how to self-discredit in five easy pieces
THE UNITED NATIONS
![David Solway](volume_images/solway-self.jpg)
DAVID
SOLWAY
_____________________________________
MINORITY REPORTS
1.
As we all know, or
should know, the United Nations is an organization distinguished
chiefly by its propensity for scandals, for which its hospitality
is legendary: to name just a few, the Congo sex scandal, the
Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal, the $5.2 billion UNDP (United Nations
Development Program) scandal involving hiring irregularities
and violation of financial controls and competitive bidding
rules, and most recently its having allowed the North Korean
regime to use its bank account to transfer funds and, according
to the Heritage Foundation, “to facilitate payments to
a company that has ties to an entity involved in arms dealings.”
But the greatest scandal of all in its general proceedings is
its treatment of the state of Israel, to which it devotes fully
one third of its condemnatory resolutions and which it consistently
attempts to marginalize and exclude. A case in point: from 1947
to the present, the UN has passed 146 resolutions dealing with
the plight of the Palestinian refugees but not one referring
to the ordeal of an even greater number of Jewish refugees expelled
from their homes in Arab countries.
Let
us go down the list. The United Nations Environmental Programme
(UNEP) curiously refers to Egypt, with its nearly all-controlling
central government, its 60,000 laws (some relics of Ottoman
times), its fraudulently elected leaders, and its ban on free
assembly and the right of protest, as “a western-style
democracy” -- no doubt Israel must be a theocratic oriental-style
tyranny. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable
Rights of the Palestinian People refers in its September 2004
workshop to “such sterile paradigms as ‘Israel’s
self-defense’.” (The Palestinians are the only irredentist
group in the world with its own UN Committee, a privilege no
other stateless group, neither Tibetans, Kurds, Tamils or Basques,
currently enjoys.) The UN International Protection Workshop
calls for “a boycott of Israeli goods” without mentioning
Palestinian terror operations or systemic Palestinian corruption.
The UN Interreligious Mobilization Workshop approves of “challeng[ing]
Christian Zionism in moderate Christian communities.”
UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Swiss national Jean
Ziegler, calls on the EU to suspend its association agreement
with Israel; of the more than 190 places in the world with malnutrition
problems, Ziegler singles out the West Bank and Gaza, delivering
a highly selective report on the situation there while passing
over the devastation wrought by the Khartoum government on the
Darfur region. Indeed, Ziegler has defended the abysmal record
of notorious human rights abusers like Cuba and Libya, as well
as Sudan, while accusing the United States of every crime imaginable
including backing Israeli “state terror.” Interestingly,
Ziegler is a co-founder of the Moammar Khadafi Human Rights
Prize -- an award which he himself later received. He is not
so much a “special rapporteur” as a “special
friend” to some of the world’s worst abusers of
human rights.
Kofi
Annan in his opening speech to the General Assembly on September
21, 2004 cited only one country on earth for violating international
law -- Israel. Nothing on China in Tibet, Syria in Lebanon,
the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, Russia in Chechnya, Sudan in
Darfur (the word “Sudan” is never mentioned), or
Palestinian rocket attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli towns
and cities. In February 2006, Annan criticized Israel’s
policy of targeted killings of terrorists as “executions
without trial” -- he made no mention of the suicide bombings
of Israeli civilians, planned and carried out by these same
terrorists. Are these murderous forays, then, forms of legitimate
execution? And on June 14, 2006, referring to an explosion on
a Gaza beach that killed eight people and was almost to a certainty
caused by a Palestinian mine, Annan told the Al-Hayat
daily, “I don’t believe it is plausible that the
Palestinians planted charges in a place where civilians often
spend their time” -- which, in point of fact, is a common
Palestinian practice. UN envoys subsequently laid the blame
on Israel, a pro forma gesture, since they did not
examine the evidence put forward by the IDF nor, obviously,
did they peruse the full retraction printed by Germany’s
Sueddeutsche Zeitung which had originally accused Israel
of the atrocity.
The
UN human rights report, prepared by UN Human Rights representative
John Dugard and presented to the General Assembly in October
2004, charges that Israel is guilty of “massive and wanton
destruction of property” and calls for international sanctions,
but makes no reference to Palestinian rocket attacks against
Israeli communities such as Sderot, gunrunners’ tunnels
or suicide bombings. As keynote speaker at an emergency session
of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on July 5, 2006, Dugard
described Israeli conduct as “morally indefensible”
and called the Israeli arrest of Hamas cabinet ministers in
the wake of the June 25 crisis a violation of the Geneva Convention
article prohibiting the taking of hostages. He had nothing to
say about the event which sparked the crisis, the Palestinian
raid into Israeli territory and, yes, the taking of a hostage.
Dugard, we might recall, notoriously praised the Palestinian
terror groups for their “determination, daring and success.”
The UNDP, under UN deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown
(now plying his anti-Israeli animus from the UK Foreign Office),
has regularly transferred funds to Palestinian charities, such
as Zaka Jenin and the Tul Karem Charity Committee, known to
be fronts for terrorist groups. A typical example of the double
standard at work in UN deliberations, brokering peace at the
cost of Jewish lives, is its outcry against the IDF demolition
of “houses” used as weapons storage depots and sniper
emplacements in Rafah, the Gaza terrorist nest along the Egyptian
border, and its threat to brand Israel as a war criminal for
defending its citizens.
Moreover,
the UN can always be counted on to sandbag Israeli initiatives
in the field or pro-Israeli resolutions in the General Assembly.
The tepid response of Kofi Annan and the UN to the Hizbullah
attack on Israel in July 2006, coupled with calls for Israeli
“proportionality” -- this in the face of 15,000
Iranian and Syrian supplied missiles targeting Israel, many
of which were launched against Israeli towns and cities -- is
only another example of the institutional prejudice which governs
its affairs. When UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in
Lebanon) -- which had done absolutely nothing to prevent Hizbullah
cross border raids or the buildup of its rocket arsenal and
even suppressed video footage of Hizbullah incursions --
was struck during fighting in the summer 2006 war by Hizbullah
rockets that fell short of their targets in Israel, an officer
of the command post immediately blamed Israeli artillery fire.
When
an UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization) base
in southern Lebanon was mistakenly struck by the IAF in the
midst of a chaotic war zone, Kofi Annan, flouting both impartiality
and common sense, went on record as saying that Israel was guilty
of an “apparently deliberate” attack. Not only did
Annan not retract this accusation, he was conspicuously silent
when twelve days later Hizbullah rockets hit another UN command
post. And when the IDF launched a commando raid into Lebanon
on August 19, 2006 to intercept a transfer of Syrian arms to
Hizbullah -- an ongoing process from which the UN has studiously
averted its gaze and which ensures another and more bitter round
of hostilities -- this same perfidious windbag condemned Israel
for “a violation of the cease fire.”
Meanwhile,
UNIFIL forces under the direction of France threatened to fire
on Israeli jets conducting reconnaissance missions but has allowed
Hizbullah to restock its missile supply via Iran and Syria --
according to Time magazine, the terrorist militia now
had 20,000 short-range rockets in its arsenal. (Current estimates
have raised the number to 40,000.) New reports indicate that
tons of sophisticated weaponry, including long-range missiles,
have been smuggled across the Syrian border by truck convoys
operating at night. Yet the provision of weaponry is in clear
violation of UN Resolution 1701, brokered by Annan, which calls
for the disarming of all militias, including Hizbullah, and
especially of Paragraph 8 which embargos “sales or supply
of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized
by its government.”
Louise
Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to
the conflict by issuing a statement stipulating the “personal
criminal responsibility” under international law of those
“in a position of command and control” for violating
the “obligation to protect civilians during hostilities”
-- a thinly veiled threat against Israel’s leaders since
terrorists do not have fixed addresses and do not answer summonses.
Fresh from a “fact-finding” tour of the Middle East
in November 2006, Arbour had no trouble blaming Israel more
than Hizbullah for the summer war, deploring Israeli security
checks in the West Bank that are directly responsible for the
reduction in suicide attacks, and sympathizing overtly with
the Palestinians despite the numberless provocations emanating
from the Gaza Strip, the continued arms smuggling through the
Philadelphi Corridor, the kidnappings, incursions and Kassaming
of the southern Negev. (This is the same Louise Arbour who attended
the conference of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement (NAM),
chaired by Cuba, in Tehran on September 3, 2007, implicitly
giving her support to the Iranian crackdown on dissidents of
the regime and refusing to meet with members of the National
Council of Resistance in Iran. On the day after her departure,
21 political prisoners were publicly hanged.)
Ann
Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF, charged that Israel was
engaged in “the continued targeting of civilians, particularly
children.” Although 4000 Hizbullah rockets and missiles
fell on Israel and one quarter of the country’s
population -- including “children” -- was effectively
paralyzed, Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian
Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, isolated Israel for
“the excessive and disproportionate use of force.”
UN draft resolutions seeking to stem the conflict failed to
name Hizbullah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran, and made no
mention of terrorism -- indeed, in all the years of its existence,
the United Nations has not yet gotten around to defining terrorism.
UNHRC
voted on August 11, 2006 to condemn Israel for “massive
violations of human rights” in Lebanon, to investigate
the “systematic targeting and killing” of civilians,
and to assess “the extent and deadly impact of Israeli
attacks on human life, property, critical infrastructure and
the environment.” Again, no mention was made of the fact
that such “targeting and killing” was neither systematic
nor deliberate, that the “critical infrastructure”
was used to supply and to shield Hizbullah, that Israeli “life”
and “property” had been severely impacted, and that
many of Israel’s northern forests, also part of the “environment,”
had been set ablaze by rocket fire and would require fifty to
sixty years to regenerate. In fact, UNHRC, recently devised
to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission which hosted
“abuser nations” and was devoted mainly to the denunciation
of Israel, has to this date held four special sessions on Israel
and passed sixteen resolutions against the country without taking
on the real and flagrant human rights abusers in the world today,
with the single exception of objecting to the military crackdown
in Myanmar. The Council features two agendas at its annual session:
one devoted to Israel, the other to the rest of the world. Special
sessions may be called by one-third of the Council members,
that is, sixteen nations, but the Organization of the Islamic
Conference controls seventeen seats. When it comes to denouncing
Israel, which is for all intents and purposes its raison
d’être and practically its sole item of business,
UNHRC does not even wait to gather and assess the facts: the
investigative mission that it sponsored in November 2006 to
examine the shelling in Beit Hanoun in Gaza condemned Israel
prior to dispatching its task force to the region.
Before a single result was in, it had already decided, to cite
its resolution, on “the Israeli willful killing of Palestinian
civilians.”
In
its meeting of December 8, 2006, Israel’s old friend John
Dugard was once again up to his old tricks, siding with Pakistani
diplomat Tehmina Janjua who spoke on behalf of the Organization
of the Islamic Conference which proposed yet another anti-Israel
resolution. Its last two measures, adopted on June 19, 2007,
isolated Israel above all other countries for continued investigation,
placing the Jewish state on its agenda sheet for permanent review
while exempting the dictatorships in Cuba and Belarus from further
scrutiny. Strangely, all the major human rights violators have
been granted immunity. Dominated by Muslim (and African) states
and with European compliance, UNHRC has merely continued the
policy of its predecessor whose record it was intended to rectify;
in its first year of operation, it did not single out any other
state for criticism. Continuing the charade, in July 2007 Special
Rapporteur Martin Scheinin, while critical of the current conduct
of the UNHRC, dismissed its problems as merely transitional;
he then took Special aim at Israel’s security fence for
causing Palestinian suffering without offering any suggestions
about how else to prevent suicide bombers from crossing into
Israel and causing Israeli suffering. For the Council, it seems
Israel is only a part of a vast bureaucratic board game involving
counters and pieces, not real people. Plus ça change.
The
Council’s most recent hi-jinks are no less chilling. On
March 28, 2008, it passed another resolution, sponsored by Egypt
and Pakistan, imposing limits on the freedom of individual expression
-- a move, according to U.S. ambassador Warren W. Tichenor,
which “attempts to legitimize the criminalization of expression.”
(The resolution was supported by the Muslim and African member
nations; the European Union countries, in typical fashion, abstained.)
The intention was to modify international law in order to bring
it increasingly into line with Islamic law, trumping freedom
of expression with a moratorium on “defamation on religion.”
On June 19, 2008, the Council decreed that Islam cannot be criticized
in its debates -- a ruling that applies to all religions but
is clearly meant to pacify the three Islamic countries that
prompted the motion, Iran, Egypt and Pakistan. The UN’s
current Special Rapporteur on “contemporary forms of racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” is
Doudou Diène from the predominantly Muslim nation of
Senegal, whose mandate is to combat religious intolerance and
incitement to hatred. From the UN’s perspective, he has
performed admirably in his new billet. Highly critical of the
Danish government in the Mohammed-cartoon affair and of racial
conditions in the United States, he is characteristically silent
on anti-semitic cartoons published in Arab newspapers, textbooks
in Saudi Arabia and Egypt which preach hatred against Jews and
Christians, the Muslim-inspired genocide and slavery in Darfur,
the suppression of women and the refusal to permit religious
conversion in the Islamic world, and, of course, the policy
of radical Jihad.
Back
on August 31, 2006, Jan Egeland again, speaking for the UN (and
seconded by Amnesty International), accused Israel for the use
of cluster bombs in Lebanon, which he called “completely
immoral,” but did not breathe a word about Hizbullah rockets
packed with steel ball bearings intended to maximize civilian
casualties in Israeli communities. When, after receiving a shipment
of advanced Russian weaponry, Syria began to build up its military
infrastructure on its southern border in early March 2007, signalling
preparation for a possible future attack on the Golan Heights,
the commander of UNDOF (United Nations Disengagement Observer
Force), Maj.-Gen. Wolfgang Jilke, reported that he had not noticed
anything out of the ordinary! When the notoriously anti-Israeli
London daily The Independent accused Israel of using
uranium-tipped weapons in Lebanon, UNEP (United Nations Environment
Program) immediately sent twenty “experts”
to analyze soil samples -- the same UN which did nothing in
Rwanda, refused to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, has had nothing
to say about the Chinese conquest of Tibet or the Russian demolition
of Grozny, has been dithering on Darfur for years and has effectively
allowed Hizbullah to rearm. But it wasted no time in taking
the obviously biased Independent’s report seriously
and rushing to investigate the evil practices of its Chosen
People. No evidence was found to confirm these allegations,
as Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment
Program, later admitted -- though the publicity damage had already
been done and The Independent has not yet
retracted its slanderous accusation.
But
keep an eye on the news. Having failed to make this false charge
stick, other UN commissions, abetted by their cronies among
the world’s newspapers and NGOs, will launch fresh allegations
of Israeli malfeasance. Even as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
and Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh were issuing a joint
statement on December 1, 2006 promising that Israel was “on
the verge of disappearing,” the UN General Assembly approved
six pro-Palestinian resolutions blaming Israel for rejecting
Palestinian peace overtures when the opposite has been the case
on innumerable occasions -- all documented. (Nor, let us pause
to note, has the UN ever considered setting up a commission
to record the victims of Palestinian internal terror, which
has been rife for years.) Rather than take issue with Palestinian
terror, the UN General Assembly has just voted to establish
a registry office to record Palestinian complaints and claims
regarding the unfinished security fence, with a view to extorting
Israeli reparations and restitution; not a word was said about
UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools in the
Territories vetting textbooks exhorting Palestinian children
to violence and murder -- UNRWA was created to serve Arab interests
and has justly been called the Palestinian “welfare state
in exile” -- or about the plague of suicide bombings that
made the fence necessary in the first place, and no measure
was discussed to levy reparation and restitution from the Palestinian
Authority for the carnage wrought among Israeli civilians. UNRWA
has still to explain the admission made by its former Commissioner,
Peter Hansen, in a CBC TV interview on October 3, 2004, that
“I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll.”
On employing members of an avowed terrorist group proscribed
in many Western countries, Hansen commented: “I don’t
see this as a crime.”
Moreover,
the UN has chosen to ignore its own Genocide Convention under
Article III of which Ahmadinejad should be indicted for incitement
to genocide. As of this date, no action has been taken to subpoena
the Iranian President for threatening to “wipe Israel
off the map” -- quite the opposite, Ahmadinejad received
his third annual invitation to address the UN plenum. As the
late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once said, if a member
state proposed in the General Assembly that the earth was flat
and that Israel had flattened it, the vote would pass 157-5
with 11 abstentions. The UN has also refused to grant the Jewish
National Fund, an acknowledged world leader in global environmental
issues, the consultative status enjoyed by its 2,800 recognized
NGOs. Most recently, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the
Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, a title whose
length is exceeded only by the list of its members, convened
under the aegis of the European Parliament in Brussels to foreground
a host of anti-Israeli NGOs, which is their sole criterion of
admission. And the UN is now in the preliminary stages of planning
its second anti-racism conference, which, judging from its 2001
performance in Durban, South Africa, will surely become another
full-fledged anti-semitic hatefest. With Libya, Iran, Pakistan
and Cuba on the steering committee, with the approval of current
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the involvement of the
High Commissioner on Human Rights Louise Arbour -- the former
a self-interested and characterless career diplomat and the
latter a noted Israel basher who has bought into the narrative
of the far Left—and given the UN’s habitual practices,
we should expect nothing less. As if to confirm, on January
24, 2008, the UN Security Council proposed a Libyan-authored
draft resolution calling on Israel to rectify the situation
in Gaza, but refrained from mentioning the incessant rocket
attacks on Israeli towns that prompted the current crisis in
the first place. (When the statement was amended at the urging
of the US to better reflect the reality of the situation, it
was this same Libya that baulked.) On the following day, UNHRC
joined the burlesque by condemning Israel for the strife in
Gaza, again without referring to the prolonged Gazan rocket
barrage, the fifteenth such vote in the last two years during
which only one other nation, Myanmar (Burma), had been mentioned
-- once.
On
February 15, 2008, the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian
Affairs, John Holmes, added his voice to the anti-Israeli choir.
His expression of sympathy for the plight of the residents of
Kassam-ravaged Sderot did not prevent him from excoriating Israel
for the “grim and miserable” state of affairs in
Gaza. Holmes refers to Israel as an “occupying power”
that, as such, has the obligations of an occupying power toward
those whom it is occupying -- an absolutely blatant lie as Gaza
is a fully autonomous mini-state with an elected terrorist government
and broad citizen support, and one which continues to target
Israeli populations centers. Israel freely supplies 75% of Gaza’s
electricity from its Ashkelon generator, yet Ashkelon has been
the object of over 800 rockets fired from the Strip. Is there
any conceivable reason that Israel should serve its attackers’
energy needs, as it continues to do? Holmes does not address
this question. Nor does he seem fazed by the fact that an average
of ten rockets a day fall on Israel’s sovereign territory
-- while the UN debates Israel’s “overreaction.”
The best that can be said for him is that he is a victim of
cognitive dissonance; more likely, not to put too fine a point
on it, he is just another blinkered UN hypocrite.
The
same epithet would apply to Dutch diplomat Robert Serry, the
new UN special envoy, who in his February 28, 2008 report on
the region, cited the UN’s “principled opposition
to extra-judicial killing . . . in densely populated areas.”
This meant accusing Israel for its selective response to Kassam-launching
terrorists while remaining mum on the abomination that is Palestinian
terror. Of the Israeli civilians -- infants, the aged, students—wounded
and killed in Sderot and Sapir College in another Gaza barrage,
Skerry was characteristically silent. As was the UN Security
Council which failed to condemn the terror attack on a Jerusalem
yeshiva -- in the midst of a “densely populated area”
-- on March 6, 2008, which left eight young students dead and
ten wounded. On March 13, 2008, Ban Ki-moon once again joined
the chorus, condemning Israel for the use of excessive force
against the Palestinians, but typically failing to mention the
7752 rockets (to date) aimed at Sderot or the eight yeshiva
students gunned down in cold blood in Jerusalem, nor scrupling
to suggest what non-excessive force could possibly signify in
the circumstances. On March 27, 2007, Richard Falk, Emeritus
Professor of International Law at Princeton University, was
appointed to succeed the anti-Israeli John Dugard as UN Special
Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. Falk accuses Israel
of subjecting Gaza to “life-endangering conditions of
utmost cruelty,” describes Palestinian rocket attacks
on Israel as “rather pathetic strikes mainly taking place
in response to Israeli violent provocations,” and compares
Israeli actions in the Territories to the Nazis’ “collective
atrocity” (CounterCurren7s.org, July 7, 2007).
The latest addition to this scandalous farrago is Ban Ki-moon’s
toothless July 1, 2008 report on the implementation of Resolution
1701, which makes no mention of Hizbullah’s retaking of
its original positions on the ground and its amassing of rockets
and missiles to restock its arsenal, in clear violation of the
terms of the cease-fire.
Former
U.S. ambassador Patrick Moynihan described the UN as a “dangerous
place”; he meant for the U.S. but his summing up is far
more applicable to Israel. The Israeli Mission to the UN has
no say on policy-making and is frozen out of most committees,
which are allocated by region. The Asian Group, to which Israel
naturally belongs, has long refused membership to Israel in
clear violation of the UN Charter. The UN, to put it bluntly,
is a Mad Hatter’s tea party in which reality is supplanted
by irresponsible tomfoolery and a private agenda. How else could
it have allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency, which
reports to the General Assembly and the Security Council, to
elect Syria, reliably suspected of collaboration with North
Korea’s nuclear program, as Deputy Chairman of its General
Conference? As Charles Johnson has written, “The UN hit
bottom a long time ago, but they’re still digging”
(littlegreenfootballs.com). It is high time to face
the fact that the UN has been effectively taken over by the
Arab bloc with Chinese and Russian backing, while the United
States absurdly pays the lion’s share of the bills. One
may responsibly wonder whether the time has come not to defend
but to defund this partisan organization -- currently the 1-800
number for Islamic advocacy -- on the grounds of both irrelevance
and bad faith and have its remaining productive bodies assembled
under different auspices. There can be little doubt that, had
the UN of today existed in the 1930s, it would have made life
easy for the Nazis.
2.
The
jaundiced unscrupulousness that governs UN transactions with
regard to the Jewish state is true of the EU whose Irish president
at the time immediately accepted the distorted account by Palestinian
spinmeisters of the Israeli demolition of terrorist “houses”
in Rafah. Not only did Palestinian propagandists bump up the
casualty figures and dissemble the tactical policy of using
Palestinian civilians as cover for armed insurgents as well
as squaring the number of demolished houses, they also presented
film footage going back several years to substantiate their
claims of a current “massacre” -- the Jeningrad
canard all over again. Of course, little is said by the EU about
the reasons for the Israeli action, the use of these famous
59 houses as bunkers for terrorists and as camouflage for tunnels
through which illegal weapons, including Sager missiles which
can be used against civilian aircraft, mortar shells and RPGs,
are brought across the border from Sinai.
Indeed,
little is said about the fact that the majority of these “houses”
were not houses at all; as Major-General Doron Almog, former
chief of the Southern Command, revealed in an interview with
David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post on July 13, 2006,
“It wasn’t 59, and it wasn’t houses; it was
unroofed kinds of storerooms/yards.” Any calculation of
truth potentials, respecting IDF officers in the field on one
side and EU apparatchiks and Palestinian operators on the other,
should dispose us to credit the former.
Little
is said about the point-blank shooting of a pregnant Israeli
woman, Tali Hatuel, and her four young daughters, Hila (11),
Hadar (9), Roni (7) and Meirav (2), by Palestinian gunmen operating
out of Rafah, unless it is to establish a “moral equivalency”
between the Palestinian targeting of civilians and the Israeli
effort to protect them. Little is said about the two toddlers,
Dorit Aniso and Yuval Abebeh, aged two and four, slain in a
Gaza-launched rocket attack in the western Negev on September
30, 2004, who were buried in a small column in the middle pages
of our newspapers. Little is said about the six Israeli youngsters
wounded by mortar shells in Neveh Dekalim or about the twenty
three victims of the Jerusalem no. 2 bus bombing in 2003, most
of whom were children. Nary a word about Yehudit Pesachov and
her seven year old grandson Omer, killed like so many others
by a Hizbullah Katyusha -- though TV news cameras zoomed close-up
on a ledger page inscribed with the names of Lebanese dead --
“this was a housewife,” said the commentator, pointing
to a handwritten scrawl -- for all the world to see. Little
is said about Hamas deploying Palestinian children in Jabalya
as human shields to protect their units of rocket launchers
from Israeli defensive air attacks. Less is said about the eleven
year old boy tricked into carrying a package containing a bomb
through a checkpoint, which was luckily discovered and rendered
harmless by a security guard before it could be detonated by
remote.
Almost
nothing is said about the British contractors who were the victims
of threats and intimidation from the Palestinians in response
to their efforts to build new, European-standard houses for
the inhabitants of Jenin, since the Palestinian propaganda machine
would then no longer be able to blame Israel for the fact that
people have been languishing in the “camps” (really,
towns) for decades -- which is not an Israeli responsibility
but a function of deliberate Arab policy, in collaboration with
the United Nations, to keep the refugee question alive in its
prolonged campaign against the Jewish state. Even less is said
about the Israeli right to defend its northern borders against
Hizbullah armed aggression -- Britain equivocates, Spain chastises,
France pontificates, Norway does its Quisling act, Finland wrings
its hands, though not one of these nations would remain quiescent
were their soldiers being abducted and rockets and missiles
raining down on their communities.
The
same applies to Israel’s southern border. Even Canada
got into the business of damning Israel despite -- or because
of -- the new direction in Conservative government policy. When
the Gaza cease-fire brokered between Israel and the Palestinians
at the end of November 2006 was immediately shattered by Islamic
Jihad, the Globe and Mail, once Canada’s “national
newspaper,” extenuated the violation as involving a mere
“handful of rockets”; altogether, eleven Kassams
had been fired at Sderot and Ashkelon. What would the Globe
and Mail have said, one wonders, if eleven missiles had
been aimed at Toronto from across the Quebec or American border
-- not to mention the more than 4000 Kassams that have targeted
Israel since the Gaza disengagement? And since the “cease-fire”
went into effect, the IDF has disarmed over 40 bombs planted
along the Gaza-Israel border. So it goes.
As
for the European press, as was to be expected, it scarcely took
notice of this latest inconvenience. Indeed, by manifestly favouring
the Palestinian narrative, the Europeans only contribute to
the growth of the terror industry. And by refusing to add Hizbullah
to the list of terror organizations, the European Council allows
its member countries, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution
1373 which prohibits member countries from subsidizing terrorism,
to continue transferring funds to Hizbullah and to shelter its
European assets. This de facto capitulation to the
terrorist enterprise would have occurred, mutatis mutandis,
in Canada if the recommendations of a Liberal/NDP “fact-finding”
mission to Lebanon in August 2006, that Hizbullah be taken off
the terrorist list, had been adopted. France’s recent
hosting of a political conference to which Hizbullah was invited
as a legitimate participant is only another move in
this direction. According the website Realité-EU,
citing information from Germany’s Federal Minister of
the Interior, the immigrant Shia community “supports Hezbollah
in Lebanon by fundraising and transferring money. The organization
‘Orphans Project Lebanon e.V.’ conducts fundraising
activities in Germany and is part of the Lebanese Al-Shahid
Association, which provides for the families left behind by
Hezbollah fighters and suicide bombers.”
One
should expect little in the way of political wisdom or moral
clarity from the three major European nations. British parliamentarians
are gradually softening their stand on terrorist outfits like
Hizbullah and Hamas. French president Nikolas Sarkozy, on whom
so much hope was initially placed, gives every indication, despite
the typical PR persiflage, of following in the footsteps of
his scheming and weak-willed predecessors and doing the bidding
of the Quai D’Orsay. While breaking off relations with
Syria and voicing opposition to the regime in Iran, he has nevertheless
signalled his willingness to construct nuclear plants in several
Middle Eastern countries. This should have been foreseen from
the start, France being France. At the same time, France’s
Total Elf Fina, one of the top four oil companies in the world,
cooperates fully with Iran despite its status as a rogue regime
intent on asserting its hegemony in the Middle East and “wiping
Israel of the map.” Meanwhile, reports have surfaced that
50 German companies are shipping nuclear materials to Iran via
Russia for use in the Bushehr nuclear reactor.
The
European Union has once again gotten into the act with no evident
objection from its member countries. The present Commissioner
of its External Relations office, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, while
paying lip service to “Israel’s need to defend its
citizens” from Gazan rocket fire, deplores the “collective
punishment of the people of Gaza” by the Israeli government,
which is thus not really permitted “to defend
its citizens.” Individual nations have once again denounced
Israel for using “disproportionate force.” London-based
Amesty International condemned Israel for carrying out retaliatory
strikes in Gaza “with reckless disregard for civilian
life,” entirely scanting the fact that the terrorists’
rocket crews intentionally operate in populated areas and sanctimoniously
claiming that the failure of Hamas “to prevent attacks
on Israeli civilians” does not justify Israel’s
reaction. What then would constitute the use of “proportionate
force”? What would be a non-reckless way of replying to
the relentless, daily attacks on Sderot, the Gaza-belt kibbutzim
and now Ashkelon?
And
where is the outcry against the European Union lending its support
and financial assistance to the planned 2009 “Durban II”
conference which, like its predecessor, will seek to demonize
the Jewish state? The Europeans nations have agreed to contribute
most of the funding, have accepted the rules set up by the Organization
of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which will prevent reference
to freedom of expression while absolving the world’s true
racist nations under cover of the Islamophobia gambit, and has
agreed to allow the planning committee (Libya, Iran, Cuba, Norway,
South Africa, et al.) to decide upon the venue and to determine
the membership list, which will include many of the dubious,
out-and-out anti-semitic NGOs that participated in Durban I
(the Palestinian Human Rights Organization, the International
Islamic Relief Organization, etc.).
EU
member countries similarly support a swarm of prestigious, ideologically-oriented
NGOs, such as Amnesty International (which has published more
reports on Israel than on Sudan), Human Rights Watch, Christian
Aid, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, to mention
only a few, in their one-sided and badly-researched condemnations
of Israel -- Holland, Ireland, Switzerland and Norway are particular
offenders in their contribution to such unvarnished Machiavellianism,
not to mention peaceable Finland that subsidizes, to the tune
of millions of euros, the Palestinian educational curriculum
which promotes the demonization of Jews and Israel. (Norway,
true to its tradition of siding with the enemy, has become the
first Western country to recognize the Hamas government and
has resumed direct transfer payments to the terrorist regime.)
Little is said about the terrorists and suicide bombers whose
efforts are euphemized as “resistance tactics” and
“martyrdom operations.” These same human rights
organizations also had little to say about the intra-Palestinian
killings during the Winter 2007 Hamas/Fatah clashes in Gaza.
Two-year old Yehya Abu Bakreh did not make it to international
prominence, presumably because the Israelis had nothing to do
with his death. Nary a peep from the International Solidarity
Movement, Human Rights Watch, the major European newspapers
or any of the ramifying committees and agencies about the 12-year
old boy killed by a stray bullet during another bout of Palestinian
mayhem in Gaza City on April 23, 2007 -- the bullet could not
be traced to an Israeli gun. Almost nothing in the international
press about the three women and the 14-year-old boy killed in
Gaza city in a Hamas attack on the home of a Fatah official
on June 11, 2007. Nor was there any outcry over the desecration
of mosques stormed by Fatah gunmen to flush out Hamas snipers.
Not a word about Hamas fighters stopping an ambulance and shooting
its wounded occupant, Nabil Jarjir, a member of the Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades, killing him instantly. Children, mosques, ambulances
-- few of these figure in the reports of European and most Western
agencies and media outlets unless, of course, the Israelis can
somehow be implicated.
And
still less is said by those who condemn the security fence,
built to protect Israeli citizens against suicide attacks, about
the wall being built by the government of Thailand -- a wall
higher and longer than the Israeli barrier -- to cordon off
two million Muslims living in the south of the country. In fact,
the Israeli fence pales in comparison with some of the national
walls and barriers listed in The Atlantic (March 2005),
including, among others, the “Wall of Shame” dividing
Morocco from Western Sahara (1,500 miles), the electrified fence
between Botswana and Zimbabwe (300 miles), and the soon-to-be-completed,
ten-foot-high barrier along the entire border between Saudi
Arabia and Yemen, built by the Saudis to discourage terrorist
infiltration! As Alan Dershowitz points out in The Case
for Peace, security fences have also been built by India,
Cyprus and even by the United Nations which “installed
a security barrier to protect Kuwait from Iraq.” Nor,
for that matter, has the righteous indignation against such
barriers prevented the UN from constructing a security fence
around its headquarters in New York. And oddly enough, no mention
is made of the wall built by Egypt to check the flow of Gazans
into the country. None of this was given consideration when
the World Court in The Hague, misnamed the International Court
of Justice, passed judgment against Israel for undertaking to
defend itself.
Nor
is the slightest attention paid to the fact that in the one
area where there is no significant barrier, along the border
between the Eygptian Sinai and Israel, over one hundred suicide
bombers, kidnappers and weapons experts were apprehended by
Israeli Security and eleven terror rings were dismantled in
2006 alone. The Palestinian suicide bomber who killed three
Israelis in Eilat in January 2007 infiltrated through this weak
point. The terrorist who self-detonated in a shopping mall in
Dimona in February 2008, killing one person and injuring 38
others, may have infiltrated through the open border with Egypt
after the Rafah wall was demolished by Hamas. (Another theory
is that they came from the area of Hebron where the security
barrier remains uncompleted.) The EU -- and, of course, the
UN and the bristling legions of “Rights” organizations
-- have been predictably silent. Adding to the devil’s
brew, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has been consistently
critical of the Israeli barrier, the most likely reason being
that it saves Jewish lives. Naturally, there is not a word from
Solana, a Spaniard, about the fences built by Spain with EU
funding and over Moroccan objections around Ceuta and Melilla,
the Spanish enclaves on the North African coast, to keep out
Arab refugees. Meanwhile, the UN continues to promulgate complaints
about the security fence separating Palestinian farmers from
their fields; that, absenting the fence, Palestinian terrorists
have the annoying habit of separating Israeli citizens from
their lives is obviously a matter of no importance.
When
it comes to speaking truth, little is said. And when it comes
to speaking sense, practically nothing.
Related
articles:
Tariq
Ali: Letter to a Muslim
Irshad
Manji: Faith Without Fear
Secular
Islam on the Rise
Edward Said: Chronicle of an Infitada Foretold