It's time to end the farce of the United Nations that generated Durban II.

Many international lawyers, professors, politicians and others continue to emphasize the importance and validity of international law in ordering relations among the nations of the world. Recent events clearly show the bankruptcy of international law and the lack of legitimacy of the United Nations and other international institutions.

The international community cannot deal with the outbreak of piracy near Somalia. The British navy and others refuse to capture pirates for fear that international law will require them to provide sanctuary and a life sinecure to the pirates.

The United States now plans to try the one pirate it captured. Undoubtedly, that will prove to all the extreme expense and difficulty in such prosecutions. A constitutional system designed for ordinary criminal prosecution of domestic crime does not fit well with piracy conducted half a world away.

The United Nations just sponsored a farce in Geneva where the clown prince of Iran spewed forth racist nonsense in a forum supposedly called to oppose racism. Of course, this flows easily from the UN's effort to outlaw free speech that "insults" religion sponsored by Islamic countries. Any objective view of reality would show that the parties most insulting other religions are Muslims and that the Qur'an itself constitutes the greatest source of insults of other religions.

Experts on international law continually call for prosecutions of Israelis and Americans for violations of international law and human rights while remaining silent as to conduct of Hamas, Hezbullah, al Qaeda and others.

Hamas launched thousands of rockets into southern Israel for several years; any of them could have easily landed in a kindergarten and killed dozens of innocent children. Silence greeted the conduct from the world community. When Israel finally acted to protect its people, the international law community suddenly found its voice.

We hear continual demands to prosecute George Bush and others in his administration for interrogating prisoners who had murdered thousands of Americans and planned to murder many thousands more. We now know that the interrogation techniques worked. The administration obtained information that it used to arrest al Qaeda operatives before they launched attacks on Los Angeles.

Far from indicating extensive torture as many would argue, the recently released legal opinions show an administration that limited enhanced interrogation to a few prisoners and attempted to protect those prisoners from abuse. Torturers simply do not concern themselves with the many issues agonized over in the memos.

The time has come to make radical changes in international legal structure. The United Nations and the traditional institutions of international law no longer have credibility. The United States and its allies have to rethink the entire system. That should begin with ending the playhouse on the Hudson before it generates a Durban III.