Challenging the UN's darker side (Part 2) | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

[We have highlighted a recent report concerning the upcoming UN which has been called Durban II. The previous excerpts detailed how the UN has effectively been hijacked by Islam and made a channel for their hatred of Israel.]

While the Geneva session is underway, the European Parliament in Brussels will host a UN "International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace." Contrary to the noble-sounding title, the rapprochement is disingenuous at best.

Consider its idea of balance: On one side will be selected Palestinian presenters like Raji Sourani, who justifies Hamas attacks as "resistance," and Jamal Juma, who says Israel is a "colonial racist apartheid state." On the other side are selected Israeli presenters who couldn't agree more. These include Michel Warschawski, self-described as a "well-known anti-Zionist activist," and Nurit Peled-Elhanan, who recently pronounced that "the Jewish head has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism, while the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to devastate and demolish and destroy this country." By citizenship, they are Israeli, but only a scoundrel or a fool would imagine either as representatives of Israel's point of view.

The UN's 16-member Palestinian division is part of a sprawling infrastructure of anti-Israel committees and programs launched by the General Assembly in 1975 alongside its resolution declaring that "Zionism is racism." In the past six months alone, the division devoted vast sums for gatherings in Doha, Rome, Pretoria, and New York. Wouldn't its $5 million budget go to better use -- and actually help Palestinians -- by building clinics in Gaza or schools in Ramallah? Tragically, the Arab regimes responsible for its annual renewal seem more interested in preserving grievances than solving them.

Faced with such intransigence, is there anything the secretary general can do? There is.

The greatest enabler of the Durban debacle, as Lantos recounts, was Mary Robinson, the UN's human rights commissioner, whose diplomacy of appeasement encouraged the spoilers. This time around, the secretary general should instruct his Geneva officials to stand firm.

As to Brussels, the secretary general's representative, billed as opening the event, should send a clear message that anti-Israel propaganda and posturing are relics of the past -- and hurt the cause of peace rather than help the Palestinians.

A UN secretary general cannot be judged by country-driven bodies that go astray. But as Ban did recently in protesting the hypocrisies of the Human Rights Council, he can choose to speak truth to power now.

Hillel C. Neuer is executive director of UN Watch in Geneva.

By (Hillel C. Neuer,  The Boston Globe, August 25, 2007)