The UN Minister of Propaganda Wants a Promotion

Shashi Tharoor wants a better job

The UN's Minister of Propaganda, Shashi Tharoor, has been all over the news lately as he pounds the pavement campaigning to succeed Kofi Annan as UN secretary general. That's right folks. The head of the UN's most bloated, inefficiently run bureaucracy, noted mainly for anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Semitic propaganda offerings, wants to run the whole shebang!

I've written quite a bit about Tharoor over the past year. So "let's look at the record," as on old pol once said

Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing

On his watch, the UN propaganda apparatus has sponsored hate-Israel "media events," one of which included the rabid anti-Semite Israel Shamir. See the link here, and note here how Reuters came to his defense, proving that a UN's flack's best friend is a UN hack!

Giving a platform to a Jew-hater wasn't enough for Tharoor. He had to top himself, and he did. The next hate-Israel fest featured the vicious anti-Israel polemicist Ilan Pappe. See my item here, and follow-ups here and here..

To keep the public record of the Pappe-fest nice and tidy, Tharoor's minions sanitized the transcript to eliminate the most extreme statements.

Waste and irresponsibility

Now, you have to admit, this is a pretty good record! But that's not all. Tharoor manages to run a useless propaganda ministry by employing no less than seven hundred paid flacks around the world. Four hundred of them are employed in New York. And no effort is being made to trim this obscenely bloated staff.

The dirty details emerged at a press briefing, see here, but received zero publicity.

While those seven hundred propagandists keep their noses to the grindstone planning hate-Israel parleys, Tharoor finds time to write books, no matter what else happened to be going on at the UN.

In recognition for his terrific work, Tharoor's department won a nice award from the UN for "promoting efficiency." I kid you not. Read about it here.

Even defenders of the UN were losing patience with the guy last year, as Annan was kicked around right and left and Tharoor was AWOL. After all, a flack's job is to, well, flack. You can't always rely on a supine UN press corps or its Saudi-dominated correspondent association to do your flacking for you.

So that's the Shashi Tharoor Platform. He has my vote. After all, he embodies what the UN is all about -- Israel-bashing and inefficiency. The right man for the job!

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