SECURITY FENCE HYPOCRISY

Saudi Arabia's Berlin Wall: A Monument to U.N. Hypocrisy (NYSun)
"Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead with plans to build a fence to block terrorists from crossing its 560-mile border with Iraq -- another sign of growing alarm that Sunni-Shiite strife could spill over and drag Iraq's neighbors into its civil conflict," the AP reports (or more accurately spins as the Saudis would want).

Here's the story:

The barrier, which hasn't been started, is part of a $12 billion package of measures including electronic sensors, security bases and physical barriers to protect the oil-rich kingdom from external threats, said Nawaf Obaid, head of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an independent research institute that advises the Saudi government.

The ambitious project reflects not only concern over terrorism but also growing alarm over the situation in Iraq, where U.S. forces are struggling to prevent sectarian violence from escalating to full-scale civil war between that nation's Shiite majority and Sunni minority.

This Saudi fence could be considered a monument dedicated to the hypocrisy of the United Nations. Once completed and viewed together with the more high profile security fence Israel has built, the monument will be a testament to the convoluted justice of the United Nations.

Israel's security fence was infamously declared "contrary to international law" by the International Court of Justice in a July 2004 "advisory opinion." The Court -- "international" and "just" in the same United Nation's tradition of Libya being declared fit to chair the Human Rights Council -- ignored that Israel built its fence in response to a brutal wave of terrorist attacks. Instead the Court focused on the difficulty the fence posed for the Palestinian Arabs. To the United Nations preventing thousands of Israeli deaths and injuries paled in comparison to a longer walk to work for Palestinian Arabs.

The Saudis -- with the AP willingly helping them along -- are trying to spin their fence as an anti-terrorism measure too. But it's not the infiltration of terrorists that the Saudis are really worried about. It's the infiltration of freedom and democracy.

Terrorists are frequent welcome visitors to Saudi Arabia. They go there to collect money for terrorist operations across the world. It's the pact with the devil the House of Saud made with the Wahhabis: the aristocrats rule while the radical clerics preach and fund jihad across the world.

The Saudis are really modeling their fence on the Berlin Wall. Like the Soviets who built their wall to keep East Germans from seeing and escaping to the freedom of West Germany, the Saudis similarly fear a fully functioning free and democratic Iraq. The Saudis see a free and democratic Iraq as a real threat in the future, so they are starting to build now.

The Israelis and the Saudis aren't the first to build security fences. India has a fence in "disputed" Kashmir. Finland has one on its border with Russia. The British have fences all over Northern Ireland. But what's striking in this instance is what the comparison between the two fences says about the United Nations. Only at the U.N. is a fence used by a democracy to protect its citizens from terrorism ruled illegal, while a fence used by a totalitarian regime to imprison its citizens doesn't even provoke a peep.

Unlike previous U.N. injustices -- its culpability in the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Darfur; its role in the Oil-For-Food scandal in Iraq and the Sex-For-Food scandal in the Congo, and so on -- here there is a fitting monument: A fence across the desert skyline.