In 1648, the Swedish politician and diplomat Count Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son, "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"  Recent events in the United States and elsewhere amply justify the aphorism.  Here are a few of those events.

1. On January 1, 2016, Iran was voted for a three-year term a member of the 41-member executive board of United Nations Women (U.N. Women), a body created in 2010 dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.  Since the body works for the elimination of discrimination against women, it is not obvious what contribution can be made by Iran, a country where women cannot hold some government positions, where there are no laws against domestic violence, and where adultery is punished by stoning to death.  Iran is certainly familiar from its own experience with handing out punishment for women who expose parts of their body.

The Iranian attitude starts at the top.  The president of Iran himself, the supposed "moderate" Hassan Rouhani, according to reports, married his cousin when he was 20 and she was 14.

2. Interesting and fabricated history lessons have been provided by Palestinian learned authorities, including Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 11th year of his 4-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority.  The Bible tells us, he says, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham.  The Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet was invented more than 6,000 years ago.

His PLO colleague Mahmoud Al-Habbash, chair of the Supreme Council for Sharia Studies, differing a trifling thousand years over dates, declared that Jews were responsible for unfounded claims, myths, and rumors in saying that a Jewish Temple ever existed in Jerusalem.  Not so – the Palestinians have been there for the last 5,000 years, and Habbash's Palestinian forefathers are the monotheist Canaanites and Jebusites.

3. The venerable Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and is a busy individual, nominated Palestinian Marwan Barghouti for the Nobel Prize.  Barghouti is admired by many Palestinians as a would-be successor to Abbas, whose term is endless as president of the P.A.  However, the minor problem is that Barghouti is in Israeli jail, convicted for murder and three attacks that killed five people, and is serving five consecutive life terms for terrorist murder, bus bombings, and suicide attacks.  His Nobel Peace Prize speech would include his qualifications – as the leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in the Intifada started by Yasser Arafat in 2000 in the West Bank and as the founder of the Tanzim, the armed branch of Fatah.

In any case, Barghouti must await the democratic presidential call, which is somewhat erratic.  The Palestinian National Council, supposedly the legislative body, officially has 800 members.  It last met for a special session in 2009, but the last regular session was in 1996.  The PNC elects the PLO executive committee of 18 members, representing different factions, and thus, indirectly, the president.

4. Abbas Zaki, member of the Central Committee of Fatah, besides glorifying Palestinian terrorists who had performed "miracles" with knives and rocks in killing Israeli civilians, has told the truth.  The conflict with Israel, he asserted, is an uncompromising religious conflict over holy Islamic land (land of Ribat).  A Palestinian state on the 1967 borders (sic) is only the first stage in the program of the Palestinian Authority, which applies to gaining the whole of Israel.  When asked about Zaki's glorification of terrorism, the Danish foreign minister, Kristian Jensen, while admitting it was "inflammatory rhetoric," nevertheless regarded Fatah as "moderate."

5. With topsy-turvy logic, the Palestinian leaders, in search of peace, have named at least eight streets in Palestinian cites after Abu Jihad, co-founder of Fatah and the commander of al-Assifa, the armed wing of Fatah.  He was the planner of innumerable attacks inside Israel on both civilian and military targets.  Another peaceful approach by Yehia Mousa of the rival PLO group Hamas was the enigmatic statement, "we found it was important to implement the death penalty rule to maintain civil peace in society and to prevent cases of murder."  In fact, since 2007, Hamas has executed 67 people.

6. Palestinian spokespeople have finally revealed the ambitious Jewish conspiracy.  The immediate goal of the Zionist plans is to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, to replace it with the alleged temple, and to incite a religious war.  The final goal of the "children of Zion" is the military conquest of the world.

7. At the meeting of the World Health Organization on May 25, 2016, a resolution sponsored by the Arab group and the Palestinian delegation focused on one – only one – county.  The resolution was carried 107-8, with 8 abstentions and 58 not in attendance.  The 107 included the U.K., France, and Germany.  It declared that Israel violated the mental, physical, and environmental health of Palestinians.

The Syrian delegate called for a special WHO investigation into health conditions in the "occupied Palestinian territory" and "the occupied Syrian Golan" because Israel continues to experiment on Syrian and Arab prisoners with medicine and drugs and to inject them with pathogenic viruses.  He believes that Israel conducts secret medical experiments on Palestinian prisoners and poisons them.

The delegate did not explain why at that very moment Israeli hospitals were treating Syrians who had fled from the civil war in Syria and flocked to Israel.  His paranoia was unlimited.  His version of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy is that Jewish doctors make and spread diseases because 95 percent of the pharmaceutical industry is owned by Jews.  This of course is in addition to the Rothschild family, which owns more than half of the world's wealth, including the World Bank.  Did the Korean-born president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, know this?

8. Germans have surprised the world by hosting in June 2016 an auction held in Munich.  Among the featured items to be sold were underpants worn by Hermann Goering and socks worn by Adolf Hitler; some dresses of Hitler's lover, Eva Braun; and a brass case that held the cyanide capsule used by Goering to commit suicide.  Goering's silk underpants with blue monograph HG had a starting bid of $700, his cyanide case at $3,500.

9. On June 21, 2016, the grieving population of Orlando, Florida was given advice by Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney general.  She told the audience including the relatives of the 49 murdered by Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist, that the most effective response to terrorism is compassion, unity, and love.  Lynch had already drawn attention to the words of the killer by her continuing call, then sudden withdrawal, for redaction of the exact words, especially allegiance to the major Islamic terrorist organization,  that he used in his numerous messages.

Though Mateen had clearly proclaimed more than once to the Orlando police dispatcher that he had pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State (ISIS), Lynch told the audience that she did not know if she would ever narrow the killer's reason for his actions to one motivation.  People, Lynch said, often act out of more than one motivation.  Yet for most political observers, in the case of Lynch herself, it is not difficult to narrow down her behavior, and her refusal to utter the words "radical Islamist terrorism," to one motivation.