What really smells at the U.N.

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That dynamic duo of demagoguery -- Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran -- visited the United Nations earlier this month. Their outrageous addresses before the U.N. brings to mind the definition of "demagogue" proffered by H.L. Mencken. He said a demagogue was "one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." Thus, any reasonable person who failed to walk out of the U.N. as these two leaders babbled on deserve the label of "idiot."

It is interesting to note, at a time when Mr. Chavez and Mr. Ahmadinejad respectively suggest our president is Satan and America the Great Satan, when they criticize U.S. leadership as responsible for world instability, when they charge the U.S. with being oppressive -- at this very same time something demonstrative of America's real standing in the world community caught scant notice.

While these oppressors of human rights lashed out at the U.S. with their verbal venom, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees -- an agency within the same international body the two presidents were addressing -- reported the U.S. had overtaken France as the country most sought out by asylum-seekers.

Not Venezuela, not Iran and not even France (last year's effort by Islamic extremists to burn Paris may have accounted for a 41 percent drop in such applications) but, rather, the United States had become the most sought-after nation by those abused of individual rights and fearing for their lives.

Yet, there before the U.N. stood these two derelicts who, despite the vast revenues generated by their oil resources, neglect to provide their own people a better quality of life. Mr. Chavez, for example, has chosen to focus Venezuela's oil riches on buying him an international stage on which to court world favor rather than maximize oil revenues to improve conditions at home.

Voted into office democratically, Mr. Chavez has chiseled away at his country's democratic foundation, restricting free speech and otherwise minimizing human rights -- even inviting Cuban intelligence and military representatives into Venezuela to assist him in this endeavor.

And while simultaneously embracing Iranian President Ahmadinejad at the U.N. and criticizing President Bush as the devil whose "sulfur" he could still smell from Mr. Bush's earlier visit, Mr. Chavez clearly demonstrates his irrationality and inability to wake up and smell the coffee.

For only a rational person could see the hypocrisy of infidel Hugo Chavez embracing Islamofascist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in jointly condemning infidel Christian President Bush. Ironically, America's fight in the Global War on Terrorism shields Venezuela and other countries of the region from the eventual world domination by Islam and its laws so vigorously sought by the likes of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

And, speaking of smells, Mr. Ahmadinejad fails to smell the roses -- for the picture he tried to paint in his U.N. speech, alleging the U.S. and Israel actually control that international body while U.S. influence impacts the Security Council and Iran, simply is untrue. In fact, for Iran the picture at the U.N. has been quite rosy for decades, through the influence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), where U.S. and Israeli control has been totally lacking.

The good intentions of NAM -- a block of nations originally aligned neither with the U.S. or the Soviet Union -- were derailed as early as the 1960s when the death of India's Jawaharlal Nehru enabled Cuba's Fidel Castro to gain influence and bring it into step with Soviet policy. In 1979, Moscow started the U.N.'s anti-Israel assault with its "Zionism is Racism" resolution -- to curry favor with the Arab states -- an effort since mimicked by the General Assembly and its offshoot organizations.

The successful continuation of this anti-Israeli initiative by the General Assembly is evidenced by the U.N.'s failure to formulate resolutions on critical issues such as Darfur while, as demonstrated at the U.N.'s last session, passing without hesitation 23 "country-specific" resolutions, 19 of which dealt with Israel alone.

The United Nations also failed in its last session to define "terrorism," thus enabling countries such as Iran to continue supporting it without concern. And, with Security Council members China and Russia in bed with Iran, there has been little support for economic sanctions against Tehran for failing to stop its nuclear enrichment program. Thus, Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim of U.S. and Israeli control of the United Nations is preposterous.

Mr. Chavez was right about one thing -- something at the U.N. smells. But it is not sulfur as he alleged. Sulfur smells very much like rotting eggs -- which may well have been what offended the nostrils of this lightweight leader. For there is indeed something rotting at the U.N.: first, that respectable members of the international body would have remained present without objection during the disgraceful Chavez/Ahmadinejad diatribe; and, second, that five years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, these same leaders have failed to smell the smoke of the Islamofascist fire raging around them to take unified action to prevent it from consuming every non-Islamic nation on planet Earth.

James G. Zumwalt, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf and Vietnam wars, is a contributor to The Washington Times.