Guterres’ speech is a perfect and frightening manifesto of the UN model’s submission to radical Islamism

We must extend our heartfelt thanks to Dr António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, for choosing, two days ago, to open the UN General Assembly with a farewell address centred on the principle of truth. The truth of what the UN has been during Guterres’s ten years in office is encapsulated in the words delivered by the Secretary-General last Tuesday to the UN delegates, which we might attempt to summarise with the title of a famous novel by Michel Houellebecq: “Submission”. The submission in question is the one that, with a certain straightforwardness, Guterres chose to lay bare in his chilling speech – a speech in which one need only connect the dots to understand what we are talking about.

Guterres, ever the model UN Secretary-General in upholding humanitarian double standards, in his manifesto on trampled human rights, the cruelty of war and civilians being targeted, chose to devote a mere half a line to 7 October (91 characters, including spaces). He chose to devote ten times as much space to Israel as to Hamas (1,100 characters, 4 per cent of the speech). He chose to emphasise the ‘spectre of ethnic cleansing’ which, according to Guterres, is being carried out by Israel in the West Bank, whilst devoting a grand total of zero words, zero lines, including spaces, to the scourge of anti-Semitism generated by the global Intifada, which has turned being Jewish into a mortal sin – in some cases even with the collaboration, in Gaza, of certain employees of a UN agency of which Guterres will surely have heard, UNRWA (we suggest that supporters of the Guterres agenda listen to the chilling speech given a few days ago at the UN by Neta Heiman Mina, daughter of Ditza Heiman, an 84-year-old Israeli woman who was abducted during the attack on 7 October 2023 and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza, 48 of which, according to her daughter’s testimony, were spent in the home of an UNRWA teacher). He chose to devote a grand total of zero words, zero mentions of a country notoriously renowned for its defence of human rights such as Iran, to which, during Guterres’s tenure, the UN system entrusted important roles precisely in the field of human rights (in 2021, Iran was elected to the Commission on the Status of Women, from which it was expelled in 2022 following the crackdown after the death of Mahsa Amini, and in 2023 the Iranian ambassador Ali Bahreini was appointed Chair-Rapporteur of the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council). He failed to mention the Houthi terrorists even once, despite the fact that the UN Secretary-General might have wished to entrust them with a commission on the defence of the law of the sea had he had more time. He chose to ignore entirely the threats facing persecuted Christians around the world, particularly in Africa. Finally, he denounced the horror of the conflict in Sudan, describing it in general terms as ‘a power struggle fuelled by external actors’.

The central theme of the Guterres model – and its subservience – can be clearly glimpsed in an omission that lies at the heart of the UN’s double standards: political Islamism and radical Islamism. The article discusses Sudan without mentioning the Islamist networks linked to the Bashir era, which remain one of the driving forces behind the violence in Sudan. There is a failure to mention persecuted Christians because doing so would mean having to denounce the horrors of Islamism. The Houthis are overlooked, Iran is swept under the carpet, Hamas is downplayed, and Israel is demonised because the UN’s algorithm, when dealing with global conflicts, functions effectively only if it chooses not to challenge extremist ideologies. No farewell could be more apt for the Secretary-General than the one offered two days ago: a UN subservient to dictatorships, specialising in pursuing double standards, incapable of defending those who try to rebel against the sponsors of terror. Thank you very much, dear Guterres.