The fallacy of ‘International Community’

In Britain today, politicians, the media, churchmen (of all denominations), civil servants, academics, and spokesmen for Islam habitually appeal to authority of “international community.”

I cannot recall many appeals to “international community” a generation ago, certainly not in the 1980s, when I was a young man serving in the British Forces during the Cold War, with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister.

It was obvious to most of us in the 1980s that there is no such thing as “international community.” There was, broadly speaking, the West (Judeo-Christian civilization), Communism, and the Islamic bloc (OIC).

Today the West has allowed itself to become economically and technologically dependent on Communist China, and indulges China in international forums such as the World Economic Forum.

At the same time, the Progressive/Woke movement is, like Communism, internationalist and ideologically opposed to the nation state.

The Islamic bloc has learned to play the West’s “diversity and inclusion” ideals behind the shield of “Islamophobia” and through the West’s soft moral underbelly: antisemitism. Add to this massive Gulf State funding of Western universities, with strings attached, namely Palestinianism/anti-Israelism.

Communism, which Lenin politically formalized as “scientific atheism,” cannot tolerate the belief that nations (symbolically 70 in the Bible) are to be arrayed on Israel, to be judged and healed by God of Israel at the end of history. The people must be educated away from such “opium of the masses” to the correct theory of history: “historical materialism.”

Today, although Communist China ostensibly allows “freedom of religious belief,” it polices and persecutes Christians. Sunday schools are forbidden, in fact religious education of children is forbidden. Those under 18 are not allowed in China’s churches. They must be educated to be atheists.

It seems to me, as a Christian, that nations, in their great diversity, are important to God. Providence will not allow them to dissolve. No great bloc of nations will endure. No Tower of Babel will endure. God’s great plan for mankind is a world of nations, not blocs and empires. Israel is central to the plans of God of Israel. And since the restoration of Israel in 1948, the Holy Land, for the first time in about 2,000 years, ceased to belong to an empire.

Culturally, the best of any nation can only come out of that nation, not least Israel. The worst of any nation can come from anywhere, and forming blocs of nations does not improve the culture or morality of those nations, but tends towards the lowest common denominator.

The Communist/Socialist view of the end of history is of a borderless world as the nation states wither away, and God of Israel is forgotten. It is a dangerous delusion. One only needs to compare the morality of de-Nazified West Germany to that of Stalinized East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ironically, today’s Communists/Socialists are, with the Islamic bloc, vociferously calling for the creation of a new state: “Palestine.” The reason is obvious. Project Palestine – “from the river to the sea” – is the means to destroy Israel, whose Biblical status is the ultimate humiliation of the Communist philosophy, and secular Progressivism/Woke, and Islamism.

Today we know that it was the propagandists of the Soviet Union’s KGB who invented the idea of a nation called Palestine, as the supposed ancestral homeland to a people called “Palestinians,” despite that fact that no state of Palestine has ever existed. In fact, ironically, during the British Mandate of Palestine, the Jews referred to themselves as “Palestinians” and the Arabs referred to themselves as “Arabs.” The founders and members of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra and the first Palestine Football Team (both founded in the 1930s) were all Jews.

From the time that Jordan occupied Samaria and Judea, including Jerusalem, following the Arab-Israel wars of 1948 until 1964, the occupiers did not call the region “Palestine”; they called it the “West Bank” of (River) Jordan. When Jordan took Jerusalem, Jews were violently expelled, and all but one of the 58 ancient synagogues of Jerusalem were destroyed, but the “Palestine” narrative did not exist until the internationalist Communists got involved.

The draft of the PLO charter was written in Moscow in 1964, and the KGB handpicked membership of the PLO.

Paradoxically, the Soviet Union was not always anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. After all, many secular Jews of Russia believed that Socialism, and the dissolving of nation-states, would be their salvation. Many of these Jews, of the Labor Bund, who had been a significant force in the Russian Revolution, were utterly opposed to Zionism. However, other Jewish Socialists provided the main momentum in forming the State of Israel, including the Kibbutz movement (arguably the only successful application of Communism, perhaps because it was voluntary and localized rather than planned and controlled by massive state power).

It is fair to say that, without the Socialists/secularists, not least the Kibbutzniks, the State of Israel could not have been formed in 1948. There simply was not sufficient support, or enough rolling up of sleeves, from the bookish religious Zionists.

In 1947, Joseph Stalin supported the Zionist movement, and supplied vital arms to the nascent Israeli army. Indeed, following Israel’s victory in May 1948, the USSR was the first country to officially recognize Israel. It seems that, briefly at least, Stalin saw Israel as a possible ally in the internationalist attempt to defeat the British Empire and the capitalist hegemony of the West.

Today, appeals to “international community” that are used to libel Israel come from way beyond the political left and the 57-state Islamic bloc. The KGB’s hope that Palestinianism would become globalized has been realized. The latent antisemitism of the West has flared up once again, as the KGB had hoped. And as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks elucidated, anti-Israelism is the new antisemitism.

Anti-Israel appeals to the “international community” now come from many quarters, including British politicians of left, right, and center. The UN in particular is a sacred cow, despite the fact that all who appeal to it know that the UN’s bodies such as the UNGA and UNHCR have, for decades, condemned Israel annually more times than all other nations combined, as catalogued here on the UN Watch database.

Nations that historically scapegoated Jews in their midst now scapegoat the sole Jewish nation in the midst of all nations. We read in the Bible that God of Israel set Israel (and Jerusalem) in the midst of all nations (Ezekiel 5:5 and Psalm 2 for example). This has never sat well with the nations, and from the Roman Emperors to, in our times, Pope Francis, Foreign Secretary David Camerson, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, the Ayatollah, and the leaders of almost all Muslim nations, Israel, with Jerusalem as the capital, must be undone. Iran, Turkey, and several Arab nations want to see Israel eliminated. The West wants what the Vatican calls the status quo.

It is obvious that Vatican’s status quo means any situation that precludes the Jewish restoration of the Eretz Israel and Jerusalem. During the centuries of Muslim rule of Jerusalem, the Roman Catholic Church took no interest in Jerusalem, which had become derelict and diseased in the Ottoman reign. But when in 1967 Jews regained Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, the Vatican suddenly called for the internationalization of Jerusalem, something the Vatican had never done in the 19 years since the British left the city and Jordan took it and purged it of Jews.

The Vatican – which formally recognized Nazi Germany by signing the Reischskonkordat in 1933 – did not officially recognize the State of Israel until 1993!

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Appeals to “international community” against Israel are variously ideologically-motivated, politically motivated, religiously-motivated, intellectually-lazy, naïve, and disingenuous.

I’m as critical of the leaders of the UK as anyone, but the idea that the morality of “international community” is superior to British morality is a dangerous fallacy.

If you gather the leaders of nations, such as the incumbent 18 states of the UNHRC (including China, Indonesia, Malawi, Albania…), to make a moral decision, that decision will be less good than any decision that could be made by a British leader with a moral backbone.

Personally, I never appeal to the authority of “international community” and the United Nations on any issue (including “world health” and “climate change”), and especially not on Zion.

If I were put in a room to debate and vote with representatives from China, Iran, “Palestine,” Malawi, Germany, Albania, Canada, USA, Brazil, (antisemitic) Norway… my moral judgement would not change. Every moral judgement I make is superior to that of “the international community.”