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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