PressTV has a report on a busy day here for Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee. He is filmed striding through the UN halls, chairing a Non-Aligned meeting calling for action against Israel (Cuba featured prominently in the audience), and meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to relay the NAM demand to slam Israel. Then he’s off to a conference on the UN Arms Trade Treaty, where (see post below) Iran, Syria and North Korea became the standout holdouts (for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with respect for the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, and maybe plenty to do with Iran’s campaign to enlarge its role at the UN).

Here’s a link to the PressTV clip, headlined “Iran’s envoy urges UN action against Israeli regime.” The bustling ambassador starring in this show is a mouthpiece for Tehran. The multi-billion dollar UN platform from which he addresses the world is funded in biggest part by U.S. taxpayers. Something to think about.