Anne Bayefsky: Undiplomatic Imbalance, Antisemitism at the UN is a problem for more than just Israel

NRO ^ | December 13, 2004 | Anne Bayefsky

[Tolik]

Do the Palestinian run the U.N.?

There is a curious omission in the 129-page report on United Nations reform recently produced by a 16-person panel "of eminent and experienced people" at the request of Secretary General Kofi Annan. The U.N.'s own website, under "Main Bodies," lists the General Assembly, the Security Council, and directly below, the "Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." But nowhere does the reform report mention this committee.

The omission goes to the heart of what's really ailing the U.N. For the past four decades the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine of the nom de guerre of Arab and Islamic states — the Palestinian Authority. Their aim is to demonize, debilitate, and destroy the state of Israel — the thriving democratic beachhead in their midst — for a start. The original U.N. mission, to protect the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, has been hijacked and corrupted by nations that neither share the universal values of the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights nor have democratic intentions.

Is this a paranoid, introverted, hysterical exaggeration? Consider the evidence.

Every schoolchild or member of the public who walks into U.N. Headquarters today (and the entire month of December) will be greeted by a large display in the front entrance put on by that main U.N. body, the Committee on Palestinian Rights. It includes a series of pictures "Fashion for Army Checkpoints," that conveys the alleged degradation of being searched for a suicide bomb strapped to one's body. Of course, nothing is said about the degradation of being blown up by a suicide bomb strapped to those bodies who manage to avoid such searches.

Is this just a problem for Israelis? Not if one compares the extensive Palestinian exhibit gracing the U.N. lobby with the minimal display they managed to squeeze alongside on the subject of AIDS.

But the public U.N. entrance is just the tip of the iceberg. There is only one entire U.N. Division devoted to a single group of people — the U.N. Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977). There is only one U.N. website dedicated to the claims of a single people — the enormous UNISPAL, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. There is only one refugee agency dedicated to a single refugee situation — UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (in operation since 1950.)

Is this just an Israeli problem? Not if you're a Dalit in India, a farm worker in Zimbabwe, or a Tibetan, and your rights are not on the U.N. agenda.

The list of hijacked U.N. organs goes on. The General Assembly operates through six committees of the whole. One of them, the Fourth Committee, routinely devotes 30 percent of its time to the condemnation of Israel.

Is this just an Israeli problem? Not if you're concerned about another agenda item of the Fourth Committee, the "comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects" which gets less than half the attention paid to Israel.

How about the takeover of the General Assembly emergency-session procedure? These sessions began in 1956, and since then six of the ten emergency sessions ever held have been about Israel. The 10th such session began in 1997 and has been "reconvened" 13 times, most recently this past summer.

Is this just an Israeli problem? Not if you were one of those people who thought a million dead in Rwanda or two million dead in Sudan might have warranted one General Assembly emergency session.

Then there is the U.N.'s primary human-rights body, the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Thirty percent of the resolutions condemning specific states ever adopted over 40 years are directed at Israel. The attention not paid to the rights of a billion people in Communist China — who have never been the subject of a single resolution — is not an Israeli problem.

To appreciate fully the extent to which the U.N. has been taken over, observe November 29th, the annual U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which is the only U.N. day dedicated to a specific people. The occasion was held in the U.N.'s elaborate Trusteeship Council before hundreds of delegates. At the front of the room sat the secretary general, the president of the General Assembly, and the chair of that main U.N. body, the Committee on Palestinian Rights. In a repeat of previous years' performances, beside them stood a U.N. flag, a Palestinian flag, and in between, a map in Arabic pre-dating the existence of the U.N. member state of Israel. All participants were asked to rise for "a minute of silence...for all those who have given their lives for the cause of the Palestinian people..." — which would include suicide bombers.

Given that the major client of U.N. largess is the Palestinian surrogate for Arab and Islamic warlords, it is a wonder that the experts on U.N. reform didn't see fit to mention the impact of the bull in their china shop.

On the contrary, they recommended that more bulls be invited in. Reform of the human-rights commission, according to the secretary general's experts, requires not limiting the commission to states committed to democracy and human-rights protection, but expanding the membership from the current 53 to all 191 U.N. member states. Current members and human-rights enthusiasts like Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan will no doubt be delighted to be joined by friends in Iran and Burma.

In an apparent nod to the ransacking of the U.N.'s peace and security foundation by Islamic states — that have blocked the adoption of a comprehensive convention against terrorism for years — the secretary general's panel recommended that the U.N. adopt a definition of terrorism. On the bright side, they finally admitted the U.N. doesn't have such a definition. Until it does, it can hardly be expected to play a serious role in the war against terrorism. But the panel was very careful to recommend that it be a "consensus definition" — U.N. code language for blessing continuing stonewalling by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

As for the panel recommendation to expand the membership of the Security Council, it may improve the egos of various states. But more warm bodies not subject to democratic membership qualifications won't transform a damage-control organ and its veto-protection scheme into an effective instrument for dealing with grave threats like a nuclear Iran.

So let's cut through all of the talk and meetings and discussion groups on U.N. reform to the root cause of U.N. disease. Arab and Islamic states have the U.N. in a chokehold and, so far, no one is prepared to do anything about it.

— Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting professor at Touro and Metropolitan Colleges in New York..

[Tolik]

More of her writings: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=annebayefsky

[Piranha]

Is she no longer a visiting professor at Columbia Law School?

[Tolik]

From her page at Hudson: http://www.hudson.org/learn/index.cfm?fuseaction=staff_bio&eid=BayeAnne

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow with Hudson Institute. Before joining Hudson she was an adjunct professor and associate research scholar from 2002 to 2004 at Columbia University Law School in New York. She was a visiting professor at the law school from 2001 to 2002.

[Tolik]

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity PING!

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[Publius6961]

Dang. You're right. I looked all over for the...

Committe on the Right of Israel to Have a Jewish State with Defensible Borders, and I'm still looking.

By the way, does the current UN have a clue?
What is the "palestinian people"? Syria? Jordan? What?

The muslim arabs in the vicinity of the nascent Jewish State rejected the UN proposal. 56 years ago...

[Tolik]

Turning Israel's decisive military victories into a political defeat was a brilliant accomplishment of Soviet and Arab diplomats. Of course, it would never been possible without accomplices in the West on their way to turn Europe into Eurabia.

[Alouette]

FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel ping list.

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[Convert from ECUSA]

" For the past four decades the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine of the nom de guerre of Arab and Islamic states — the Palestinian Authority. Their aim is to demonize, debilitate, and destroy the state of Israel — the thriving democratic beachhead in their midst — for a start. The original U.N. mission, to protect the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, has been hijacked and corrupted by nations that neither share the universal values of the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights nor have democratic intentions."

Amen! Talk about nailed it and moral clarity! Whooooeeee, as Emeril Lagasse would say - BAM! BTW, I like the picture of the hammer about to hit the nail, it says it all about the article!

[IAF ThunderPilot]

Do you know what most of Israelis, INCLUDING many lefties (!!!), think about the UN?

UN = Unwanted Nobodies

And I am among them!

I had a girl friend who was a leftis in her political opinions, however she had the same opinion about the UN!
And she is not the only example.

[anotherview]

The answer to your question was written in a letter by Emir Feisal al-Hussein (later King Feisal of Iraq and Trnasjordan) in 1919:

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

Note the goodwill by Arab leaders towards Zionism at the time. That began to change under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who instigated anti-Jewish riots among Palestinian Arabs in 1920. He became Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the British appointed spiritual and defacto political leader of the Palestinians in 1921. He effectively remained their leader until he passed the reigns of power to his nephew, Yasser Arafat.

The 84 years of conflict we have endured can largely be traced to Husseini and to the British who appointed him and seemed to see conflict between Arab and Jew as a way to divide and conquer, to retain control of their "mandate".

The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

I added the bold face for exmphasis. King Feisal, and most Arabs at the time, considered Palestine (which included what is now Israel) to be part of Syria. If that is correct then Palestinians are, in fact, ethnically Syrian.

Note the goodwill of the Arab leadership towards Zionism at the time. It certainly didn't last long, did it? The Palestinians talk of Jews as invaders. Those who didn't already live in British Palestine were invited in by the Arabs at the time.

[anotherview]

Disregard the above post. It got jumbled. It should read:

The answer to your question was written in a letter by Emir Feisal al-Hussein (later King Feisal of Iraq and Trnasjordan) in 1919:

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

I added the bold face for exmphasis. King Feisal, and most Arabs at the time, considered Palestine (which included what is now Israel) to be part of Syria. If that is correct then Palestinians are, in fact, ethnically Syrian.

Note the goodwill of the Arab leadership towards Zionism at the time. It certainly didn't last long, did it?

That began to change under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who instigated anti-Jewish riots among Palestinian Arabs in 1920. He became Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the British appointed spiritual and defacto political leader of the Palestinians in 1921. He effectively remained their leader until he passed the reigns of power to his nephew, Yasser Arafat.

The 84 years of conflict we have endured can largely be traced to Husseini and to the British who appointed him and seemed to see conflict between Arab and Jew as a way to divide and conquer, to retain control of their "mandate".

The Palestinians talk of Jews as invaders. Those who didn't already live in British Palestine were invited in by the Arabs at the time.

[anotherview]

Do you know what most of Israelis, INCLUDING many lefties (!!!), think about the UN?

UN = Unwanted Nobodies

I think you are a master of understatement. Most of us have much harsher words for the U.N. Left or right doesn't seem to matter when it comes to the U.N.

[anniegetyourgun]

Thanks for the ping Tolik - very interesting article.

[IAF ThunderPilot]

I know! I can think about 100 words that I can say about the UN that are similar to the words that I may use against Arafat or Hitler!

My point here was to change the meaning of the U.N (Unwanted Nobodies), and most of all my point was to show that the Israeli opinions are united when its about the UN-no matter if its left or right, same as we have the same opinions about Arafat and Hitler!

Unwanted Nobodies is a simple way to represent the Israeli (including myself) opinion about the UN, because if I start saying the entire things that I think about the UN, my posts will be removed :)

[Convert from ECUSA]

I'll bet you say quite a few good phrases about the UN if you wanted to, my friend! And you'd have an Amen Corner here in Virginia if you cut loose and did so (though hopefully your comments would not be banned at FR)! Interesting that many Israeli leftists think the UN is useless, in the USA, most leftists practically worship the UN like it was the altar of Ba'al. Hmmm, come to think of it, the UN is the altar of Ba'al.

My personal thoughts of the UN (at least those that are not profane):

UN = Unwanted Nudzhes ("nudzhe" or "nudge" is Yiddish for pest or nag)

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[swilhelm73]

bttt