A Podium for Genocide
September 26. 2026—Netanyahu walked to the rostrum with an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant still hanging over him like a joke nobody was laughing at, and he called the delegations that walked out on him “moral cowards.” Think about the arithmetic of that sentence for a second. A man accused, by the highest court humanity has managed to build, of orchestrating the destruction of a captive population, calling other people cowards. And the room let him. The translators translated. The cameras rolled. Somewhere in Gaza a mother was digging with her hands while Netanyahu kept smirking that smirk, unarrested.
Two days before that, Trump had used the same podium to muse aloud about whether to “annihilate” Iran and drive ninety million people “into hell with no chance of survival.” He said it the way I’d wonder aloud whether I want fries or spaghetti. The Canadian prime minister scrolled his phone. Reporters counted the empty seats.
Nobody actually reflected on the absurdity and total moral collapse of the moment: that a U.S. president, standing at the institution supposedly built to prevent exactly this, was indirectly threatening an innocent people with nuclear annihilation. Two days later a prime minister overseeing modern history’s most brutal genocide stood in the same spot, pontificating.
People will tell you the UN is a “forum.” A “space for dialogue.” An “imperfect but necessary” whatever. I’ve heard the phrases my whole adult life. They said the same things about the League of Nations while Mussolini was gassing villages in Ethiopia and Japan was tearing through Nanking. Institutions built to prevent atrocity that instead sit politely through it are not neutral. There is no neutral. You either interrupt the mass murder or you lend it legitimacy.
Decades of resolutions and “plausible” genocide accusations have done nothing. Zero. Brown University has documented that the American empire’s war on terror has killed millions. The UN stood by, passed some resolutions, and sometimes even greenlit the killing.
A global display of moral cowardice
I don’t buy the line that the UN is broken. Broken implies it was ever meant to work the way we were told. Look at what it actually does, consistently, decade after decade: it launders Empire. It gives the powerful a place to say their crimes out loud in diplomatic language and walk out through a side door absolved.
The delegates who got up and left when Netanyahu started talking… That was the only honest gesture of the whole week. And even that was choreography, because they’ll be back next September, and he or someone worse will be back next September, and Empire’s mass murder will continue next September.
And in the backrooms, they will all kiss Netanyahu’s feet and sign fresh arms deals for weapons field-tested on Palestinian children.
Disband the UN
And this is what I cannot get past. This is the part where my brain just stops working. The United Nations was founded, in 1945, for two reasons and two reasons only: to prevent another genocide, and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. Those were the ghosts it was built to keep buried.
The UN was built out of the ruins of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And this year, in the span of forty-eight hours, on that same stage, under that same blue flag, we watched a man credibly accused of genocide take the microphone, right after we watched a nuclear-armed president openly float the annihilation of a country of ninety million. The two founding nightmares of the institution, delivered as keynote addresses, back-to-back, to polite applause. And everyone just went along with it. Filed their stories. Attended the receptions. Talked about “tone” and “walk-outs.”
How? How is this thing still standing? How has no serious government stood up and said the obvious, which is that an institution that hosts the exact horrors it was built to prevent has no reason to exist anymore? Disband it. Salt the ground. Put something honest in its place or put nothing at all. Because whatever this is, it is not protecting us.
—BettBeat’s Newsletter, September 26, 2026
https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/a-podium-for-genocide-and-the-atom?utm_source=post-email-