A Serious World in the hands of Comedians

Iran's President Whose only Reason for Coming to New York Is to Threaten Israel 

Every year the world is treated to the serious comedic spectacle that is the United Nations General Assembly in New York, USA.

In a world fraught with disaster, both human and natural, and a planet facing a climate change crisis that is accelerating the melting of the polar ice caps resulting in higher oceans levels and spelling potential imminent near future catastrophe for low lying countries, one would have thought that a gathering of contemporary world leaders in this day and age, would be a forum to place emphasis on finding solutions to global warming, increasing global food prices, rapid depletion of the earths fossil fuel reserves, the growing threat of international terrorism, the increased global income disparities both within and across nations, a rapidly increasing global population, the emergence of antibiotic resistant infections and many global problems that have the potential to accelerate the socioeconomic decline of the human race.

Netanyahu and His Bomb

Yet the UN General Assembly has over the years become the most expensive international talking shop in the history of the human race. These few days I have been on C-Span listening to speeches by the world's leaders and confronting the horrible reality that the world is increasingly becoming a sophisticated place with sophisticated peoples who are largely being represented and ruled by certified clowns.

Here was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the leader of a country which has the potential to become the main player in the Middle East, talking about democracy and world freedom in a country that is one of the most repressed countries in the world. A country where the opinions of a few religious mullahs can overturn the aspirations of its multimillion inhabitants in the blink of an eye. He is a leader in a country renowned for gigantic earthquakes and sitting on a huge reserve of inflammable oil and gas, but is just hell bent on the acquisition of nuclear stockpiles just a year after the catastrophic tsunami in Japan has exposed how dangerous nuclear technology can be in the face of natural disasters. Here is the leader of an expressly civilized nation calling for the elimination of an entire race of people, whose main crime was that they were led by historic persecution to find a country to call their own, with their claim to the land being based on the teachings of the holiest religious books in the area.

Arab Puppet Mahmoud Abbass

Here was Benjamin Netanyahu the Israeli prime minister, who was just too willing to launch another war in an area that is still reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and where the negative consequences of the Arab spring  has resulted in the insane proliferation of weapons in the area. Even the fact that the war this time around will be a blood bath of monumental proportions, given the insane arms build up in the area, does not seem to be registering to this political ideologue. He will meddle in American politics, to get another Republican leader who will once again waste taxpayers money on an adventure of death and whole scale destruction. The urgent need to prevent a disaster was the argument given for the Iraq intervention, and we all know how that turned out.

Africa Greatest Leader Fighting Cholera Bai Koroma

African leaders from countries steeped in poverty, misery, food deprivation and disease, use this forum to paint colorful pictures of situations back in their home countries that are far removed from any semblance of reality. While some of the cash strapped leaders will paint pictures of governments willing to tackle great challenges facing economic constraints, leaders from countries like Sierra Leone will paint pictures of economies on the verge of modernanization with impressive growth forecasts, while their citizens die from preventable diseases like cholera that are brought on by years of disregard for sanitation and allowing mountains of trash to build up in city streets, while allowing political cronies to cash monthly fat checks for waste disposal.

Sierra Leone's Monumental Development

Take the case of my country Sierra Leone and our president Professor Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma. He makes these yearly UN visits with a huge delegation of folks whose main purpose is to go shopping in New York at government's expense while sleeping in the most luxurious hotels the Big Apple can provide. He presents a picture of a country reborn, where all the citizens are living in peaceful bliss, the economy is growing at annual rates exceeding 35%, the mines are now working at full capacity and adding millions of dollars to the national coffers, and yet he still needs help to fight the worst cholera epidemic Africa has faced for close to a century. I really do not know of a way to describe hell in paradise as the paradox of our yearly bluff and beg routine demonstrates.

And what is it about these national walkouts When Israel starts talking, Iran will walk out. When Iran starts talking America and Israel will walk out. When the Palestinians start talking the Israelis will work out. The whole exercise is an adult indulgence in ceremonial childish behavior whose irritation is only equal to its ridiculousness. Even in my poor town of Segbwema we sit down and listen to our adversaries talk and consider it improper etiquette to walk out on somebody who is talking to you, even if you do not want to hear what hey want to say. But the United Nations General Assembly considers it now a high point to walk out as soon as your adversary is heading for the podium.

And you should hear the Arab nations continually gripe about the misery of the Palestinian people while the only thing they do for them is supply the with arms, bombs and ammunition to shoot at Israel and have the Jewish nation come down their heads like a dust storm in the Sahel. Arab intransigence and radical ideologies have left virtually no room for any peaceful coexistence with the Israelis and any Palestinian leader wiling to genuinely talk peace with the Jewish state is viewed by Arab leaders as a sell out. The fact that in next hundred years nothing good will happen in Palestine in the absence of peaceful dialogue is lost on Arab leaders who see Palestine as the only issue they have in common with their largely repressed electorates.

I do not support the continued Israeli occupation of occupied Palestinian lands, but by the same token I have deeply studied the thousands of years of Jewish persecution in the Middle East and Europe and sincerely believe that they too deserve to have an ancestral home. This earth was created for one and all and no people should be treated on this earth as if they were strangers from another planet. The Arab populations usually disguise their racial intolerance under the cloak of Islam and try to sell their political agendas as if they were Islamic agendas. Sane people have to learn to know the distinction between the two. Palestine is an Arab agenda that has no place for the existence of the Jewish people and has little to do with a war on Islam.

Our world leaders need to waste all these huge amounts of state and world resources to just engage in ego inflating and national posturing. There are clear and present dangers threatening the existence of man kind. World leaders need to emulate the examples of presidents Mandela, Clinton and Obama who are visionaries for seeking global solutions to the problems facing the world, be they the spread of racial and tribal intolerance, terrorism, climate change and global food insecurity. World leaders would be advised to leave this unnecessary posturing to kids in school playgrounds.

As I  write a large snake is reported to have killed 35 people in northern Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone government has turned to the Chairman of Traditional Witchdoctors Association Abdul Kamara to find an urgent solution to the problem. He has already said that it is witchcraft and the witch hunt is now on. The Witchdoctors are complaining that the president is the only one supporting their efforts and the health minister is not giving support of their majestic powers. If this were not true, it will be like writing about 1125 instead of 2012.