Moral inconsistency

Pulling together the Pope Benedict story with the United Nations fiasco in recent days, we can look back on a truly bizarre week. Media focus on Benedict far outweighed the rants by presidents Ahmadinejad and Chavez, and don’t you wonder why?

Lt. Col. Oliver North noticed that, and he makes a very important point in this column.

As the U.N. General Assembly began its annual seance in New York, Pope Benedict XVI, head of 1 billion Roman Catholics across the world, and arguably Christendom’s most visible leader, was threatened with death by Muslim extremists. Not one of the visiting dignitaries to the “World Body” — as the United Nations is fond of describing itself — so much as raised a plucked eyebrow or waved a manicured finger at this outrage. Perhaps that’s because the very secular U.N. Charter deftly avoids any mention of God, a Creator, a Supreme Being or even a benign mention of Divine Providence. It just wouldn’t be appropriate to denounce those who threatened a mere religious figure.

One of the reasons is because the UN has been busy pushing “reproductive rights” to Third World countries tied to their relief programs, so they can try to eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor. Pope Benedict represents the moral compass, and the Church the moral axis, at the center of the world.

But if defending the faithful is taboo at the United Nations, it’s hard to explain two of the subsequent center-ring acts at this annual circus. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used his appearance before the General Assembly to proffer a 30-minute tutorial on Islamic theology. Of course he also managed to work into his sermon the obligatory denunciation of the United States — a recurring theme in the big blue building that could not exist without the support of U.S. tax dollars.

Then, in keeping with this year’s liturgical setting, Venezuela’s Marxist president Hugo Chavez, fresh from a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Havana, used the General Assembly’s “World Stage” to describe U.S. President George W. Bush as Satan incarnate. As the cameras swung through the great hall, no delegate was seen storming out in disgust as the head of state of the most generous nation on earth was vilified by a tin-horn oil baron.

Those present in the assembly at the United Nations, which we fund, which is on our soil, applauded these tirades against our country and our president. And Col. North points out why.

The moral inconsistency — in what is said — and left unsaid at the United Nations would be inexplicable were it not for one commodity: oil. The pope has no oil wells — and therefore isn’t worth defending. Messrs. Ahmadinejad and Chavez have a lot of oil — so they can’t be insulted. The Wahhabi princes and potentates whose imams spew threats at the bishop of Rome have lots of oil. Apparently the “civilized world” — the consumers of all this oil — dare not offend the purveyors of hatred lest they decide to raise prices or cut us off.

Today, oil fuels more than advanced economies — it feeds the fires of hatred. The beneficiaries of our petrodollars — nearly all are autocratic regimes — now finance the instruments of our demise. The leaders of these nations and their minions — in mosques, media and embassies — can say the most outrageous things imaginable. Worse, they have discovered that they can extort silence from those who depend on a steady supply of light crude.

Some of us keep asking “where’s the outrage?” within the civilized world, within the moderate Muslim world, over the incendiary threats and acts of violence. Col. North offers an explanation.

Because their silence has been bought with petroleum, none of the powerful — or the slavish media following them around — expressed any outrage or even concern when a radical Islamist group said that, “We say to the servant of the cross (the pope): Wait for defeat … We say to infidels and tyrants: Wait for what will afflict you. We will smash the cross … you will have no choice but Islam or death.” Nor did any of these “leaders” express concern that jihadists vowed to attack any “worshippers of the cross,” while throngs of enraged Muslims in several countries burned the pope in effigy. It was therefore hardly surprising that no one at the United Nations expressed even regret at the murder of Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an Italian nun, at a children’s hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Shocking, isn’t it?

As Fox newsman Eric Shawn says in his book The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America’s Security:

No longer can the U.N. be assumed to be doing what’s right. It has squandered its goodwill. It is up to us and to our true international partners to hold the U.N. to the ideals upon which it was founded…

It’s up to us to expect moral consistency. Nobody stands for that like the Pope.