The United Nations

Wasn't the UN created to promote peace and human rights?

"...the United Nations was established...to promote peace. [But] It consists of a welter of sovereign states whose ambassadors use the devious language of peace as a fig-leaf for national self-aggrandizement. How any human organization can promote genuine peace or prevent war when egoism is the basic motive of mankind [strikes me] as ludicrous".

- Prof. Paul Eidelberg is the Co-founder and President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East -

Even though the UN has clearly failed in most conflict situations to promote peace and security -- its primary function -- at one task it is really unmatched. It excels at legitimizing or delegitimizing targets chosen for political reason by a coalition of dictators who dominate the world body and whose tainted authority the UN launders.

- Dr. Harris O. Schoenberg , President of the Center for UN Reform Education, author of A Mandate for Terror -

Arab slave trade continues. U.N. condemns Israel.

World thirsty for Oil.

Nur Muhammad al-Hasan emerges from the Sudanese bush. His loose, once-bright white jalabiya flutters as he strides towards me. I in turn step through the long, dry grass towards him, stooping slightly as I walk under the weight of a U.S. army kit bag full of grimy Sudanese bank notes. It is April 1999 and the midday sun is oppressive. Nur and I greet each other with a handshake and "Salam 'alaykum." We slip under the shade of an enormous mango tree where we have some important business to discuss: The liberation of slaves, mainly women and children.

Our enterprise is not to everyone's liking. Last spring, Sudan's government, the radical Islamist regime of the National Islamic Front (NIF) headed by Hasan at-Turabi and Gen. 'Umar al-Bashir, protested to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights about our work. The regime claims that my organization, Christian Solidarity International (CSI), is the main source of the abduction and kidnapping of children in southern Sudan. In April, the Khartoum regime also initiated proceedings to deny CSI its consultative status at the United Nations (U.N.), alleging that we act contrary to the purposes and principles of the U.N. charter.

About the same time, the world's richest and most influential child welfare organization, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), ended its long silence on the enslavement of Sudanese woman and children. Instead of condemning the slavers, UNICEF-whose mandate requires it to work in partnership with the government of Sudan-echoed Khartoum by calling our liberation of slaves "absolutely intolerable," and by accusing us of violating the Slavery Convention. Others, with agendas of their own, perhaps working with the Sudanese regime or trying to salvage their own tarnished reputations, have spread rumors of fraud about these activities.

Then in late October, the U.N. Economic and Social Council voted by a tally of 26 to 14 (with 12 abstentions) to withdraw our consultative status, thus effectively excluding CSI from the U.N. system. Yet if anything is "absolutely intolerable," it is that the international community has allowed slavery and other crimes against humanity to be institutionalized by a member state of the United Nations.

All of this campaigning has had some effect, making the "out of sight, out of mind" attitude less tenable. In February 1999, soon after Dan Rather of CBS News highlighted the plight of Sudanese slaves and CSI's role in freeing them, UNICEF broke its silence and admitted: "Slavery in Sudan exists." Even as it said this, however, UNICEF appeased the Khartoum regime by condemning the redemption of slaves as "absolutely intolerable."

...UNICEF's executive director Carol Bellamy made a series of widely publicized press statements attacking CSI's antislavery campaign, claiming that Dinka efforts to retrieve their enslaved women and children contravenes the Slavery Convention and is not in their own best interests.

...The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has also kept mum on the issue, despite her own staff and independent U.N. special rapporteurs confirming the existence of slavery in Sudan and the government's key role in abetting the slave trade-in particular, the reports submitted by the former Special Rapporteur on Sudan Gaspar Biro and his successor Leonardo Franco. The 1999 Sudan Resolution of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights failed even to mention the word "slavery." The U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has also never publicly condemned the revival of slavery in Sudan.

And the U.S. government? It too is reluctant. In 1999, for the first time in six years, Washington declined to serve as the main sponsor of the Commission on Human Rights' Sudan resolution, leaving this responsibility to the lukewarm European Union; and the Clinton administration assented to the commission's "slavery-free" resolution. Why the change? Because in return, the Sudanese were prepared not to press hard for a condemnation of the United States for the rocket attack on Khartoum's Ash-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998. However, with an eye on the abolitionist movement at home, the State Department tried to maintain the moral high ground by condemning the (U.S.-supported) Sudan resolution as "deeply flawed" for failing to "confront fully the practice of slavery." This did not convince; just four days later, the Clinton administration announced a weakening of sanctions on Sudan (by allowing the sale of agricultural goods and pharmaceuticals).

...The sad truth must be acknowledged: Sudanese slaves and other victims of the NIF's genocidal jihad count for little in a world preoccupied with other matters. Millions of lives have been lost and disrupted while the world has largely turned a blind eye toward gross violations of human rights in Sudan.

Whatever may be the future of the international abolitionist movement, the Dinkas are right not to wait for help from the U.N. or any state but to find their own ways to liberate their people from bondage. Still, they can count on my colleagues and me, as well as a growing number of abolitionists for support until the last slave is free.

- John Eibner, historian and human rights specialist, assistant to the international president of Christian Solidarity International. He has led over twenty fact-finding visits to Sudan and neighboring countries and has pioneered CSI's antislavery program. Source: The Middle East Quarterly -

Has the UN displayed a double standard against Israel?

Since Israel is the only nation in the world that is denied the right to hold a seat on the U.N. Security Council on a rotating basis, the Jewish State is uniquely reliant upon the influence -- and, if necessary, the veto -- of the United States to prevent its security and vital equities from being compromised by that body.
- Center for Security Policy, Washington, D.C, 17 March 1994

...Meanwhile, Israel, in deference to World Opinion, is using rubber bullets to hold back the mob. In Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya or Sudan the mob would have been shot to pieces; the riots ended; and the World would have kept its collective mouth shut. The World, what a disgusting gaggle of hypocritical corrupt nations who kill when it suits them. Now, like maggots feeding on a corpse, they congregate in the United Nations, caressing each other in a pit that can only be described as the Sodom of New York. Even as 500,000 Africans are butchered without a single conference of the General Assembly, these sluggards found the time to convene at least three General Assemblies just to castigate Israel for building houses on land that the Jews own and which is part of their capital Jerusalem.

- Emanuel A. Winston - Middle East Analyst & Commentator -

Fifty years ago enlightened mankind through UN resolution 181 grudgingly agreed to allow the re-creation of the Jewish State. The dream came true, the Jews were again to become free people in a free country. Blinded by the happiness, they did not notice that the UN was already regretting its move. During the first cease-fire, after the Arab attack on the newborn Jewish state, UN mediator Count Bernadotte, on June 27, 1948, in the suggestion to resolve the crisis omitted all reference to resolution 181. As one of the Hebrew newspapers wrote at that time, he was planing to squeeze Israel into boundaries "the size of a coffin" (Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition). His proposal was reminiscent of what the Peel Commission had recommended in 1937, when it "generously" allocated 4% of Mandated Palestine for the re-establishment of the Jewish state.

Efforts to delegitimize Israel have also been part of the record of the specialized agencies, especially UNESCO, the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In the 1970s, the Arabs in UNESCO raised questions about archaeological excavations in Jerusalem. Director-General A.M. M'Bow sent a specialist, Belgian Professor Raymond Le Maire, to investigate. Le Maire found the digs were carried out in accord with established international standards. Muslim holy places were protected, and archaeological relics from all periods of antiquity were preserved. Le Maire's report was suppressed by M'Bow, and UNESCO voted sanctions against Israel and refused to admit it to a regional group.

Similar to experiences in UNESCO have been developments in WHO, the World Health Organization. A positive report by an expert, Dr. A. Bellerive, on health conditions in the Israeli-held territories was rejected by the WHO Assembly in 1973, and a "special committee" was created to replace him. The following year Israel was condemned for refusing to admit the biased special committee. By 1976 Ambassador William Scranton declared that "the absence of balance, the lack of perspective and the introduction by the WHO of political issues irrelevant to the responsibilities of the WHO do no credit to the United Nations. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of politicized action which decreases respect for the United Nations system." Twenty years have passed, there is a new Director- General, and the only population in the whole world whose health conditions were debated this May at the annual WHO Assembly was the Palestinian Arabs.

...In April 1983 the PLO claimed that Israel had undertaken a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian Arabs. Complaints submitted at the same time by Arab states accused Israel of responsibility for "mass poisoning" based on an outbreak of headaches, dizziness, and nausea, particularly among Arab school girls on the West Bank. Although the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Centers for Disease Control both confirmed the findings of Israeli doctors that there was no mass poisoning, the Security Council demanded an inquiry and the Assembly of the World Health Organization condemned Israel in connection with the "mass poisonings." In a totally unprecedented move, it called for direct WHO control over health programs in the Israel held territories.

- Dr. Harris O. Schoenberg , President of the Center for UN Reform Education, author of A Mandate for Terror -

"This international masquerade, if we look closely, marks a definite decline into earlier, barbarous standards. Playing up the problems of Israel helps to distract attention from the excesses of savage dictatorial regimes".

- Jacques Givet, in The Anti-Zionist Complex -

In short, "anti-Israeli" sentiment at the UN is often a surrogate for two other predilections: anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.

- John R. Bolton, Senior Vice President, American Enterprise Institute, July 14, 1999 -

[the UN's PLO observer] "can almost always get the majority to support ... [his] accusations, justified or not."
- Jane Rosen, Manchester Guardian correspondent, in the The New York Times Magazine, September 16, 1984

"It is the tool of those who would make Israel the archetypal human rights violator in the world today. It is a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. It is a sanctuary for moral relativists. In short, it is a scandal."

- Professor Anne Bayefsky of York University, Canada, writing of the UN Human Rights system -

Does UN resolution 242 require Israel to withdraw its forces back to the June 4, 1967 lines?

That Resolution, the bedrock legal reference contained in the 1993 Declaration of Principles, is said by the Palestinians to require Israel to leave the entire West Bank. Palestinian commentator Gassan Khatib, for example, said in a July 11 segment of ABC's Nightline "for the Palestinians, we're talking about implementing Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for ending the illegal occupation of Israel over the Palestinian occupied territories."

Is Israel legally compelled to exit from all the land it has controlled since the conclusion of a war that was launched to destroy it? The language of 242 was hammered out with great precision to take account of Israel's vulnerable pre-1967 borders and to avert future aggression. Britain's UN ambassador in 1967, Lord Caradon, an author of the Resolution, argued that: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial."

The American UN ambassador at the time, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, said 242 omitted reference to Israel's withdrawing from "the" or "all" territories in order to enable "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure."

- from EYE ON THE MEDIA: Stumbling on Resolution 242, by Andrea Levin -

"The former British Ambassador to the UN, Lord Caradon [the chief-author of 242], tabled a polished draft resolution in the Security Council and steadfastly resisted all suggestions for change...Kuznetsov of the USSR asked Caradon to specify 'all' before the word ' territories' and to drop the word 'recognized.' When Caradon refused, the USSR tabled its own draft resolution [calling for a withdrawal to the 1967 Lines] but it was not a viable alternative to the UK text...Members [of the UN Security Council] voted and adopted the [UK drafted] resolution unanimously..."

- from UN Security Council Resolution 242, The Washington Institute For Near East Policy, 1993, pp 27-28 -

Arthur J. Goldberg, an author of U.N. Resolution 242, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (1965-1967):
"It calls for respect and acknowledgment of the sovereignty of every state in the area. Since Israel never denied the sovereignty of its neighbouring countries, this language obviously requires those countries to acknowledge Israel's sovereignty."

"The notable omissions in regard to withdrawal are the word 'the' or 'all' and 'the June 5, 1967 lines' the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories, without defining the extent of withdrawal....There is lacking a declaration requiring Israel to withdraw from all of the territories occupied by it on, and after, June 5, 1967... On certain aspects, the Resolution is less ambiguous than its withdrawal language. Resolution 242 specifically calls for termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty of every State in the area. The Resolution also specifically endorses free passage through international waterways...The efforts of the Arab States, strongly supported by the USSR, for a condemnation of Israel as the aggressor and for its withdrawal to the June 5, 1967 lines, failed to command the requisite support..."

- Columbia Journal of International Law, Vol 12 no 2, 1973 -

"The Meaning of 242" - June 10, 1977

Lord Caradon, an author of U.N. Resolution 242, U.K. Ambassador to the United Nations (1964-1970):
"We didn't say there should be a withdrawal to the '67 line; we did not put the 'the' in, we did not say all the territories, deliberately.. We all knew - that the boundaries of '67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a cease-fire line of a couple of decades earlier... We did not say that the '67 boundaries must be forever."
MacNeil/Lehrer Report - March 30, 1978

Prof. Eugene V. Rostow, an author of U.N. Resolution 242, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-1969):

"Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338... rest on two principles, Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace; and when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to 'secure and recognized borders', which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949." > "The Truth About 242" - November 5, 1990

"UN SC 242 calls on Israel to withdraw only from territories occupied in the course of the Six Day War - that is, not from 'all' the territories or even from 'the' territories...Ingeniously drafted resolutions calling for withdrawal from 'all' the territory were defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly one after another. Speaker after speaker made it explicit that Israel was not to be forced back to the 'fragile and vulnerable' [1949/1967] Armistice Demarcation Lines..."

- UNSC Resolution 242, 1993, p. 17 [The USSR and the Arabs supported a draft demanding a withdrawal to the 1967 Lines. The US, Canada and most of West Europe and Latin America supported the draft, which was eventually approved by the UN Security Council. - the American Society of International Law, 1970] -

"...The Egyptian model fits neither the Jordanian nor the Syrian case...Former Secretary of Defense McNamara has said that if he were the Israel's Minister of Defense, he would never agree to giving up the Golan Heights...UNSC 242 authorizes the parties to make whatever territorial changes the situation requires - it does not require the Israelis to transfer to the Arabs all, most, or indeed any of the occupied territories. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty awards [to the Arabs] more than 90 percent of the territory Israel captured in the Six Day War... permits a transfer [of all the territories] if the parties accept it, but it does not require it..."

- UNSC Resolution 242, 1993, pp 18-19, notes that the evacuation of the Sinai does not imply a requirement to do the same in former Syrian or Jordanian occupied territory. -

Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. President (1963-1968):
"We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967 will not bring peace." September 10, 1968

U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 - A set of guidelines for Peace & Security:

What does it say?
* "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency "
* "respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political
independence of every State in the area "
* "[every State's] right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats
or acts of force."
* "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories in the recent conflict."
What does it mean?
* The Arab states must end the state of war initiated and maintained by them since 1948.
* The Arab states must recognize Israel's right to exist.
* Israel is entitled to clearly defensible borders. This is not a privilege, but rather a right
guaranteed by international law.
* Israel should withdraw from some, not all, of the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.
* Israel's indefensible pre-1967 borders provided no security.
* The Arab states should sit down with Israel, without preconditions, to negotiate peace.

- Canadian Friends, International Christian Embassy, Jerusalem -

What are the obligations of the Arabs under UN resolution 242? What about the Palestinian Arabs in particular?

A nearly forgotten article of UN Resolution 242 requires of the Arabs, "termination of all claims and states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

The Palestinians were not recognized as a "State in the area" by Resolution 242, but if they aspire to that status, it is incumbent upon their leadership to assume the same obligations toward Israel that every Arab country has. And since obligations are generally honored in the breech, an appropriate role for the United States would be to insist that the Arab states, and the Palestinian leadership, change both their behavior and their propaganda as a prerequisite to changes to the borders of Israel.

- Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, March 20, 2000 -



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Peace Faq

Zionism is Racism

What is this 'Zionism is Racism' resolution?

The Soviets were strong, mobilized enemies of Israel early on, and they remained so until relatively recently. Soviet foreign policy has been active, not passive, during this whole period and its hostility toward Israel was manifested in a variety of ways. I am especially sensitive to the campaign in the various organizations of the United Nations, where the Soviets pioneered and strongly supported the Zionism-is-racism resolution. The Soviets sponsored that resolution in UNESCO and in the General Assembly. The Soviets were pushing that resolution as recently as 1985 at UN meetings in Nairobi. Even when the Arab nations were ready to abandon it, the Soviets pushed to keep the Zionism-is-racism resolution on the agenda of the Women's Conference.
- Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Soref Symposium, April 29, 1990 -

It had become a crime to be a Jew who wished to return to the Jewish national homeland.

- Ambassador/Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the introduction to "The Anti-Zionist Complex", by Jacques Givet -

Is Zionism a form of racism?
"[the false equation of Zionism with racism is] simply an Arab ploy to take the focus off of the real enemies of humanity. Zionism is a healthy form of nationalism."

- Edward H. Brown, Jr., chief United Nations representative for the Congress of Racial Equality -

For the first time in history, thousands of black people are being brought to a country not in chains but in dignity, not as slaves but as citizens.

- William Safire, in the New York Times (January 7, 1985) after Operation Moses, the secret rescue of Ethiopian Jews, was revealed. -

Zionism Is Not Racism
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution slandering Zionism by equating it with racism. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, which holds that Jews, like any other nation, are entitled to a homeland.

History has demonstrated the need to ensure Jewish security through a national homeland. Zionism recognizes that Jewishness is defined by shared origin, religion, culture and history.

The realization of the Zionist dream is exemplified by more than four million Jews, from more than 100 countries, including dark skinned Jews from Ethiopia, Yemen and India, who are Israeli citizens. Approximately 1,000,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Baha'is, Circassians and other ethnic groups also are represented in Israel's population.

Many Christians have traditionally supported the goals and ideals of Zionism. Israel's open and democratic character and its scrupulous protection of the religious and political rights of Christians and Muslims rebut the charge of exclusivity.

The Arab states define citizenship strictly by native parentage. It is almost impossible to become a naturalized citizen in many Arab states, especially Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Several Arab nations have laws that facilitate the naturalization of foreign Arabs, with the specific exception of Palestinians. Jordan, on the other hand, instituted its own "law of return" in 1954, according citizenship to all former residents of Palestine, except for Jews.

The presence of thousands of black Jews in Israel is the best refutation of the calumny against Zionism. In a series of historic airlifts, labeled Moses (1984), Joshua (1985) and Solomon (1991), Israel rescued almost 42,000 members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community.

Israel is only one of many ethnic democracies (such as Finland, Norway, Korea, etc. etc), that have one ethnic majority and one or several minorities that do not share ownership of the national territory. Israel's identity as a Jewish nation is no less democratic than any other of these countries. Almost all of the ethnic democracies also have an official state religion, just as Judaism is the official national religion of Israel. An official state religion, along with a dominant ethnic majority, are fundamental features of many democratic nations.

- from The Religious-Secular Conflict in Israel, by Shlomo Sharan and Ervin Birnbaum, Ariel Center for Policy Research -

Theodor Herzl on Africa
There is still one other question arising out of the disaster of nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy, only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say, though I may expose myself to ridicule for saying so, that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans..

- Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism. Source: Golda Meir, My Life, (NY: Dell Publishing Co., 1975), pp. 308-309 -

Isn't this resolution hypocritical?

The Office of the High Commissioner services the UN human rights treaty bodies, which were created to implement the various UN human rights treaties. Most of the treaty bodies are composed of genuine experts who act and speak in a manner that is fair. But occasionally, especially in the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), one finds evidence of prejudice. An example of this occurred when the British rapporteur of the Committee, making final comments on the report of Israel, which is a party to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (which CERD oversees), declared that the flag of Israel, which contains the shield of David, is racist and discriminates against Israel's non-Jewish citizens. The representative of the Government of Israel pointed out, in the course of his reply, that the British flag contains not one but three crosses.
Dr. Harris O. Schoenberg , President of the Center for UN Reform Education, author of A Mandate for Terror

When countries attack Israel in this way, it is not just to hide their own sins and failures, and not just because they are fearful for their oil supplies. It is because the government of Guinea, among others, uses torture as a means of holding on to power; it is because the Soviet Union uses psychiatric internment as a political tool - to take only two countries as examples of deteriorating standards - that Israel has to be accused of every crime.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"

There are gradations on the scale of credentials to intervene in human rights discussions, and I believe that Iraq is at the bottom. Every time Iraqi representatives eagerly revive the Zionism-racism formula, I reflect on the ancient Jewish community of 160,000 forced to leave Iraq after thousands of years, and on the continued brutal suppression of the Kurdish people . When they talk of human rights I remember the innocent Jews hanging on the public gallows in Baghdad, among them, incidentally, the cousin of a member of my delegation to the United Nations whose young pregnant wife was forced to watch the execution.

- Chaim Herzog in his speech Racism, Human Rights and Double Standards -

"A world that closed its doors to Jews who sought escape from Hitler's ovens lacks the moral standing to complain about Israel's giving preference to Jews."

- Alan Dershowitz, noted civil rights lawyer -

Why is this resolution dangerous? Why should I care?

The UN does not hold antisemitism in contempt. On the contrary, it is notorious for its antisemitic position. It has passed hundreds of anti-Israeli resolutions. When, in 1975, it passed a criminal resolution equating Zionism with racism, the UN delegate from Costa-Rica noted that the resolution "was an invitation to genocide against the Jewish people."

It would be tempting to see in this propaganda nothing more than bigotry of a quite traditional sort that can, sooner or later, be overcome. But the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campaign is not uninformed bigotry, it is conscious politics. ...Further, this fact of world politics creates altogether new problems for those interested in the fate of democacies in the world, and of Israel in the Middle East. It is not merely that our adversaries have commenced an effort to destroy the legitimacy of a kindred democracy through the incessant repetition of the Zionist-racist lie. It is that others can come to believe it also. Americans among them.

- Ambassador/Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the introduction to "The Anti-Zionist Complex", by Jacques Givet -

"In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically including many undesirable things. But it could not be and could not become racist unless it ceased to be Zionist."

- Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan -

Was this resolution binding?

The United States...does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

- Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoted by JSource -



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Peace Faq

Israel is the Heart of Our Civilization

by Nidra Poller

The airwaves are thick with the sound of raucous voices and clashing swords. O Jerusalem — well, ok, East Jerusalem — and the thundering hooves will brook no opposition! Get Israel!

At the slightest twinge of international pain from a geographical region known as the "Mideast conflict" they cry out, "Cut it off! Get rid of it, and the worldwide body politic will finally live in peace."

Ahmadinejad has promised hundreds of times to wipe Israel off the map without provoking much of a reaction. His proxies stock arms, poke and prod, without raising international eyebrows. Then Israel approves housing construction in Jerusalem and the sleeping warriors awake. Grrrrrr!

The Obama administration bares its fangs and the troops go into action. General Petraeus warns that the unresolved Israel-Palestine conflict is disturbing Muslim nations, stimulating extremism, and putting our boys in danger. Walt & Mearsheimer point the finger at homegrown Zionists who are twisting the arm of this vast nation, bringing it to its knees, and forcing Israel down our throats. The brave Petraeus denies he ever implied that our friendship with Israel could be a direct or indirect cause of American military casualties in friendly Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. But the hot potato has already been passed to Robert Gates who runs it smack between the White House goalposts and into the mouth of President Obama who can scold Israel off the top of his head.

Naughty [Zionist] boys... you're costing us "blood and treasure." Nothing less.

Israel is a pain. Dr. Quack has the solution. Cut out that festering appendix and the ummah will welcome us with open arms.

And just when we start to catch on, the president and his hired guns speak from the other side of their mouths. They were only kidding. Treating Prime Minister Netanyahu like a vacuum cleaner salesman at the White House was a sign of unfailing friendship. Israel and the United States are bosom buddies. Count on us! If blood and treasure must be spent by Big Friend America to save the neck of little guy Israel, we won't be stingy. All we ask in return is...

Make peace.

THE "TWO-STATE SOLUTION that everyone knows will resolve the conflict" is brandished like a scimitar: Israeli withdrawal to the '67 ('49 armistice) lines, dismantlement of settlements, a mini territorial tradeoff, a "solution" to the refugee problem, and the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital... Why is this "everyone knows the solution" religiously repeated when it has been amply demonstrated that neither Israel nor any Palestinian entity can accept it?

It is not a solution, it is a lethal narrative. A soft outer wrapping of apparently legitimate Palestinian aspirations hides a knife aimed at the heart of Jerusalem that would cripple Jewish sovereignty in the homeland. The insistence on a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem is inextricably joined to claims for statehood conceived as a natural right. The aim of the narrative is lethal — the destruction of Israel — and its constant repetition is a form of warfare.

On what grounds can Islam lay claim to any part of Jerusalem?

WHAT MAKES JERUSALEM SO PRECIOUS? — THE JEWS.

Mecca was sanctified by Islam, even though the black stone pre-existed the founding gesture, and Jerusalem was sanctified by Judaism. Subsequent religious claims to the city are accretions to the original consecration. Jerusalem is the Christian holy land because Jesus was a Jew. And Islam's claim is based on a scriptural injunction to supersede Judaism and Christianity. If claims to Jerusalem are based on religion, Judaism takes precedence.

If Muslim claims to Jerusalem are not religious but secular they are inexplicable. Ramallah would be more suitable as the capital of a Palestinian state that truly intended to live peacefully side by side with Israel. Why should the world be dragged into a fierce tug of war when the territorial issue — if that is what it is really about — could be so easily resolved?

The lethal narrative carries a double secular-religious warhead.
Topography trumps chronology in a dazzling Muslim claim to the centrality of Jerusalem staked on the Al Aqsa mosque and the gilded Dome of the Rock that dominate the Temple Mount (the French call it l'esplanade des mosquées). That's not centrality, it's replacement theology! If that claim is granted, the heart of our civilization will be broken. The precedent established in Jerusalem will be extended to Paris, New York, London, the Hague, Detroit, Washington D.C... wherever a mosque is built, Islam will extend its political sovereignty. It will be the end of separation of church and state, the end of religious and political freedom.

Al Aqsa, built on the ruins of the Jewish Temple, is not proof of centrality, it is the emblem of replacement theology. Europeans, who are so eager to impose the division of Jerusalem, are awakening to the dangers that threaten their own capitals. The Swiss said no to minarets, France and Belgium don't want veiled women in their streets, plans for mega-mosques in Rome and London, were nixed...

But the belated, timid European awakening pales in the face of an American president who has raised anti-Zionism to new heights. Take this sequence: Last month, mosque-goers threw rocks down from the Temple Mount at Jews worshipping at the kotel (Western Wall). Local Islamists regularly stir up the masses with false claims that Israel is violating the sanctity of al Aqsa.

Then President Obama worked up a fury against the Israeli government with false claims that housing construction in "East" Jerusalem (as if it were another state, like South Dakota!) jeopardizes the peace process. Ramat Shlomo is in north Jerusalem but ideology doesn't have a compass. The restoration of the Har Hova synagogue, "right next to Islam's holiest sites," was a further affront to Islam dutifully relayed by the world's pundits, bereft of the slightest notions of logic and chronology. Barack Hussein Obama dragged Benyamin Netanyahu into the coal shed and bound him hand and foot with ultimatums. Add it all up: in the space of two short weeks the free world bowed to the will of Temple Mount Islamists!

The faulty religious justification for the division of Israel's capital alternates with a secular narrative that stands on a falsified baseline where all of Israel was Palestinian land stolen by Jewish colonizers who created an illegal state which was subsequently extended by military conquests to include "East Jerusalem." Out of the goodness of their hearts the Palestinians will reluctantly accept the fait accompli for a rump state within the 1949 armistice line. But that's all!

Everything else is illegal and all means of reconquest are justified.

Jerusalem was divided by the sword. The neighborhoods claimed today as exclusively reserved for Arab-Muslims are Jewish neighborhoods that were emptied of their rightful residents by atrocious massacres during the first war of independence. The survivors fled for their lives. Arabs moved in. When Europe — followed now by the United States — validates that sort of zoning regulation, the rules will apply to their own cities. No need for tanks rumbling down the Champs Elysèes or bombs raining down on Coventry. Just increase the pressure on the pesky State of Israel, cut off its blood supply, and discover — too late — that you've given yourself a massive heart attack.

Hillary Clinton's "tough love" AIPAC speech concluded with a Passover homily. Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, preached the Secretary of State, and at every step of liberation and up to the threshold of the Promised Land, there were always hangers-back who said it was "too dangerous, too hard, too risky." Today, she would have us believe, the Promised Land is a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Israelis, like their hero Moses, should just do the right thing!

Was there a rabbi in the house?

THE LESSON OF PESACH is that the children of Israel were liberated from slavery in Egypt by the alliance between their own determination and the "outstretched hand." The Jewish people have remained faithful to this Alliance, which is inseparable from the integrity of Jerusalem. The Pesach seder is not the commemoration of a dead past, it is expressly the here and now of liberation. "I was a slave in Egypt..." We do not bow our heads to pharaohs, to presidents, or to international opinion.

The emissaries sent to Canaan to get the lay of the land came back and warned that it would be too hard to redeem the divine promise. "It's no Paradise. And besides there's all kinds of tough guys there," they said, shivering in their sandals. Deemed unworthy of the promised homeland, the liberated slaves spent forty years in the wilderness, learning to be free. They gave birth to a new generation that had the courage to build a sovereign Jewish nation with Jerusalem as its capital.

The values they forged during that period of apprenticeship are at the heart of Western civilization. The most salutary lesson of the current crisis is that Israel is not suicidal. Jews will choose life, and assaults on Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem and its outskirts are stabs in the back of the free world.

Nidra Poller in author, novelist, translator and journalist. She is based in Paris and writes about the Muslims in Europe, anti-semitism and the French media and politicians.





This essay was received April 23, 2010. An earlier version was published by www.atlasshrugs.com and Makor Rishon.

Netanyahu's Speech in the UN

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people. The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20,1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments. Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations! Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others. This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.

Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated. The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization.

It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing
exponentially.

It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances – by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise. But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after an horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind. That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood?

Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.

In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn't get peace, Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv.

Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.

Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country's civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances.

Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy's civilian population from harm's way.

Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice. Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce?

Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace.

Here's why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense? The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of selfdefense now accuses us –my people, my country - of war crimes?

And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense.

What a travesty! Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace.

Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace. In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples – a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it.

We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state. Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people.

The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers. Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more."

These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city, in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem.

We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland. As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own.

We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity. But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel. That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don't want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them. Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.

Churchill bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.”

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the "unteachibility of mankind" is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

The UN Supports Terrorism

The United Nations - An organization’s descent into irrelevance.

How an organization built on the lofty and noble ideals of Justice, Human Rights and Freedom has collapsed under the weight of Hypocrisy, Appeasement and Double Standards.

This article is divided into four parts:
1) The U.N. and Human Rights

2) The U.N. and Anti-Semitism

3) The U.N. and Israel

4) Conclusion

The U.N. and Human Rights
Civil Strife
* Congo: 3 million slaughtered
* Rwanda, Cambodia, Sudan: millions suffer genocide
* Pakistan, Niger, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia: millions subjected to slavery

Human Rights Abuses
* Torture
* Arbitrary imprisonment
* Child abuse, the use of children in conflicts

Women’s Rights
* Female genital mutilation
* Rampant illiteracy
* Sexual enslavement

Disease
* HIV/AIDS
* Malaria, TB
* Polio

Natural Disasters
* Drought
* Earthquakes
* Floods

Rather than intervene to ensure the safety and basic rights of the world’s inhabitants, to depose ruthless dictators, to expose and redress human rights violations… The U.N. has placed the protection of two of the world’s most notorious rulers at the head of its agenda.

Protecting Saddam Hussein
The majority of U.N. member states were opposed to the war in Iraq. Non-intervention in a sovereign state was seen as a higher good than unseating a “leader” who for decades ruled with a brutality that saw hundreds of thousands gassed or killed in a war with neighboring Iran. Thus, the noble cause of removing a mass murderer from power, whose diabolical intentions of obtaining weapons of mass destruction— including nuclear power— was scuttled by the U.N.


“The fact that Saddam Hussein murdered more than 300,000 of his own people is a matter of complete indifference to the "Stop the War" brigade. So is the fact that, if the coalition were to stop the war, murderous thugs would seize power in Baghdad.”

Protecting Yasser Arafat
A vote in the Israeli cabinet stating that Israel reserved the right to remove Yasser Arafat, the founder of modern international terrorism (while causing him no physical harm), prompted a Security Council vote, a mere 2 days later, followed by a Special Emergency

Clearly, when it comes to safeguarding dictators, the U.N. has demonstrated its ability to mobilize with great efficiency.

Tragically, the U.N. prioritizes the protection of mass murderers and terrorists over the protection of their defenseless victims.

“The Armed Islamic Group in Algeria has murdered more than 100,000 Muslims in the last decade. In Chechnya, another 100,000 people, one-10th of the population, has been killed and almost half the population is displaced. In Afghanistan, the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies killed thousands of Shia. In Mauritania, tens of thousands of Muslims are held as slaves. Tens of thousands more died in the Kashmir conflict and in the civil wars in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Thousands more have died in Nigeria and Indonesia. The Burmese junta drove out more than a quarter million of its Rohingya Muslims in the early 1990s. In India last year some 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in Gujarat, some disemboweled or burned alive while police stood by or joined in.

Yet these events are passed over in silence, even within much of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of many of these atrocities sit in the UN condemning events in the West Bank.”

“The U.S. government, with an over two-century record of forwarding human rights and defeating tyrants, is to defer to the United Nations? The duly elected leaders of the United States should step aside and let assorted dictators make key decisions affecting American national security?”

“Americans finally had a look inside the sausage factory. Their image of the United Nations as a legitimating institution had always been deeply sentimental, based on the United Nations of their youth — UNICEF, refugee help, earthquake assistance. A global Mother Teresa. That's what they thought of the United Nations, and that's why they held it in esteem and cared about what it said. Now they know that it is not UNICEF collection boxes but a committee of cynical, resentful, ex-imperial powers such as France and Russia serving their own national interests — and delighting in frustrating America's — without the slightest reference to the moral issues at stake. The American public understands that this is not a body with which to entrust American values or American security.”

“…why has the U.N. not been moved by the massacre of 1 million Sudanese black Christians at the hands of their Muslim rulers? How about the deaths of untold numbers of Muslims by the Russians in Chechnya? What about the persistent attacks on Hindus in India by Muslims — a ghastly firebomb attack on a train full of people (the terrorists locked the doors after torching the train) being one of the more recent examples?

Why has the United Nations never investigated China for gunning down hundreds in Tiananmen Square and killing thousands of others more quietly? Why has the U.N. never investigated Saddam Hussein for gassing his Kurdish population or the Syrian government for the massacre at Hama, in which up to 20,000 were killed in one day? And why, pray, could the United Nations, as well as Europe and the rest of the world (with the shining exception of the United States of America), never bat an eye as innocent Israelis were bombed and maimed on a daily basis for 18 months to the evident delight of even "moderate" Arab states.

And why, with this despicable record, do liberals continue to hold the "world community" in such awe?”

“In the Alice in Wonderland world of the United Nations, the delegates cannot agree on the meaning of the word “terrorism.”

On this side of the United Nations rabbit hole, terrorism is the use of terror as a means to cause intense fear, to demoralize, to intimidate, to subjugate or to coerce, especially for political purposes.

In a sane world, it would be obvious that suicide bombers who repeatedly blow up busloads of innocent people are practicing terrorism. The United Nations cannot accept that definition.

Even after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the General Assembly of United Nations could not agree on a complete terrorism strategy.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Anne Bayefsky, adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School, professor of political science at York University, Toronto, and a member of the governing board of U.N. Watch, said attempts to arrive at a consensus on terrorism are consistently blocked, especially by Arab and Islamic nations.

…Sudan, a country that practices slavery, torture and routine mutilation of its citizens, recently had U.N. reports of its abuses dropped thanks to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Also recently, the same commission sanctioned the use of “all available means including armed struggle” against Israel. The U.N. human rights commission approved suicide bombings and terrorism.”

“One of the reasons it [the U.N.] fails is that it's pretty much designed to. There is no vision, no set of shared values that truly unites the United Nations. You can't have a civil rights organization where Klansmen are welcomed as members; you can't have a softball team where half the players want to play basketball, and you can't have a global organization dedicated to the spread of human rights and democracy with nearly half the members representing barbaric, corrupt regimes.

And because the U.N. feels it must be "fair" to everybody, the worst abusers get to take turns determining policies on human rights and weapons proliferation. Right before the war, Iraq was set to co-chair the U.N. Commission on Disarmament - with Iran! And even now the U.N. Commission on Human Rights is chock-a-block with representatives of nations that treat their own citizens like piñatas.”

“The commission is the primary U.N. organ responsible for human rights protection. The current chair is Libya. Yes, Libya. In addition to Libya, three of the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism are current members—Cuba, Sudan and Syria.

…The sad fact is that the U.N. is not only a failed leader in the protection of human rights, but is itself a substrate of xenophobia and aggression. The U.S. pays 22% of the U.N.'s regular budget. Yet today's U.N. operates in fundamental opposition to the values of the U.S.—and to its own universal human-rights foundations.”

“The United Nations is perceived by most Americans as indispensable for maintaining stability in the world. That was certainly the intent when it was created at the end of World War II. Its charter proclaims that "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women" are principles central to peace and security. Regrettably, the U.N. has failed to act upon the centrality of human rights to its mission. Secretary-General Kofi Annan apparently recognized this reality in his Nobel lecture when he said: "The sovereignty of states must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights.”

Since the U.N.'s creation, millions have been killed, maimed, starved, tortured or raped by brutal rulers whose governments nevertheless wield great influence in the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council. These facts clearly reflect the inadequacies and failures of the U.N. For example, North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, has inflicted a holocaust on his people. Defectors and observers have estimated that more than a million people have starved to death in brutal Gulag-type camps. The resulting flood of refugees into China, where an estimated 360,000 North Koreans may now be hiding in an effort to escape brutality, has not produced action in the U.N., though the U.N. High Commission on Refugees is fully aware of this human catastrophe. China classifies these tragic human beings as "economic migrants" and "not refugees," while cynically embracing the refugee convention as the "Magna Carta of international refugee law" and thereby earning the applause of U.N. officials… “…The U.N. Human Rights Commission has become a travesty. Two years ago, the U.S.—which has worked diligently to make the commission an effective instrument—was replaced by Syria, a corrupt, totalitarian supporter of terrorism. This year, in spite of American efforts, Libya was elected to chair the commission, an egregious challenge to the commission's integrity considering Libya's rule by a militant tyrant responsible for the 1988 bombing of a U.S. civilian jet in Lockerbie in which 270 people were murdered. U.S. opposition to Libya was supported only by Canada and Guatemala; 33 countries voted for Libya, while our European "friends" conspicuously abstained from voting at all. In electing such states as Syria, Libya, Vietnam, China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Zimbabwe to serve on the commission, the ostensible guardian of human rights, the U.N. has forfeited its commitment to those values…

Is it any wonder that many Americans hesitate to place our security concerns in the hands of the U.N.? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as he was leaving his role as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in 1976, called it a "theater of the absurd."”

“The U.N. sees no great danger posed by totalitarian nations imposing their will on neighbors – regimes like the one in Syria. Syria, in fact, even served as chairman of the Security Council during the month of June this year. Yet, there is only one nation actually occupying another in the Mideast today, and that one nation is Syria, which has a political and military stranglehold on Lebanon.

The U.N. sees no great danger when a nation like Sudan makes war on its own people because of race and religion. The Islamic radicals who run the country have aided Osama bin Laden in the past. Today they are content to continue the mass murder of Christians and animists in the southern region of the country and in the Nubian mountain region.

The U.N. sees no great danger in tribal wars like the one that flared in Rwanda, resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million people. In fact, the evidence is now clear the U.N. had advance knowledge of the impending slaughter and did nothing to prevent or even condemn it.

The U.N. sees no great danger in the wholesale, government-sponsored, racist land-grabs currently underway in Zimbabwe, for instance. White farmers are being held hostage and murdered in a systematic, orchestrated, forceful and violent campaign of wealth redistribution. Not as much as a whimper of concern was expressed by the U.N. Conference on Racism.”

Syria
A country that supports, controls and harbors the Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP and is on the US State Department’s list of states that sponsor terror, is a member of the U.N. Security Council.

“The almost unopposed selection of Syria to hold a rotating seat on the UN Security Council is an embarrassment to the US, but first and foremost to the UN itself. That such a travesty could proceed so smoothly is a mark of the disdain with which free nations must hold the UN, and of how far that body has strayed from its founding ideals.

Electing Syria to the Security Council is the equivalent of electing a mobster to the police oversight board. According to the UN Charter, it is the Security Council that determines the existence of any "threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and decides how to "maintain or restore international peace and security." Two weeks ago, the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism is a threat to "international peace and security" and decided that all states must "deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts." The ink is not yet dry on this resolution, but the election of Syria, of all nations, to the post of judge and jury renders its implementation suspect, to say the least. Syria is not just in wholesale violation of this Security Council resolution, but is at the forefront of attempting to legitimate terrorism in the international arena.

…The Syrian government hosted in its capital the leaders of all the organizations it calls "national liberation movements": Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the PFLP. All four of these groups engage in terrorism, reject all efforts to negotiate peace with Israel, are virulently anti-American, and are listed by the US State Department as terrorist organizations.”

“Last week, the US was voted out of the UN Human Rights Commission. Rights violating nations such as Sudan, Libya, and Syria, were voted in. What does this vote tell us about the nature of the UN and of its members?

Well, it clearly tells us that most of the UN’s members don’t care for human rights. If they did, they would not have elected savage dictatorships and terrorist sponsors to oversee and protect human rights in the world. Nobody that really cared about hens would put the foxes in charge of the hen-house. According to the UN itself, Sudan’s government is directly responsible for “displacement, starvation, and killing of civilians, looting and burning of villages, abductions and rape.” Libya and Syria have been known sponsors of international terrorism for over three decades. Sierra Leone, another country voted in, has been recently denounced by the UN for committing “abuses of human rights … with impunity, in particular atrocities against civilians …including executions, mutilations, abductions, arbitrary detention, forced labor, looting, [and] killings of journalists.”

But we shouldn’t really be surprised with the vote’s outcome. After all, Russia has been in the UN Human Rights Commission since its creation, in 1947, despite having been a totalitarian state where human rights were non-existent for most of that time. How then could the commission have had any credibility at all?

The answer is that the presence of the US gave the UN Human Rights Commission credibility. Now that the US is gone, it has none. Americans should realize this fact and start asking themselves a couple of questions. For instance: Should the US have been sitting in the commission with communist Russia for almost half a century? And more importantly, should the US still be a member in the UN alongside dozens of dictatorships that have no respect for human rights? Why should the US grant these nations the legitimacy that they do not deserve?”

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is shown with infamous dictators and leaders of terror organizations, further undermining the legitimacy of the U.N.

The U.N. and Anti-Semitism
“…Daily incidents of anti-Semitic violence around the globe are reported in the media. Yet while leaders of the Free World condemn synagogue bombings in Turkey, fire-bombings of Jewish schools in France, and the hate speech of Malaysia's president who now heads the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the U.N. moves in the opposite direction, encouraging the proliferation of this centuries-old hatred.

…The U.N. is an organization founded on the ashes of the Jewish people, and whose core human rights principles were drafted from the lessons of the Holocaust. The inability of the organization to address seriously one of the very evils it was intended to prevent is a scandal of global proportions. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared, "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." Fifty-five years later the outrage is gone, the silence of the U.N. when it comes to anti-Semitism is deafening, and the only ones benefiting are those planning future barbarous acts against Jews everywhere.”

“Despite the unprecedented wave of antisemitism sweeping Europe and the Arab and Moslem world, this resolution never had any realistic chance of passing in the United Nations General Assembly.”

“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.

…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.”

“This Conference [The U.N. Conference Against Racism, Durban 2001] is supposed to be about combating racism. Instead it has been seized by those who foment it. It has become a global forum for racism. A racist anti-racism conference. How has the UN come to promote such an environment? Can it yet pull back from the brink of a disaster for the principle of the universality of human rights, their application to victims everywhere, and from the grave discredit to the institution itself which is so close at hand? What a tragedy if the very foundation of the UN itself should be forced to serve as its epitaph…

The outset of the 21st century sees the very United Nations which stands on the ashes of 6 million Jewish dead including one and a half million children slaughtered for being born Jewish in an unparalleled catastrophe in human history sponsoring a world conference which gives vent - neigh promotes - the Jew as undeserving and villainous, and Jewish self-determination as illegitimate and evil.

Anti-Semitism is not merely an historical phenomenon. One need only come to the World Conference on Racism to watch it metastasize…

“…In the draft documents of both the NGO and Government Conference:

The word "holocaust" is in square brackets, may or may not be plural, or started with a capital H - thereby questioning the reality of Jews as the victims of the most heinous crime committed against a people in history.

The place and the meaning of the word antisemitism in a document supposed to be condemning racial discrimination in all its manifestations remains controversial and at issue - in footnotes and in brackets.

Language likening the Jewish state to an apartheid regime thereby criminalizing its purpose and its very essence.

Language containing wild accusations - such as genocide or ethnic cleansing - directed only to Israel, virtually ignoring the other 190 states of the UN.


Furthermore, this conference and its preparatory process include:
• An official UN regional conference leading up to this Conference which banned the very participation of accredited Jewish NGOs.

• Virulent hate literature - Jews with hooked noses, blood dripping from fangs, with pots of money surrounding the victims, distributed on the grounds of this Conference in officially-sanctioned booths of participants.

• Harassment and intimidation of Jewish participants registering for this Conference.

• Clothing freely distributed with the official NGO World Conference logo inciting hatred and violence towards the Jewish state.

“...And this Conference has become the vehicle for those who spread the biggest Nazi-like lie of all - that Jewish self-determination - Zionism - is itself racist…

Antisemitism was deliberately omitted in the Vienna Declaration of Human Rights. The Holocaust was deliberately omitted from the statement adopted at the General Assembly on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the UN Charter.

This is antisemitism, UN-sponsored antisemitism:

• Israel is not an equal member of the world community.

• Addressing racism against Jews - antisemitism - is controversial and stymies consensus - in the words of the Chairman of the Drafting Committee at the Vienna World Conference.

• The Holocaust is allegedly of significance only to a special interest group and its mention somehow advantages the Jewish victim.”


The U.N. and Israel
“…Israel is also the only UN member state denied membership in any of the UN's five regional groups, which elect UN bodies in Geneva. Elections in the UN are normally based on regional representation or slates prearranged by regional groups. Israel qualifies for membership in the Western European and Others Group (WEOG), composed of geographically diverse states including Canada and Australia. But WEOG, driven by states such as France, refuses to admit Israel to its Geneva operations. This has the consequence that Israel cannot be elected to a whole range of UN bodies. For instance, Israel cannot stand for election to WIPO — the World Intellectual Property Organization. Similarly, Israel is prevented from

Lacking UN regional group membership in Geneva means that Israel is the only UN member forced to sit out consultations on draft resolutions and UN Geneva-based business of all kinds. Israel is refused any possibility of participating in the consultations of regional bodies in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development the World Health Organization. The meetings behind closed doors of regional groups at the Commission on Human Rights negotiate the language of resolutions on all subjects without any Israeli participation. In recent years, Sweden and Co. in the European Union have enjoyed negotiating an agreed-upon level of hostility on the myriad anti-Israel resolutions with Arab states on the commission, before Israeli diplomats got a copy of a first draft.

Even Israel's limited participation in the WEOG regional group in New York is circumscribed by the caveat that existing rotation schemes not be disturbed. The result? WEOG membership in the UN Economic and Social Council has already been tied up until 2021…

“…As for UN staffers, official lists of the UN secretariat from July 2002 count 24 Israelis and 27 from "Palestine."

Algeria, Bahrain, China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe pass judgment on human rights at the UN Commission on Human Rights. China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates specialize in the rights of women at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Iran is one of five members on the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan scrutinize the implementation of labour standards on the Governing Council of the International Labour Organization.

In the meantime, representatives and experts from the democratic and Jewish state of Israel are disqualified, blackballed, or left standing in the halls of UN bodies everywhere.”

"Israel is the only UN member not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies. So while membership of the UN Human Rights Commission now includes Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Syria — four of the seven states designated as state sponsors of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department — Israel cannot even be a candidate.”*

* Since its creation in 1948 and until May 2000, Israel was the only UN member state excluded from a UN regional grouping, because Arab states rejected Israel's claim to the Asian group (where it belongs geographically). As a result, Israel was barred from a number of important UN bodies. In May 2000, Israel was accepted as a temporary member of the Western European and Other States Group (WEOG), theoretically remedying the situation. This arrangement was to go into effect two years later, and as of May 2002, Israel can (theoretically at least) be elected to the Human Rights Commission or to the Security Council. However, Israel is still the only UN member that is not permitted to participate in any of the key daily consultations of regional groups which take place during the commission itself.

“The concerted anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic campaign that has blossomed under United Nations auspices is seriously undermining its credibility. The Durban conference may have put this anti-Israel, anti-Semitic animus on full display, but it has been present for decades, as witness the passage of the despicable "Zionism is racism" resolution (since rescinded); the unwarranted obsession with Israel at the UN Commission on Human Rights; the singular institutional discrimination that blocked Israeli membership in a UN regional group; the annual UN General Assembly anti-Israel resolutions; and the bogus extraordinary emergency sessions that exclusively blame Israel for the conflict, while ignoring Palestinian violence and terrorism…

“…[on December 2001] the scene shifted to Geneva, where the Swiss government acceded to pressure from the Arab League to convene a conference of the High Contracting Parties (original signatories) to the Fourth Geneva Convention ostensibly to enforce the application of the Convention in territories that Israel has administered since the Six Day War of June, 1967. This represented yet another attempt by Israel's enemies to misdirect the world's attention from their responsibility for the current violence and bloodshed.
The original gathering of the High Contracting Parties took place four years after the end of the Second World War and the horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany against European Jewry and others, and the conference established a new set of protocols to protect victims of war. In verified instances of ethnic cleansing and genocide since 1949, such as in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, however, there was no call for reconvening the High Contracting Parties.

What's more, the gathering took place based on a recommendation of the UN General Assembly that it has no authority to make. Article 7 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions clearly states that reconvening should only happen to consider "general problems concerning the Application of the Conventions and of the Protocol" and not specific situations; and the obligation on the High Contracting Parties to "respect and ensure respect" for the conventions applies to each state examining its own internal compliance and in no way authorizes intervention by other states…

“… The declaration that invited the parties to participate was biased, inflammatory, selective and highly politicized. The document "recalls the need to safeguard and guarantee the rights and access of all inhabitants to the Holy Places." This disregards the fact that access to these sights has never been more secure than under Israeli governance, and that Jewish holy sites that revert to Palestinian jurisdiction have been desecrated and destroyed. The declaration "[calls] upon the Occupying Power to immediately refrain from committing grave breaches" of the Fourth Convention, as if it were a fait accompli that Israel has already perpetrated such violations. It refers to "Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem," the standard deliberate manipulation of UN Resolution 242, which does not specify which territory is considered occupied.

…The Palestinian UN representative stated that the language of the final declaration from Geneva demonstrated that "Palestinian people are entitled to fight that occupation." So make no mistake: When states hypocritically support one-sided efforts to delegitimize and demonize Israel, while not holding the Palestinian Authority accountable and, in fact, turn a blind eye to Palestinian terror and violence, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their ilk see a green light to strap explosives on the next suicide bomber.”

“Discrimination against Israel in the U.N. system is rampant.

…The Geneva-based U.N. Commission of Human Rights devotes disproportionate attention to real or putative Israeli violations of human rights under a special item of its agenda during its annual meeting; the remaining 189 states are collectively examined under another agenda item.

Furthermore, Israel is the only country ever to have been branded a ''non-peace loving state'' by the U.N. General Assembly, which is driven by the Arab-Muslim bloc.

As a matter of fact, in more than 50 years, the United Nations voted in favor of Israel just two times: in November 1947 (partition of Palestine) and in May 1949 (admission of the Jewish state to the United Nations). It would be hard to find a single pro-Israel resolution since, with the notable exception of the 1991 resolution that revoked one from 1975 that compared Zionism to racism.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is aware of this reality. A few years ago, after citing the appalling U.N. record on Israel, he said that “it has sometimes seemed as if the United Nations serves all the world's peoples but one: the Jews.””

“On April 15, the commission adopted a resolution sanctioning the use of "all available means including armed struggle"—which includes suicide bombing—as a legitimate tactic against Israelis. Only five countries, including the U.S., voted against. The U.K. and France abstained, and Russia approved.

More than a quarter of the commission's resolutions condemning a state's human rights violations passed over the last 30 years have been directed at Israel. There has never been a single resolution on China, Syria or Saudi Arabia. The current session ended by defeating a resolution to criticize anything about the situation in Zimbabwe, and by eliminating the 10-year-old position of rapporteur on human rights in Sudan. This was despite a report of the U.N. rapporteur on torture informing commission members of the Sudanese practice of "cross-amputation"—amputation of right hand and left foot for armed robbery, and various cases of women being stoned to death for alleged adultery.”


“The proponents of the argument recognize the U.N. has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy over the last 50 years condemning the Jewish state. There's just no dispute about it. The U.N. hates Israel. It has almost from the moment the U.N. voted to approve the creation of the state in 1948. Israel is perceived by the U.N. as perhaps the greatest threat to peace in the world.

Just look at the facts. Of 175 Security Council resolutions passed by the U.N. before 1990, 97 [55% - MidEastTruth] of them were directed against Israel. Of 690 General Assembly resolutions before 1990, 429 condemned Israel
[62% - MidEastTruth] .

The U.N. is obsessed with Israel.
And that is a great example of why we should treat the U.N. for what it is - an evil and irrelevant group of global busybodies.

Israel is no threat to anyone except those who seek to destroy it. Frankly, even to those people, it's not enough of a threat.”

“On Monday, France, Belgium and four other European Union members endorsed a U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution condoning "all available means, including armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. Hence, six EU members and the commission now join the 57 nations of the Islamic Conference in legitimizing suicide bombers. By their logic of moral equivalence, terror is justifiable because its root cause is Israel's occupation. That Palestinian terror predates occupation, or that suicide bombings became a tactic of choice only after the initiation of the Oslo process, is too inconvenient to mention.

Unfortunately the U.N. goes beyond giving rhetorical support for terrorism. In a variety of ways, its agencies have been complicit in Middle Eastern terror.”

“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 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… “…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."

…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.”

“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.

“In 1948, the U.N. recognized Israel as a new state and member. Shortly thereafter, Israel's Arab neighbors—refusing to accept the U.N. decision—invaded Israel. Since that time, and until quite recently, neighboring Arab states have publicly considered themselves in a perpetual state of war with Israel, and have acted accordingly. How has the U.N. responded? Since 1964, the Security Council has passed 88 resolutions against Israel—the only democracy in the region—while the General Assembly has passed more than 400 such resolutions. The U.N., an organization committed to peace, permitted Yasser Arafat to address its General Assembly in 1974 with a pistol on his hip, and subsequently formed—under U.N. auspices and with U.N. funding—three separate entities with large staffs which advance the Palestine Liberation Organization's anti-Israel agenda: the Division for Palestine Rights; the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People. No Arab state has ever been chastised by the U.N. for actions against Israel and for its defiance of the 1948 U.N. resolution.”

“UNRWA was founded 52 years ago as a temporary agency to help the Palestinian refugees from the first Arab war to destroy Israel, in 1948. In a report he submitted in November 1951, UNRWA director John Blandford Jr. stated he expected the Arab governments to assume responsibility for relief operation by July 1952. The international community assumed the refugees should be resettled as soon as possible because, as Blandford put it, "Sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration."

While Blandford's innocence is somewhat touching, he should have suspected foul play from the moment of UNRWA's creation.

The UN, after all, already had an agency dedicated to helping refugees — the venerable UN High Commission on Refugees. On its own Web site, UNRWA explains why all the world's refugees have one agency and the Palestinians have another: "UNRWA is mandated to provide the Palestine refugees with humanitarian assistance, whereas UNHCR has the mandate... to seek permanent solutions for the problem of refugees by assisting governments. "

With this, UNRWA admits its sister agency is in the business of solving refugee problems, while its job is to perpetuate one. As Ralph Garroway, a former UNRWA director, explained in August 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die. "

“…Follow the money and it tells the same story. In its first 20 years, the US provided more than two-thirds of UNRWA's budget, while the contribution of the Arab states was miniscule. As recently as 1994, Israel gave more to UNRWA than all Arab countries except Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Morocco.

As if this weren't bad enough, UNRWA has now become a de facto accomplice in terrorism. Food storage areas have been allowed to become munitions' depots and weapons' factories, as the incursion last month into the Balata refugee camp showed. And UN administrators have ceded effective control of the camps to Palestinian gunmen – a fact not lost on the IDF as it attempts to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Operation Defensive Shield.

…In 1947, 8 million Hindus fled Pakistan and 6 million Muslims fled India upon the creation of those two countries. The following year about 600,000 Arabs fled Israel and an equal number of Jews fled the Arab countries to Israel. The Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish refugees were all resettled by the war-torn countries they fled to, despite the poverty of those countries and the fact that no refugee agency was created to help them.

Far from providing "relief," UNRWA's mission has added to the burden of Palestinians and Israelis alike. Rather than pledging more money to UNRWA, Powell should have yanked the US contribution and found a way to spend it on solving, rather than perpetuating, the Palestinian refugee problem.”

“On Feb. 28, following a series of Palestinian terror attacks in Israel (including an attack on a young girl's bat mitzvah celebration), Israeli forces rolled into the Jenin and Balata refugee camps. They remained for three days.

…U.N. officials were instantaneous in their condemnation. Kofi Annan called on Israel "to withdraw immediately." High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson labeled the incursions "in total disregard of international human rights." On March 21, a UNRWA spokesman called on Israel to compensate the agency for damage to its refugee camps.

Israel's raids did damage the camps. But as a result of the operation, Israel uncovered illegal arms caches, bomb factories and a plant manufacturing the new Kassam-2 rocket, designed to reach Israeli population centers from the West Bank and Gaza. Confronted with evidence of illegal Palestinian mines, mortars and missiles, no U.N. official questioned how it was that bomb factories could exist in U.N.-managed refugee camps. Either the U.N. officials were unaware of the bomb factories—which would suggest utter incompetence—or, more likely, the U.N. employees simply turned a blind eye.”

“…Unfortunately, UNRWA is not alone in reinforcing the U.N.'s reputation as an organization incapable of fighting terror. On May 24, 2000, Israel unilaterally pulled back from southern Lebanon, a withdrawal the U.N. certified to be complete. Terror did not end, though. On Oct. 7, 2000, Hezbollah guerrillas crossed the border and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers (including one Israeli Arab), all of whom they subsequently killed. Observers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon videotaped the scene of the kidnapping, including the getaway cars, and some guerrillas.

Inexplicably, they then hid the videotape. Questioned by Israeli officials, Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, chided Israel for "questioning the good faith of senior United Nations officials." When after eight months the U.N. finally admitted to possessing the tape, officials balked at showing it to the Israeli government since that might "undermine U.N. neutrality." That U.N. observers protected and defended guerrillas who crossed a U.N.-certified border, using cars with U.N. license plates while under the cover of U.N. flags, was apparently of no consequence to UNIFIL. Pronouncements aside, U.N. moral equivalency in practice dictates that terrorists are equal to states. Fighting terror compromises U.N. neutrality.

…Perhaps Mr. Annan can be forgiven for not being aware that U.N.-funded refugee camps housed arms factories, or for allowing U.N. complicity in terror cover-ups in Lebanon
and Iraq. But in a Middle East where perception is more important than reality, Mr. Annan's silence is deafening and his moral equivalency is interpreted as a green light for terror. The main casualty is U.N. credibility.”

“It has been a long-standing scandal that this UN agency [UNWRA] has toed the Arab line that the refugee camps should remain temporary shelters, so as not to undermine the claims of the 1948 refugees to refugee status and to their demand to return to Israel proper. Any attempt to develop a rehabilitation program, or even make conditions in the refugee camps more humane, has been thwarted by the obstinate Arab policy of keeping the refugees in misery so that their claims should not somehow be attenuated.

But there is a deeper issue: all refugee camp officials - from directors of the camps, through the camp bureaucracy and down to teachers in the schools - are UN employees. Most of them are Palestinians. Is it possible for a camp like Jenin to become a center for terrorists and suicide bombers without the knowledge, connivance or even active participation of the UN-employed camp bureaucracy - Palestinians or expatriates?

One can well understand that Palestinian officials of UNWRA support the Palestinian cause, as would those international workers employed by the agency. But there is a difference between supporting the Palestinian case and aiding and abetting terrorism and suicide attacks.

As usual, the UN is reluctant to investigate itself and face the consequences, as has been the case in Srebrenica, where UN peace-keeping forces were complicit in the Serb massacre of 7000 Muslim men in l995.

The UN should now investigate itself by checking whether any individual employed by its refugee relief agencies has been involved, directly or indirectly, in terrorist activities.”

While millions of people are being murdered, tortured and enslaved, with no intervention by the U.N., Israel’s Security Fence was sent by the U.N. for adjudication by the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Israel’s Security Fence represents the most non-violent, passive way to stop mass-murdering suicide bombers from entering Israel and killing her citizens.

In the current U.N. constellation, the fact that no democracy supported the Arab initiative was not enough to prevent the poor decision.

“Does the international community wish to continue the systematic destruction of its institutions on the altar of the Arab-Israeli conflict? This, not Israel's security fence, is the question that will shortly be before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

First the UN General Assembly let the tyranny of tyrannies reign when automatic majorities routinely treated one nation, Israel, as a pariah, "racist" state. This deterioration is so complete that the UN routinely ignores its own rules in its zeal to condemn Israel. It has, for example, called "emergency" sessions to condemn Israel even when the GA itself is in session.

Next the politicization spread to humanitarian bodies and human-rights issues. At the UN Human Rights Commission, Israel was the only country singled out for condemnation by the agenda itself, before the annual session began, and 30 percent of the resolutions condemned Israel alone.

Just weeks ago, Israel felt compelled to abstain on an annual GA resolution condemning religious intolerance when the sponsoring nation, Ireland, refused specifically to mention anti-Semitism, and a separate resolution condemning anti-Semitism had been blocked... “…This was small potatoes compared to Israel's singling out as the only country in 53 years to warrant the condemnation of the contracting parties of the Geneva Convention, who slept peacefully as Cambodians, Sudanese, Rwandans, etc. were slaughtered.

So far the perversion of international political and human-rights bodies into cudgels against the region's only democracy has largely escaped the judicial sphere. Now the question is whether the venerable International Court of Justice, its predecessor established by the League of Nations, will fall victim to the same plague. “…If the ICJ were a fair court, it would have rejected the UN's attempt to politicize it on multiple counts.

First, that the UN did not bother to wait to pronounce and condemn Israel on the very question for which it sought the court's "advisory opinion," namely the legality of the security fence.

Second, because the UN entirely ignored the suicide terrorism that necessitates the fence's construction.

Third, because the court is not even supposed to involve itself on "contentious issues" without the express consent of the parties.

And fourth, because the Geneva Convention itself, which the fence supposedly violates, either does not apply at all, or allows for self-defense and even for the confiscation of land for "imperative military necessity."

Yet the ICJ is expected not only to consider the question, in blatant violation of its own precedents and rules, but to rule against Israel. As a result, the march to declare Israel an international outlaw state will continue…

“…If so, the nations of the world, through the UN and its bodies and court, will be committing another act of what Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler calls "genocidal anti-Semitism." The context of the court's action is that Israel, as Cotler wrote in a November 2002 paper of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, is "the only state in the world today ... that is the object of standing threats from governmental, religious, and terrorist bodies seeking its destruction."

The UN, and now its judicial arm, are not only failing to combat this fundamental breach of international security and human rights; they are central parties to it. The fence is not the real issue here. The ICJ is letting itself be used in a campaign to brand Israel as an "apartheid state" which, of course, has no right to exist.

Israel is not the only victim of this crime. By selecting Israel as the paradigm of the outlaw state, the international community is abandoning the millions of people who live under real tyrannies and whose governments are the real threats to peace and security.

"I say to my wife and my people, Next Year in Jerusalem," said Natan Sharansky, standing before the Soviet court that sentenced him to 13 years in prison. "To this court, which has only read a sentence prepared long ago – to you I have nothing to say."

That something called the International Court of Justice is poised to put Israel in a similar position is not just a tragedy for this country, but for the world.”

“When he served as ambassador to the UN, the late Chaim Herzog charged that the organization's attitude to Israel "belonged in Alice's Wonderland. If Alice wandered into UN headquarters, she would only have to wear a Star of David in order to hear the imperious 'off with her head' at every turn." What took place in the General Assembly Monday, only adds yet another illustration to Herzog's argument, unfortunately every bit as cogent today, as when he first made it some three decades ago. Nothing is seemingly more immutable than the UN's incredible anti-Israel double standards.

The General Assembly demonstrated its bias when it voted by a whopping 90-8 majority to refer the security fence to the International Court of Justice. Israel, desperately resorting to the most non-violent defensive measure against relentless terror, is thereby put on trial, while mass-murderers cast themselves in the role of the outraged plaintiffs.

But if any silver lining can be detected in this latest episode of the General Assembly's annals, it is that, unequivocal as the anti-Israel majority was, it was less massive than to which we have become accustomed…

“…No less that 74 nations chose to abstain, and many others were no-shows for the session. In all, less than half of the 191 assembly members voted against Israel. This didn't result in an Israeli victory, but as Ambassador Dan Gillerman noted, it was at least "a moral victory." In practical terms Israel can't view the vote as heralding an imminent change in its fortunes at the UN. Yet even the Arab world's automatic majority runs up against some limits when it distorts the fabric of the international system in its drive to vilify Israel.

Qualitative analysis of who voted for the Arab resolution and who did not is further enlightening. Israel was supported by the US, Australia, Ethiopia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau. The long list of abstainers include the entire EU contingent, along with all other European countries and all other members of the Free World. No democracy supported the Arab initiative.

The resulting picture is instructive. The dividing line seems to be that which separates democracies from dictatorships. Those who voted for turning the fence issue to the ICJ for deliberation were on the whole autocracies, which succumbed to the tyranny of tyrannies.

“The Situation of and Assistance to Israeli Children”
(Israel introduces for the first time a draft resolution to the agenda of the UN, November 2003)

“Liran Zer-Aviv was getting excited about his approaching fourth birthday party when his family took him out to lunch at a well-known restaurant in the Israeli city of Haifa last month. As they ate, a young Palestinian woman walked into the restaurant packed with other families and detonated a suicide bomb. Liran and his parents were killed. So were his baby sister and his grandmother.

Just days after, far away in New York, Egypt proposed a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly. The resolution decried the suffering of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli military, but said nothing about Liran or the scores of other Israeli children killed and maimed by Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists…

“…That gave the Israelis an idea. For years, Israel had sat by as the UN condemned its various sins; it spoke against all the resolutions aimed at the Jewish state but seldom if ever proposed any of its own. Every year, the General Assembly passes about 20 resolutions against Israel, far more than it directs at any other country. This time, Israel decided to fight back. It proposed a resolution, its first since 1976, decrying the suffering of Israeli children in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Israeli resolution closely matched the wording of the Palestinian one, simply replacing the words "Palestinian children" with "Israeli children.”

The Palestinians and their allies were outraged. They called the resolution a dirty trick and used their voting bloc in the assembly to attach amendments that emasculated it. So, on Wednesday, Israel withdrew the resolution. Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman called it "a shameful day for the United Nations, a sad day for humanity. "… “…It is hard to disagree with that. The consistent discrimination against Israel at the United Nations is a dark stain on the reputation of the world body. Whatever its crimes or misdemeanours, Israel draws far more criticism at the UN than it warrants. The UN helped create Israel when it passed a resolution calling for the partition of the Holy Land between Arabs and Jews in 1947. But at least since 1967, when the Six-Day War changed Israel's image from victim to victor, the UN has been consistently anti-Israel.

About a quarter of all the rebukes issued by the UN Human Rights Commission are aimed at Israel, while dictatorial countries such as Iran are rarely criticized and countries such as Libya are even invited to chair the body. Until May, 2000, Israel was kept out of the UN system of clubs known as regional groupings, an exclusion that meant it could not serve on the UN's most powerful organ, the Security Council.

As the Israeli government officially complains: "Israel is the object of more investigative committees, special representatives and rapporteurs than any other state in the UN system." At the height of anti-Israeli feeling at the UN, the General Assembly voted to equate Zionism with racism. Just two years ago, at a UN conference in Durban, South Africa, the anti-Israel lobby again raised that ugly charge…

“…All of this has consequences. As a result of its consistent prejudice against Israel, the United Nations has played no substantial role in the effort to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Any time anyone suggests a UN intervention in the dispute, Israel quite understandably protests. How could it possibly trust the UN to supervise an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, for example?

Though Israel's resolution on children failed in the end, that very failure brilliantly exposed the UN's double standard in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Until last year, UN resolutions on children had always condemned the suffering of children everywhere, without singling out any particular group. Palestinian diplomats said they singled out Palestinian children because they suffer more, under Israeli occupation, than "any other children in the world." And, indeed, Palestinian children have suffered severely as the fighting has escalated…

“…But what of the Israeli children? More than 100 like Liran Zer-Aviv have been killed since the start of the latest Palestinian uprising three years ago. Unlike the Palestinians, they were often deliberately targeted for death by bombers who went to places where they knew there would be children, like family restaurants, pizza parlours and discotheques. In one infamous case last year, Palestinian gunmen burst into an Israeli home and killed a five-year-old girl as she hid under her parents' bed.

By rejecting the Israeli resolution, the United Nations General Assembly has declared to the world that that girl's death does not matter. More important, it has declared once again its deep bias against the state of Israel.”

Conclusion
“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.”

“Supporters of the United Nations say that if it didn't exist, the world would have to create it. That might have been true at the end of World War II, but not today.

There are countless organizations helping sort out global problems: the G8, the World Trade Organization, the Commonwealth, NATO and many other multilateral governmental organizations work in parts of the UN's mandate. Tens of thousands of non-governmental organizations duplicate much of the UN's work.

In the face of this, the 56-year-old organization must either reform itself or wither away.

What's wrong with the UN that everyone else is doing its job for it?

“…The developed world also funds most of the UN's special agencies and boards and provides key personnel for peacekeeping or humanitarian operations.

Despite this, the 168 countries that pay only about 14 per cent of the costs regularly use the UN to attack Western democracies, especially Israel. There are more than a dozen one-sided UN resolutions criticizing Israel, most relatively silent about misdeeds by the Palestinian Authority or Arab states.

Then there is the plethora of conferences that assault Western values while ignoring abuses in developing states such as Zimbabwe. The recent "human-rights" fiasco in Durban, South Africa, was not unique.

Not surprisingly, taxpayers in Western countries are demanding a better return on their investment.

The UN cannot ignore this; it must change…

A UN for the 21st century must be lean, focused and sympathetic to Western values. Otherwise, it will not be worth keeping.”

“The US should stop financing and supporting an organization chock-full of dictatorships like the UN. The US presence in the UN serves only to legitimize these tyrannies’ existence and their continuous abuse of human rights. To sanction evil is as impractical as it is immoral. The US cannot hope to protect human rights by associating itself with human rights violators.

Of course, the US should continue to pursue a foreign policy that supports human rights, but should do so on its own, or in alliance with other nations that actually share its values. If America really cares about human rights, the best thing it can do is to take this opportunity and withdraw from the UN. Then the world may get the message that human rights are more important that membership in a corrupt and morally bankrupt organization.”

“…The U.N. today remains far short of realizing its potential or its stated aspirations. Its direction and control have been hijacked by authoritarian regimes, the relics of yesterday. We must work diligently toward realizing its original goals: freedom, democracy and human rights for all the peoples of the world. Until then, with our national values and security at stake, we must not permit our interests to be diverted and undermined by the unprincipled. At a minimum, it is essential that the U.S. take the lead in establishing and strengthening a Caucus of Democratic States committed to advancing the U.N.'s assigned role for world peace, human dignity and democracy. The recently established Community of Democracies (CD) has called for this move, a recommendation jointly supported in a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations and Freedom House.

…The changes necessary in the U.N. will be difficult to achieve, and some may not be achieved at all. But the impetus for such change must be a commitment to human rights and democracy. We should put Kofi Annan's statement to the test: "When the U.N. can truly call itself a Community of Democracies, the Charter's noble ideas of protecting human rights . . . will have been brought much closer. "”

In today’s U.N., dictators can viciously deny their own people democracy while hypocritically and unjustly exploiting the U.N.’s democratic structure to act against true democracies.

Such Orwellian practices must come to an end.

We call for the creation of a new international body whose membership is exclusive to states that are democracies, with leaders who champion its citizens’ human rights.



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