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EYE on the UN

A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

March 26, 2008: Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, named by unanimous vote to a newly created position, U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs -- calls for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Sanctioning Human Wrongs, What is the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights doing in Iran?
Anne Bayefsky, National Review, September 7, 2007
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour traveled to Iran last week to listen attentively to Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a human-rights meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, currently chaired by Cuba. While Arbour was hobnobbing with anti-Semites, butchers, and anti-democratic forces from around the world, Iranians were being prepared for public hangings. The Iranians were delighted at Arbour's visit.

Wash. Post Editorial, Aug 12, 2006: UN Human Rights Council: Even Worse Than Before

Anti-Israeli Past Is Present at the UN's Human Rights Council - Anne Bayefsky
The credibility of the flagship of UN "reform," the newly created Human Rights Council, sunk during its first session, which ended on June 30. When the Council replaced the discredited Commission on Human Rights, serial human-rights abusers were elected members right from the start. The Council decided that the program for the first session should begin with the "human rights situation in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine." The Council placed criticism of Israel permanently on the agenda of all future sessions when it gave the special investigator on Israel what amounted to a permanent mandate. On its final day, the Council passed just one resolution condemning human-rights violations by any member and directed it at Israel.
    When it was all over, the Council decided to hold its first special (emergency) session within a few days - on Israel. A decision by the old Commission to hold a special session required a majority vote; at the Council, only one-third of the 47 members are required. The 17 Islamic members alone satisfy the new requirement. (National Review)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, July 7, 2006]

W.’s U.N. Mandate - Anne Bayefsky (National Review)

The day of reckoning has come. In an election that turned so much on values, what values does the U.N. promote? To name a few, the U.N.'s primary human-rights body, the Commission on Human Rights, includes such role models as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Not surprisingly, of 86 separate votes held at the 2004 Commission, the U.S. was in the minority 85 percent of the time. Reports estimate that more than two million people have been killed in Sudan over two decades of conflict, 70,000 have been murdered in the Darfur region since March, and another 1.6 million persons are currently displaced. But there has been no U.N. General Assembly emergency session on Sudan, just as there wasn't for Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. That's because the Assembly's emergency sessions are reserved for denouncing Israel, the "tenth" emergency session having now been "reconvened" 13 times in the past seven years. Instead, the U.N. has sent a commission of inquiry to Sudan to "determine whether or not acts of genocide have occurred or are still occurring" and to report in three months. Zhila Izadi, a 13-year-old Iranian girl, is currently under a sentence of death by stoning for the crime of being raped and impregnated by her brother. But the U.N. response to a criminal "justice" system that stones, amputates limbs, and publicly hangs children was to abolish the post of U.N. investigator of human-rights violations in Iran in April 2002. So much for values.

The U.N. thinks the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the greatest impediment to world order — not a nuclear Iran, not a bellicose North Korea, not the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists, and not violent Islamic fundamentalism.

The U.N. claims the root cause of militant Islamic terrorism the world over is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, while in fact the occupation results from failed (and continuing) Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish state.

ALSO SEE: Your Tax Dollars at Work : The U.N. discovers the cause of anti-Semitism: Jews, Anne Bayefsky (WSJ)
 

Terrorism's Silent Partner at the UN - Joshua Muravchik (Los Angeles Times)

• This month, the UN Security Council voted to condemn terrorism in a resolution introduced by Russia. But the convoluted text and the dealings behind the scenes that were necessary to secure agreement offer cold comfort to anyone who cares about winning the war against terrorism. Even after Beslan and after Madrid and after 9/11, the UN still cannot bring itself to oppose terrorism unequivocally because the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which comprises 56 of the UN's 191 members, defends terrorism as a right.

• The U.S. delegation tried to get language into the resolution stating that the deliberate massacre of innocents is never justifiable in any cause, but this was rebuffed by Algeria and Pakistan, the two OIC members currently sitting on the Security Council.

• For eight years now, a UN committee has labored to draft a "comprehensive convention on international terrorism." Everyone understands what terrorism is: the deliberate targeting of civilians. The Islamic Conference, however, has insisted that terrorism must be defined not by the nature of the act but by its purpose. In this view, any act done in the cause of "national liberation," no matter how bestial or how random or defenseless the victims, cannot be considered terrorism.

• This boils down to saying that terrorism on behalf of bad causes is bad, but terrorism on behalf of good causes is good. Obviously, anyone who takes such a position is not against terrorism at all - but only against bad causes.

• As Pakistan's envoy to the UN, Munir Akram, put it: "We ought not, in our desire to confront terrorism, erode the principle of the legitimacy of national resistance that we have upheld for 50 years."

• As long as the Islamic states resist any blanket condemnation of terrorism, we will remain a long way from ridding the Earth of its scourge. And the UN, in which they account for nearly one-third of the votes, will be helpless to bring us any closer.

  The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, October 20, 2004]

Michelle Malkin, WorldNetDaily, June 2, 2004, The ambulances-for-terrorists scandal:  The United Nations and Red Cross have been providing cover for terrorists – literally --and American taxpayers are footing some of the bill.  [PAC Comment --  see this: UN ambulances used to transport terrorists in Gaza (the Reuters video)]

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, June 21, 2005]

Terror on the UN Payroll? - Matthew Levitt, (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

• Both the U.S. and the EU, the two single largest contributors to UNRWA, have banned the military and civilian "wings" of Hamas. Yet on October 4, 2004, UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said, "I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime."

• In several documented cases, Palestinian terrorists have exploited employment with the UN and other agencies to support their groups' activities.

• Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah, UNRWA's director of food supplies for Gaza refugees, admitted to using his UN vehicle on multiple occasions during summer 2002 to transport arms, explosives, and activists of the Popular Resistance Committee to carry out terrorist attacks. Attalah also confessed to contacting members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Syria "in order to obtain money for transferring arms to the Gaza Strip as assistance for the PRC."

• In August 2002, Israeli authorities arrested Nidal Abd al-Fatah Abdallah Nazal, a Hamas activist who worked as an UNRWA ambulance driver, who admitted using his ambulance to transport "arms and messages to Hamas activists in various cities, exploiting the freedom of movement granted to him" as a UNRWA employee.

• As a member of the Quartet, the UN has a special obligation to uphold the commitment outlined in the Roadmap to dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.

• The U.S. should work with the UN to develop, apply, and monitor a set of professional standards to ensure that UN offices, equipment, and personnel are not exploited for terrorist purposes.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, October 14, 2004]

Claudia Rosett, NRO, April 18, 2004: Oil-for-Terror? There appears to be much worse news to uncover in the Oil-for-Food scandal.  The United Nations knew that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was stealing from the oil-for-food program - and, by extension, starving his own people - but did little to stop it, according to a special report by the BBC. 

French Envoys Admit Taking Oil Payoffs - Charles Bremner
Two former French ambassadors have admitted earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of oil that Iraq had assigned to them under the UN Oil-for-Food program. The disclosure tarnished France's moral stand against the invasion of Iraq, and its Foreign Ministry scrambled to distance itself from the alleged illicit activities of Serge Boidevaix, a former director of the ministry, and of Jean-Bernard Merimee, a former French Ambassador to the UN. Both are facing corruption charges. (Times-UK)
[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, October 14, 2005]
 

Atlantic Blog, May 7, 2004: More double standards: While the U.S. takes a beating over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Amnesty reports on a neglected story concerning girls as young as eleven who are being sold into slavery as prostitutes for peacekeepers in Kosovo. The story manages to neglect to mention that the Amnesty report complains that the UN has shown no interest in doing anything about it.

The U.N.'s Israel Obsession

David Tell, for the Editors, The Weekly Standard, 05/06/2002, Volume 007, Issue 33

IN 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel--in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"--the United Nations sat on its ass. And did not send a fact-finding mission.

But, oh, how the U.N. has been making up for that oversight ever since. [PAC Comment: when you click the preceding link, a window will appear. In that window, click "open."   If the article doesn't appear, you probably need to first download the free Acrobat reader.]  For more than 50 years now, the Jews have been its favorite subject.

Among the nearly 200 nations represented at the U.N., only Israel has ever been assigned special--reduced--membership privileges, its ambassadors formally barred, for 53 straight years ending only recently, from election to the Security Council. Meanwhile, and right up to the present day, that same Security Council has devoted fully a third of its energy and criticism to the policies of a single country: Israel. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which regularly--and unreprovingly--accepts delegations from any number of homicidal tyrannies across the globe, has issued fully a quarter of its official condemnations to a single (democratic) country: Israel.

There has been a genocide in Rwanda, an ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, periodic and horrifying communal "strife" in Indonesia's East Timor, the "disappearance" of a few hundred thousand refugees in the Congo, a decades-long and culturally devastating occupation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China . . . but none of those U.N. member states has ever been subjected to the rebuke of a General Assembly "emergency special session." [PAC Comment: The world stands by as the government of Sudan engages in genocide (see Benjamin Joffe-Walt "They killed my whole family and then took me away and made me their slave" and Arabs Engineer Mass Starvation in Sudan.)  Yet, Sudan will sit on the UN Human Rights Commission -- out of the 18 most repressive regimes, six of them—China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—are currently members of the United Nations Human Rights Commission.   KAMEL LABIDI: It is not the first time the state-run Arab media and even civil-society advocates have remained tight-lipped as death, devastation, and human-rights abuses unfold in a "brotherly" Arab country.]  Israel has, though, repeatedly, simply for refusing to surrender in the face of terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds and injured thousands of its citizens--murders that no U.N. resolution has ever so much as mentioned.

No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N.--two of them directly supervised by Kofi Annan's governing secretariat--do nothing but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide distribution of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist. The "Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories," for example, "investigates" Israel's continued "practice" of "occupying" not just the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land within its internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.

And then there is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, an operation originally established in December 1949 to assist those Palestinian refugees created by the Arab world's botched attempt at a second Final Solution. UNRWA, as it happens, is centrally relevant to its parent organization's latest outburst of naked Israelophobia. Because UNRWA wholly funds and largely administers the West Bank refugee camp in Jenin where the Israeli army is purported--by various Palestinian militants and local U.N. officials--to have just perpetrated a "massacre" of "unarmed civilians." It is to the site of this alleged "atrocity" that Kofi Annan now intends to dispatch a commission of inquiry chaired by Yasser Arafat's favorite European diplomat, former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and seconded by Cornelio Sommaruga, retired chief of the International Red Cross, a man who once likened the Star of David to a swastika.  [PAC Comment:  See JENIN And Hypocrisy: The Massacre That Wasn't]

All by themselves, Annan's personnel choices here are a genuine scandal, and as this issue of The Weekly Standard goes to press, Israel's understandable objections, to Sommaruga in particular, have left it a still open question when and whether the secretary general's designees will ever be allowed to reach their destination. And if, at the end of the day, they aren't? That will be perfect justice, we think. The "world community" will howl, of course, and Israel's many enemies will believe the worst. But they believe the worst already. And they will continue to believe the worst no matter what. And, quite apart from the controversy over what its staff should look like, the whole idea of a U.N. fact-finding mission to Jenin is scandalous to begin with, it seems to us--an assault on Israel's honor, even its basic legitimacy as an independent nation, that no similarly situated democracy would ever be expected to endure.

Assuming Annan's investigators do eventually make their way to Jenin, is it possible they might actually find the "facts" they are looking for? No, almost certainly not. Media accounts of Israel's incursion into a football-field-sized sector of the camp have bubbled over with lurid details worthy of a medieval peasant's worst anti-Semitic fantasies. And the peasant-in-chief has been a U.N. official, UNRWA commissioner general Peter Hansen, who has given dozens of lip-smacking interviews recounting "wholesale obliteration," "a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history," "helicopters . . . strafing civilian residential areas," and "bodies . . . piling up" in "mass graves." Some of this carnage Hansen even claims to have seen "with my own eyes." But he is a bald-faced liar. The Israelis have been out of Jenin--and foreign journalists and other international observers have been back in--for more than a week. And no evidence, literally nothing that would indicate the presence of a civilian "massacre," has yet emerged.

Quite the contrary, rescue workers in Jenin have so far recovered the bodies of six--not the rumored six hundred, but six--women, children, and elderly Palestinians. This, in a now ruined central area of the camp where countless armed gunmen rained days of nonstop sniper fire on Israeli foot patrols from the windows of still-occupied residences they had booby-trapped with high explosives. This is a "massacre"?

And why, even if its death toll had proved a hundred times higher, would it warrant a U.N. fact-finding mission? In 1993, just after the events lately made famous by Hollywood's "Black Hawk Down," a two-week U.S. bombing campaign against Mogadishu killed a thousand Somali civilians. During the whole of the present intifada, now six months old, far fewer Palestinians than that have died as Israel has attempted to rescue itself from a national security threat far graver and more immediate than any America faced in East Africa. But did it ever occur to the United Nations to convene an inquest into the "human catastrophe" that was Somalia? It did not.

Maybe the U.N. picks on Israel simply because it can. Or maybe, just maybe, there is a darker impulse at play.

Which would explain why the U.N. has spent decades, in the guise of refugee assistance, providing active, organized, and enthusiastic auxiliary services to the most delusional and violent strains of Jew-hating Palestinian irredentism. It bears mentioning, though one rarely hears it mentioned, that the UNRWA camp at Jenin has been for years what the Palestinians call a'simat al-istashidin, the "suiciders' capital," from which dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Al Aksa, and Tanzim terrorist attacks have been launched, killing hundreds of Israelis. [PAC Comment: See: Canadian Alliance MP speaks out on UNRWA's Shameful Role]

UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from fall through spring each year, children are taught that all of "Palestine," from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them. During summer vacation, those very same schools host training camps in which those very same students are instructed in the arts of kidnapping and rock-throwing and bomb-manufacturing and martyrdom. UNRWA rents the buses that regularly take residents of Jenin on tours of the Israeli countryside--where "their" property, "stolen" by the Jews, is carefully pointed out. UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to do double duty as munitions dumps. UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and counterfeit currency factories are housed in the public shelters it has constructed in Jenin. UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own administrative offices in Jenin are festooned with graffiti celebrating some of the world's most notorious terrorist organizations. Or how some of the world's most notorious terrorists might have found their way onto the agency's payroll--to the point where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, extreme even in the context of Palestinian extremism, now openly controls the UNRWA workers' union.

This same United Nations, the blood of Israeli civilians still wet on its hands, now dares to question the morality of a modest, defensive, and long-overdue Israeli reprisal?

In curricular materials published by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education, "Objective Five" for high school history teachers reads as follows: "The student will understand why the people of the world hate the Jews." It is a question for the ages. Zionism may no longer be racism at the United Nations. But anti-Semitism is forever.

[Also See, U.N. vs. Israel, Telling standards, Anne Bayefsky , NRO, April 20, 2004, re the U.N. response to the death of Abdel Aziz Rantissi, and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin]

 

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The U.N.'s Jewish Problem, Anti-Semitism has found a comfortable home on the East River.

Ruth R. Wisse, Commentary, 04/08/2002, Volume 007, Issue 29

JEANE KIRKPATRICK once remarked that while she was a professor of political science there were two mysteries she could not understand: how the Holocaust could have happened, and how the rest of the world could have let it happen. Things became clear once she took her post as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1981. The anti-Semitism of many member nations, and the reluctance of others to compromise their "neutrality" while pursuing their own political ends, were almost as much on view during her tenure at the United Nations as they had been in Europe four decades earlier.

On March 18, U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan released a letter to the media telling Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Israel must end what he called the "illegal occupation" of Palestinian lands. This statement was false. As George P. Fletcher noted in the New York Times, and other legal experts have long affirmed, "it is not illegal for victorious powers to occupy hostile territory seized in the course of war until they are able to negotiate a successful peace treaty with their former enemies." In recognition of this precept, following the war of June 1967 the Security Council passed Resolution 242 calling for Israeli withdrawal from "territories" rather than from "the territories," precisely avoiding the implication that the occupation itself was illegal. Annan not only obscured this crucial distinction, but then downplayed the significance of his terminology--on the perverse grounds that such incrimination of Israel had subsequently become common coin within his organization.

What Annan should have been seeking to end is the pernicious role of the U.N. as instigator and abettor of a possible international conflagration. The U.N.'s assault on Israel, in direct violation of its Charter, now rivals even the Jew-hating indoctrination that preceded World War II. The very organization that is charged with ensuring the equal protection of all nations, large and small, has become the spearhead of attempts to destroy one of its most vulnerable members.

THE U.N.'S first debate over Palestine set the pattern for everything that followed. On November 29, 1947, a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly adopted the recommendation of the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine to divide the already divided area (of which Jordan had the lion's share) into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews accepted partition; the Arabs opposed it by force. Although the resolution gave Jews only a sliver of what the 1917 Balfour Declaration had promised them and a fraction of their historic homeland, they established Israel on the land they were accorded. The U.N. did not intervene when five Arab countries then attacked the new state, vowing to push its inhabitants into the sea. For the next 53 years Arab states fought Israel and never had to abide by the outcome of their military defeats. And they discovered early on that the U.N. would defer to their vast demographic and political advantage rather than come to Israel's defense.

It is worth asking why the Arabs did not accept the partition of Palestine and encourage the Palestinian Arabs to develop their independence. Arab states claim that they are opposed to Israel because the Jews deprived the Arabs of their land, but in refusing to partition Palestine, it is they who insisted on keeping the Palestinians homeless. Had Arab governments settled their Palestinian brethren as Israel did the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, they would have lacked evidence of Jewish malfeasance on which to base their politics of grievance. Maintaining Palestinian Arabs in refugee camps was a calculated strategy for organizing Arab politics in perpetual opposition to the Jews. The United Nations was charged with supporting a population that their fellow Arabs were determined to retain as refugees. They preserved and administered the squalid refugee camps. And those camps--the consequence of Arab policy--have been used to demonstrate the iniquity of Israel.

Let us acknowledge that the United Nations cannot successfully broker all the international conflicts that fall under its aegis, but in no other case except that of Israel did the organization become a weapon of belligerents against one of its members. When the United Nations took over the refugee camps instead of making Arab governments resettle their fellow Arabs, it absolved the Arabs of responsibility for their aggression, and perpetuated the apparent "evidence" that Israel had displaced the Palestinians. Similarly, following each new defeat on the field of battle, the Arabs resorted to the United Nations to end the conflict in a way that would preclude the need to concede Israel's legitimacy, and that would charge Israel retroactively with responsibility for their war against it.

The Arab assaults had left Israel holding land beyond its original borders. Those territories that Israel gained in self-defense were now exhibited as evidence of Jewish expansionism. Once again, as in the case of the refugee camps, the Arabs misrepresented the consequence of their aggression as the cause of their aggression. The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964, before Israel came into possession of the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza, was increasingly funded by Arab governments as the response to Israel's capture of the territories.

Shortly after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, having failed to dislodge Israel in their third coordinated assault, the Arabs joined the Communist bloc in opening a new U.N. propaganda front. Arab governments recycled Soviet slogans of the 1930s and used their influence to pass a resolution defining Zionism as racism. Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a country. Israel is that country--as sanctioned by the United Nations. Using the technique of the Big Lie, the Arabs who refused to recognize the Jewish state accused the Jews of committing a racial offense for the sin of wanting their own land.

The United Nations championed this new brand of anti-Semitism for the next fifteen years. Once again, as in the 1930s, an anti-democratic axis had formed in opposition to the Jewish people, only this time its pulpit was the U.N. itself. With the passage of the Zionism-is-racism resolution, Arab leaders demonstrated that it was possible to enlist the U.N. in the prosecution of a fellow member.

When the Zionism-is-racism resolution was repudiated in 1991, thanks to the initiative of the United States, no apology was made to the Jewish people for a campaign of defamation. Nor did the secretariat and U.N. bureaucracy make any attempt to stanch the poison that had seeped into the international arena. Instead, Arab governments were allowed to use the perception they had fostered of Israel's illegitimacy to hijack an ever-increasing proportion of U.N. time and resources--almost 30 percent of Security Council meetings--for a country that contains about one thousandth of the world's population. Indeed, the anti-Jewish campaign of the United Nations reached extraordinary heights at the United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance that convened in Durban, South Africa, just prior to September 11, 2001. In the words of one observer, "A coalition led by regimes that persecute their own people--and in some cases harbor international terrorists--sought by formal declaration to delegitimize the Jewish state, demonize its people, and mobilize a global movement against its existence as a country." Even longtime students of anti-Semitism were shocked by the level of anti-Jewish invective at the conference, which was obviously intended to deflect criticism from many of the regimes mounting the attacks.

Obsession with Israel at the U.N. is by now as commonplace as the wolfish nature of the wolf in an Aesop fable. Reporting last month on the 46th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, where the United States tried to promote a resolution on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan, Kate O'Beirne writes wearily, "In the end there was only one roll-call. It was on that hardy U.N. perennial, the condemnation of Israel." In another recent session, the Commission on Human Rights passed one resolution on the Congo (population: 43 million), none on Burundi (6 million), Somalia (7 million), Angola (10 million), or Algeria (31 million), but five resolutions on the "Occupied Arab Territories" (population: 3.5 million). Canadian legal scholar Anne Bayefsky, who specializes in refugee studies, says this record of the United Nations "ought to be an embarrassment to every democratic U.N. member. The tragedy, and the peril, is that it is not."

IN ALLOWING the Arab countries to internationalize their war against the Jewish State, the United Nations has endangered Jews in new ways. Whereas earlier anti-Semitism could be identified with its evil sponsors and morally, if not militarily, countered, the United Nations lends its presumed legitimacy and prestige to anti-Semitism. The Jew-hatred of certain Arabs and Muslims is one thing; Muslim clerics have even distorted the Koran's injunction against suicide to encourage more killings of Jews in Israel and elsewhere. But on university campuses students now cite the U.N. as the source of their antipathy to the Jewish state. They accept "that hardy perennial, the condemnation of Israel," as a moral beacon rather than the sign of corruption that it is.

The tragedy and the peril do not end there. Experience ought to have taught the international community that anti-Semitism is an instrument of anti-democratic politics. When a U.N. delegate from Algeria, one of the most notorious abusers of human rights, recently used Nazi terminology to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, he was mocking all those who know what Nazism is and who went to war in order to defeat it. When delegates to a conference on humanitarian aid spent twelve hours bashing Israel as opposed to two hours on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, they advertised their contempt for governments that try to cure disease by scientific means. A society's deflection of energy to anti-Semitism is a sign of its political demoralization; the more it whips up frenzy against the Jews, the more it requires going to war to release that frenzy. The rise of anti-Semitism at the U.N. correlates with the rise of the politics of resentment against what Jews represent--an open and democratic society, the ethic of competition and individual freedom.

Had the United Nations been fulfilling its true mandate, Israel ought to have sparkled among over 100 even younger nations as the showpiece of democracy. No other country has ever achieved so much while defending itself against so relentless an assault. Not even the United States has successfully integrated so many refugees in ratio to its resident population. By allowing Arab countries to conscript the U.N. for their war against the Jewish state, the democracies advertised the weakness of their system. Every advantage that Arabs have gained over Israel at the U.N. proclaims the strength of autocracies and dictatorships over liberal democracy. This lesson is reinforced every time there is a condemnation of the Jewish state.

The U.S. government is hardly unaware of the enormity of this issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee in the summer of 1999, a representative of the State Department pointed out that Israel alone has been denied membership in a regional group, which precludes its membership on the Security Council and participation in the full range of international activities conducted at the U.N. He cited the pattern of abusive resolutions "incompatible with the basic principles guiding the search for peace" that the United States opposes year after year.

When American politicians, businessmen, or physicians betray their office or profession, they are subject to investigation so their wrongdoings can be checked and the system safeguarded. The United Nations has no such oversight. It has behaved like the physician who kills his feeblest patient, the businessman who cheats his smallest shareholder, and the politician who betrays his weakest constituency. Although we have passed the eleventh hour, the president of the United States ought to form an independent commission of inquiry to determine how the United Nations betrayed its mandate, whether anything can yet be done to rectify some of the damage, and whether the organization as we know it still deserves to exist.

Ruth R. Wisse is Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University.

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The UN has fed a monster that now threatens it and everyone else

By Alan Dershowitz, Jewish World Review, August 28, 2003

Several days ago I received a phone call from a Brazilian journalist who asked me to respond to the charge being made in her home country that Israel was at least indirectly to blame for the deadly truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that killed, among others, a prominent Brazilian diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

I was not surprised at the question, considering its source. Among many South Americans, as among many Eastern Europeans, the knee-jerk response to nearly every evil is "blame it on the Jews." For example, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has blamed the "Jewish media" for the scandal involving Catholic priests having sex with young parishioners.

But the question got me to thinking: Who does share the blame with the terrorists themselves for the horrific explosion that killed and injured so many innocent people? Although the primary culprit is clearly the terrorist group that planned and executed the mass murder, the secondary culprit is the U.N. itself.

For more than a quarter of a century, the U.N. has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as "freedom fighters." No organization in the world today has accorded so much legitimacy to terrorism as has the U.N.

Consider the following:

• There are numerous occupied peoples around the world seeking statehood or national liberation, including the Tibetans, Kurds, Turkish Armenians and Palestinians. Only one of these groups has received official recognition by the U.N., including observer status and invitations to speak and participate in committee work. That group is the one that invented and perfected modern international terrorism — namely, the Palestinians.

  These rewards were first bestowed in the 1970s when the Palestine Liberation Organization was unabashedly committed to terrorism. In fact, Chairman Yasser Arafat was invited to speak to the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 at a time when his organization was seeking to destroy a member-state of the U.N. by terrorism.

  By rewarding Arafat and the PLO for such behavior, the U.N. made it clear that the best way to ensure that your cause is leapfrogged ahead of others is to adopt terrorism as your primary means of protest. The Tibetans, whose land has been occupied more brutally and for a longer period than the Palestinians, but who have never practiced terrorism, cannot even receive a hearing from the U.N.

   

• The U.N. has for years refused to condemn terrorism unequivocally, while encouraging and upholding "the legitimacy of the struggle for national liberation movements" against "occupation" — in other words, the use of terrorism against innocent civilians to resist occupation. This has sent the message to aggrieved groups that terrorism is legitimate.

   

• The U.N. has allowed Palestinian terrorists to use U.N.-sponsored "refugee camps" like Jenin as terrorist bases. This has sent the message to the world that the U.N. closes its eyes to terrorism.

• The U.N. has repeatedly condemned efforts by Israel to prevent and respond to terrorism. For example, the Security Council condemned Israel for isolating Arafat in the West Bank last year, even after it was proved that Arafat remained complicit in acts of terrorism.

  This has sent the message to the victims of terrorism that if they fight back they risk sanctions.

   

• The U.N. has allowed states such as Syria that sponsor terrorism to sit on the Security Council and to chair important committees, while denying Israel these same rights. This has sent the message that the U.N. applies a double standard when it comes to terrorism.

The bottom line is that the U.N. has served as an international megaphone for the perverse message that any people who feel that they are occupied have the right to resist occupation by randomly murdering innocent civilians anywhere in the world.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. Some Iraqis, who feel that they are now occupied, have taken the U.N.'s message to heart and are engaged in a "national liberation movement" of the kind long praised by the U.N. and are using the tactics rewarded by the U.N. against that very organization.

Now that the victims of "national liberation terrorism" are U.N. employees instead of Jewish babies, maybe the U.N. will finally come to its senses and understand that by legitimating and rewarding terrorism, they have created a Frankenstein monster that can be turned against any nation, organization or group. Unless there is a change, no one will be safe from this U.N.-created, -fed and -rewarded monster that threatens the entire world.

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From An international double standard, Amos Gilboa, Maariv International, May 3, 2004

The Turkish army invaded Cyprus in 1974. Approximately 200,000 Greek refugees fled south to the Greek section of the island.

After the invasion, the Turks brought farmers from Turkey and settled them in northern Cyprus.

During negotiations for reunification, the Greeks demanded that all of the refugees and their descendents return to the Turkish section. The Greeks demanded that the Turkish "settlers" return to Turkey. 

The UN and EU supported the Turkish position and left the "settlers" and "settlements" in place.  The UN and EU did not accept the Greeks' demand to allow the refugees to return -- the basic assumption was that the new reality of refugees and settlers, which has been created in Cyprus during the last 30 years, was the decisive factor to be considered.

Furthermore, the EU did not make ratification of the agreement (which was rejected in a recent referendum) a condition for Cyprus to join the Union.

Why is what's good for Cyprus not good for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

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