Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
07 September '11
http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=3095
On September 20, the vast majority of the 192 member countries of the United Nations will probably “recognize” a Palestinian state.
The “recognition” will not be accompanied with caveats about dismantling PA terrorist organizations such as Al- Aksa Martyrs Brigades or ending the incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis that pervades all levels of Palestinian society. There will be no requirements for demilitarization. Nor will negotiations by the PA to unite with the genocidal Hamas be curtailed. The Palestinians will not be obliged to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and will continue demanding the Arab right of return to it.
Renewal of negotiations with Israel are unlikely because the Palestinians realize that their goals can be more effectively achieved by leveraging international pressure on us to make further unilateral concessions - and dismantle us in stages.
This event will be followed by Durban III, a UN endorsed hate fest designed to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state. The principal participant will be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently predicted that the UN recognition of Palestinian statehood would represent the first step toward the inevitable elimination of the Jewish state. Like the preceding meetings in 2001 and 2009, this purportedly “anti-racist conference” will overwhelmingly concentrate on spewing venom against Israel.
The founders of the United Nations, who after the defeat of Nazism endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, could never have visualized that the organization they created would become controlled by dictatorships and tyrannies and transformed into a platform for promoting genocide.
This was exemplified by the Libyan representative serving as president of the UN General Assembly in 2009, succeeded in July this year by Qatar with Iran as a vice president; genocidal Iranian president Ahmadinejad repeatedly addressing the General Assembly as an honored guest; North Korea, renowned proliferator of nuclear arms, elected to chair the Conference on Disarmament; and Iran, notorious for stoning women for adultery, appointed to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
But nothing beats the bizarre UN Human Rights Council, 80 percent of whose members, according to the Freedom House index for 2010, are either “not free” or “partly free” countries. Not surprisingly, scoundrels are appointed to positions of authority. Thus we have Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Palestinian territories, who claimed that the US backed and executed the 9/11 attacks, and recently also posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on his website. The Advisory Committee is chaired by Morocco’s Halima Warzawi, who previously blocked an effort to condemn Saddam Hussein for gassing 30,000 Kurds. It also includes Jean Ziegler from Switzerland, who praises Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe and co-founded the “Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights” - the recipients of which included Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, Louis Farrakhan and Hugo Chavez.
The chatter about human rights initiated by tyrannical states that inflict monstrous injustices on their own people represents the ultimate hypocrisy. Examples abound: Libya moved a motion to “end all forms of racial discrimination”; Iran called on the US to ensure implementation of international humanitarian law; China demanded an end to “excessive force by law enforcement bodies”; and North Korea called for a ban on torture.
In this degenerate UN Human Rights Council, a pogrom environment dominates, with 70% of all resolutions directed against Israel.
This also applies to the General Assembly, where demonizing, delegitimizing and attributing all the woes of the world to the Jewish state is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, when Jews were blamed as the principal source of all the evils confronting mankind.
Daniel Pipes estimates the total number of deaths in world conflicts since 1950 to be in excess of 85 million.
The 50,000 deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict would thus account for less than 0.05% of this total. To this day, while hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world are slaughtered or denied elementary human rights, the hypocritical UN has not commissioned any Goldstone type reports to investigate such massacres, but shamelessly directs the bulk of its energies toward condemning Israeli settlements or construction in Jewish Jerusalem.
Alas, primarily due to realpolitik, the “enlightened” European countries - whose soil has been drenched with Jewish blood for 2,000 years, culminating in the Holocaust - are, at best, inclined to abstain, but more recently have been endorsing primitive anti-Israeli resolutions.
SO HOW should we respond to the impending vote on Palestinian statehood? We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we will never achieve justice at the United Nations. The combination of Islamic countries, rogue states and dictatorships guarantees that the most extreme resolutions against Israel will always be overwhelmingly carried.
Blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for this state of affairs because he failed to provide a “plan” is simply primitive political demagoguery. What “plan” beyond making suicidal unilateral concessions could conceivably satisfy the Palestinians? But we should not panic. Despite President Barack Obama’s ongoing policy of engaging and appeasing extremists and Islamic states, the US will almost certainly prevent the UN Security Council from imposing sanctions and boycotts against Israel.
Contrary to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s recent hysterical remarks, this is not a “diplomatic tsunami,” and we must take advantage of the UN platform to convey the case for Israel to our friends and allies.
We must bear in mind that the UN General Assembly can make proclamations, but it cannot “create” a state or change the status on the ground. Besides, in the absence of the IDF protecting the weak and corrupt PA, a genocidal Hamastan would displace it - a situation that even most European states would not wish to foist upon the region.
Today most Israelis would endorse a Palestinian state - provided Palestinians faced up to the issues mentioned in the opening paragraph of this column. Until Abbas is willing to recognize the Jewish state and forgo the “right of return,” even Obama will be obliged to exercise the US veto at the Security Council. And if the Palestinians resort to violence - Abbas has called for “Arab Spring-like popular resistance” - we must be prepared to overcome our adversaries as we did in the past.
On the positive side, there are rumblings in the United States Congress reflecting grassroots frustration with the annual $7.7 billion of American taxpayer funds being provided to the UN, despite the fact that the global body’s original noble objectives have been reversed and it has been transformed into a depraved organization.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the powerful Congressional House Foreign Affairs Committee, maintains that the UN no longer has any credibility as a force for peace in the Middle East. She objects to the US “paying one-fifth of the bills for the UN’s anti-Israeli activities including the UN Human Rights Council, a rogue’s gallery dominated by human rights violators who use it to ignore real abuses and instead attack democratic Israel relentlessly.”
She remarks that “at the UN, money talks and smart withholding works,” noting that in 1989 Yasser Arafat pushed for membership at the UN for a “Palestinian state,” but his initiative was stopped in its tracks when the George H. W. Bush administration threatened to cut off US funding from any UN entity that upgraded the Palestinian mission.
She has concluded that with the Obama administration refusing to leverage US funding to defend US interests, Congress must fill the void. Thus on August 30, with 57 co-sponsors, she introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act, which would terminate US contributions to any UN entity upgrading the Palestinian mission.
The bill would also require the US to disaffiliate and cease funding the Human Rights Council until it repealed its permanent anti-Israeli resolution. It would freeze contributions to UN activities related to the defamatory Goldstone Report and the Durban hate fest and suspend support for UNWRA until it ceased employing terrorists.
Ros-Lehtinen said she was promoting this resolution “for the sake of our ally Israel and all free democracies, for the sake of peace and security. And for the sake of achieving a UN that upholds its founding principles.”
The Senate will probably narrowly block this resolution, and the Obama administration has already bitterly condemned the bill, which it would undoubtedly veto.
But the fact that such a resolution could be submitted by the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee signals a growing frustration with the UN, which may sooner rather than later lead to a showdown with this obnoxious organization.
Congress is the bright light in the current difficult situation confronting us. In the long term, as the American public becomes increasingly disillusioned with the groveling behavior of the Obama administration toward the decadent and biased UN, there is hope that congressional intervention will ultimately succeed in employing US clout to bring an end to such outrageous behavior.
In the meantime, we should remain resolute and stand our ground.
ileibler@netvision.net.il
This column was originally published in the Jerusalem Post
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