Toronto Sun <editor@sunpub.com> | February 9, 2003
UN is guilty of anti-Semitism
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN <lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com>
Of all the shame the United Nations has brought down upon itself in recent decades, none matches its ongoing, obsessive, relentless and vicious attacks on the state of Israel.
Nothing - not the recent farcical election of totalitarian Libya to head the UN Commission on Human Rights, nor the bizarre appointment of Iraq, for gawd's sake, to co-chair a major UN forum on disarmament - so defines the moral bankruptcy of the UN as does its decades-long persecution of the very state it was instrumental in creating in 1948.
Writing in The Washington Times last May, Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, described Israel as the only one of 190 UN countries ever singled out by a majority of UN members for extinction. This may have been an overstatement. But not by much. Consider:
As Morris Abram, the late chairman of United Nations Watch, once observed, the UN has held only two special emergency sessions since 1982. No session was ever convened to condemn China's occupation of Tibet, Syria's occupation of Lebanon, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, or the slaughters in Rwanda, the disappearances in Zaire, or any other global horror. Only Israel was so targeted - twice.
At the UN's urging, only one member state has ever been brought before the Geneva Convention. Not Cambodia for its genocide, Russia for its brutal repression of Chechnya or Sudan for its atrocities. Again, it was Israel.
The UN General Assembly, driven by a coalition of Arab, Muslim and other dictatorships, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation on Earth. But it has never censured Israel's assailants for their three wars of aggression in 1948, 1967 and 1973.
The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) passes at least five resolutions a year condemning Israel (last year it was seven) and spends about 30% of its time solely on the Jewish state. In contrast, as Beichman notes, each of the following countries or regions has been the subject of one resolution - Iraq, Iran, Russia/Chechnya, Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Cuba, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Southeast Europe and Sudan. Manuel Prutschi of the Canadian Jewish Congress notes this double standard is compounded by the fact the UNCHR devotes one agenda item to focusing solely on Israel. All other nations are lumped together under a separate item.
Despite this, Israel, the only Mideast democracy, is not allowed to join the UNCHR, or the Security Council, while many of the world's worst dictatorships - Syria, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia - can and do. As David Goldberg of the Canada-Israel Committee explains, membership on major UN bodies is conditional upon belonging to one of the UN's five regional groups. Israel is the only UN member excluded from this system because it has been prevented from joining its regional group - Asia - by an ongoing Arab boycott. Thus, it cannot even get a delegate appointed to the 53-nation UNCHR to defend itself from unfair attacks. Due to efforts by the U.S. and, to its credit, Canada, Israel now has partial membership in the "Western European and Others Group."
Israel, Beichman notes, is the only country to which the UNCHR assigns a special "rapporteur" to investigate human rights "violations." In other nations, rapporteurs investigate "situations." The reports by Israel's rapporteur are always one-sided because his mandate prohibits investigating Palestinian actions in addition to Israel's, even if they occur in the same area. The Israeli rapporteur's mandate is the only one not periodically reviewed by the UNCHR.
Each year on Nov. 29, the UN holds a United Nations Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The day is always a vicious diatribe against Israel. There is no UN Day of International Solidarity With the Victims of Palestinian Terrorism. No other "people" on Earth, no matter how brutally oppressed, receive a similar day of UN solidarity.
While the anti-Semitic ravings aimed at Jews at the infamous UN conference ostensibly against racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001 are well-known, Israel is also the only UN state to have been subjected to two blood libels. In 1991, the Syrian delegate to the UNCHR accused Israel of murdering Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, an ancient anti-Semitic canard. In 1997, the Palestinian delegate accused Israel of injecting 300 Palestinian children with HIV-infected blood. Neither of these lies was immediately denounced by the UN. From 1975-91, in what even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called a "low point" in its history, a General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism stayed on the books until it was finally repealed due to a campaign by the U.S. By contrast, in 1997, the mere mention of an allegedly blasphemous reference to Islam by a UN expert from an academic source, was instantly rebuffed by the UNCHR and deleted from the record.
No fair-minded person argues Israel should be above scrutiny by the UN. No fair-minded person dismisses the suffering of the Palestinians in the Disputed Territories and the human rights abuses committed by Israel, albeit in the context of responding to the constant threat of terrorism.
But to pretend, as the UN does, year after year, that Israel is the world's worst human rights violator, is not only sheer nonsense, it is anti-Semitism. And it is the UN's stock in trade.
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at <lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com>
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