This article published in The Washington Times ----------------------------------------------------------- U.N. LYNCHING PRELUDE Arnold Beichman Hoover Institution ----------------------------------------------------------- Of the 190 countries in the United Nations only one, Israel, has been singled out by a majority of the U.N. membership for extinction. I will document this statement with a catalogue of actions taken by the U.N. in the half-century of the its existence that will demonstrate: • First, that no other U.N. member state has ever been so targeted; yes, not even apartheid South Africa. • Second, no other U.N. member state has had its legitimacy so consistently questioned. • Third, no other U.N. member state has been denied its right to self-defense against deadly attacks against its citizens. Israel is not shown on the maps of Arab cartographers, especially those used in school textbooks. The U.N. majority, acting as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner like a lynch mob of yore, now intends to turn that myth into reality. The latest U.N. action by unanimous vote of the Security Council to set up a committee to investigate the Jenin "massacre" is an example of typical U.N. double-dealing where Israel is concerned. It never occurred to the U.N. Security Council to set up a special committee to investigate Mr. Arafat's 18-month suicide bombing intifada. But when Israel counterattacks, it's a massacre and Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, says the Israeli defense move was "in total violation of human rights." (As Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick has written: "Suicide bombing intends genocide.") In other words, suicide bombing terrorism against civilians is legitimate, resistance to such terrorism is illegitimate. Here is the documentation (assembled with the aid of U.N. Watch) of how the U.N., driven by the powerful Arab-Muslim bloc, has successfully ghettoized Israel: (1) Israel is the only country excluded from the U.N.'s regional group system. Israel is located in Asia, yet it is barred from Asian group membership at the U.N., due to an Arab boycott. As a result, it is the only country without regional group affiliation, the other four being the Western European and Others Group, the Eastern European Group, the African Group, and the Latin American Group. These groups are important, because they act as diplomatic working groups on almost every issue to be discussed. These groups also propose candidates to be elected to the various U.N. bodies, like the Security Council and the Commission on Human Rights. Since Israel does not belong to any group, it is the only country of 190 member states that is not eligible to serve on the numerous U.N. commissions. Recently the Western European and Others Group, which includes the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand as "others" now invites Israel to take part in discussions in New York, but Israel will not be allowed to stand for election. (2) In recent years, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has annually passed five resolutions condemning Israel. This year, they passed seven. By contrast, each of the following countries/regions has been the subject of only one resolution: Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Russia/Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Southeast Europe and Sudan. The disproportionate focus is aggravated by allocating a separate agenda item to criticism of Israel, while all other countries are discussed collectively under a different item. One resolution this year even contained a camouflaged endorsement of Palestinian terrorism. It "reaffirmed" a General Assembly resolution from 1982 (No. 37/43), which approves of resistance to occupation "by all available means." There is a special rapporteur who is assigned by the commission to examine Israel's actions. Rapporteurs for other countries investigate "situations." The rapporteur for Israel is mandated to investigate "violations," thus prejudging the outcome of his report. His mandate is the only one that is not periodically reviewed by the members of the commission. These reports are always one-sided, because the mandate requires that Israeli practices be investigated and not Palestinian practices, even in the same geographical area. (3) Nov. 29 is the United Nations Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People. No other people has a U.N. Day of Solidarity. This date marks the anniversary of the General Assembly's 1947 Partition Plan, known as Resolution 181. In 1977 the Arab states pushed through a General Assembly resolution to place the U.N. offices in New York and Geneva at the disposal of speakers from the League of Arab States, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the two unique U.N. committees mentioned above — the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices in the Occupied Territories. In these speeches, Israel is accused of the most heinous of crimes: genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and last year terrorism was added to the list. This Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians all happens under U.N. auspices and is paid for by the U.N. (4) Israel is the only state to which a special investigator with "an open-ended mandate to inspect its human rights record" is assigned by the U.N. (5) It is the only state targeted by two special committees and special units of the U.N. Secretariat ostensibly devoted to the Palestinians but in reality dedicated to Israel-bashing worldwide, costing millions of dollars a year. (6) Israel is the only state that has been the subject of two blood libels at the U.N. — the murder of Christian children to make matzo (1991) and infecting Christian children with the HIV virus (1997). Both instances happened at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. In 1991, the Syrian delegate accused Israel of murdering children to use their blood for matzo. In 1997, the Palestinian delegate accused Israel of injecting 300 Palestinian children with HIV-infected blood. (7) It is the only state that since 1982 has been the subject of two emergency special sessions of the General Assembly. (8) It is the only state whose aggressors in three wars have gone unchallenged in the Security Council. (9) The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution (General Assembly Resolution 3379) was called by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan "a low point" of the U.N.'s history. While it was repealed in 1991, there were efforts to revive this language during the U.N.'s World Conference Against Racism last year in Durban. Though most of the anti-Israel proposals were defeated in the end, the Durban Conference process crossed the line into anti-Semitism with the denial that Jews have a right to self-determination, denigration of the Holocaust and twisting the use of "anti-Semitism" to mean anti-Arabism. (10) UNIFIL, the U.N. force stationed on the Israel-Lebanon border, hid a videotape of Israeli soldiers being abducted by Hezbollah in October 2000. After finally admitting to having the tape, the U.N. would only show an edited version (in which Hezbollah faces were hidden) to the Israeli government. They claimed they needed to maintain neutrality between a member state and a terrorist group. (11) The U.N. Environmental Program held a Special Session on the "Environment in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," as if there were no greater environmental concerns in the world that might merit a special session. (12) UNESCO, in Paris, began passing resolutions about protection of Jerusalem holy sites and access for Muslims in 1968. No resolutions about protection or Jewish access were passed from 1946 to 1967 when Jordan controlled Jerusalem and barred Jews from entering. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 25, 1999, described the infamous "Zionism-is-racism" resolution as "perhaps our low-point in our relations; its negative resonance even today is difficult to overestimate." Calling for a "broader fight" against anti-Semitism, Mr. Annan said: "I know that the United Nations is regarded by many as biased against the State of Israel. I know that Israelis see hypocrisy and double standards in the intense scrutiny given to some of its actions, while other situations fail to elicit the world's outrage and condemnation. Still the broader fight against anti-Semitism must be addressed. We must denounce anti-Semitism in all its manifestations." Let the denouncing begin. see Brief facts about the origin of the Palestinian Refugees |
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