We are so accustomed to the UN slamming Israel, that we hardly take notice when they condemn Israel. However, Friday was a banner day where the UN passed SIX anti-Israel resolutions in one day. Jew-hate central under Kafi Anan’s wicked hand is absolutely laughable, if it were not so serious.
The best quote came from the “Palestinian” rep:
“It is unfortunate to say, at the least, that each time the Arabs have extended their hand, it was violently rejected by Israel.”
The reason we all know is because each time a hand was extended, it was holding an AK-47, hand-grenade, suicide bomb, morter, RPG, or remote controlled bomb.
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Oh, now there’s the U.N. outrage towards Israel’s enemies…
http://www.thenews.com.pk/update_detail.asp?id=14192
I can just see all the countries scrambling to submit their anti-Iran resolutions. Don’t all rush at once now.
GM – sorry to say that I don’t need to Google archives to remember the American Left’s view of Israel being usually positive or neutral even through the Begin years. The why is a whole other discussion. Maybe I was just blind but I didn’t see the Israel become un-hip until the ’82 Lebanon invasion, when I was in college and witnessed first-hand the beginning of the progessive student organizations Israel bashing.
Of course, in the spirit of fair play, here’s someone that completely disagrees with me…
http://thelastbestplace.blogspot.com/2006/09/deconstructing-propaganda.html
Mike’s talking about the rest of the world. I’m referring to the American left. Apples and oranges but still good reading.
As far as the rest of the world, on the surface anti-Israel UN resolutions are an anti-semitic, anti-Zionist ganging up on Israel. But also look at it in the context of the Cold War and you can see it was a little less about ideology and a little more about alliances. Except for the Zionism=racism resolution, which was so anti-semitic that the General Assembly had to backtrack on it. A lot of this was about the U.S. and USSR jockeying for power.
Even the ADL admitted that with the fall of the USSR the UN lightened up on Israel. So what’s disturbing with this new slew of resolutions is that they mirror Russia’s newly energized attempts to reinstate itself as a power in the region – obviously to limit American interests. On the one hand Russia has no love for Islamicism. On the other it has aspirations to regain the old glory days of the USSR-Pan Arabist partnership. Slide down this NYT article to the part about Putin’s intentions in the Middle East…
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901060710-1209926-2,00.html
As far as the role of anti-Israel resolutions in creating international alliances, this piece makes more sense than I do…
http://bama.ua.edu/~afi/monthly_article.htm
“”Countries sympathetic to Israel face considerable pressure not to vote with the anti-Israel forces. “Even when there are certain African and Latin American countries with whom we have good relations, they often tell us that they can’t vote with us because they are committed to vote with their [regional] group,” says the Israeli official. For example, India and Israel enjoy excellent bilateral relations, yet India consistently votes with its Asian bloc and non-aligned group in resolutions against Israel, the result of continual heavy pressure to stick with their groups. “In this way, the more moderate countries are pulled to support the more extreme positions within their groups,” says Becker. “Countries have to be extremely brave to buck the voting pattern of their traditional alliance.””
So does it really matter who’s the Secy. General? Maybe the reason Israeli diplomats so easily shrug off these resolutions and who votes for them might be, to put it crassly, that they don’t take them too personally.
Nathan,
if we all moved to Utah, they would just come up with a reason as to why we “stole” it and needed to be destroyed there.
Shadai – Israel rejected false overtures from groups that have repeatedly proven their real intentions – through several previous iterations of false peace offers. David Grossman typifies a certain willed contextless pollyannaism that has made Israel’s hardcore peaceniks worse than unpopular: they are now increasingly seen as irrelevant.
This is what we are up against – people who have brainwashed you with their manufactured victimhood:
Inspectors catch Palestinians cutting olive trees
Cutting trees and blaming the settlers?
Inspector caught Palestinian youths in the act as they were cutting olive
trees, claiming they did it at the request of the owner of the grove. The
police suspect that he did it for compensation. Now additional Palestinian
complaints will be investigated.
Originally published by the Ma’ariv daily website, translated by IMRA:
Tal Yamin-Walbowitz Maariv website (Maariv NRG) 22 November 2006
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/508/339.html
[Translation by IMRA]
Are the settlers hurting the Palestinians or are the Palestinians hurting
themselves?
Frequently Palestinians farmers complain that settlers cut their trees and
hurt them and their livelihoods. At times even IDF soldiers and police had
to protect the Palestinians farmers in the territories during the olive
harvest season. But the police suspect now that in some cases the
Palestinians themselves are those cutting the trees and then blamed the
settlers and demanded compensation from the Civil Authority.
Foresters of the JNF patrolling the Shaar Efraim area today noticed to their
surprise a number of Palestinians cutting olive trees in violation of the
law as they were damaging scores of olive trees. The foresters hurried to
call the police who arrived and held four of them for questioning.
The four were transferred to the police station in Kedumim and in their
interrogation they said that the owner of the property invited them to cut
the trees for firewood. A police spokesman for the Judea-Samaria District,
Superintendent Pintzi Mor, told Maariv NRG that the owner of the area would
be called in for questioning.
Sources in the police said that over the years the police have experienced a
phenomenon of the filing of complaints to the Civil Authority regarding the
destruction of olive trees, along with a claim for financial compensation.
In the last year alone the Palestinians in the area of Judea and Samaria
filed claims for 350 thousand shekels for the destruction of olive trees.
The police now intend to check the complaints in detail. A senior source in
the police told Maariv NRG that “most of the complaints for damage to olive
trees were filed in recent years at the end of the harvest season or
towards the end, something that increase the suspicion that this is a cooked
deal.”
Holding a remote controlled bomb seems a bit silly.
I was thinking about this the other day when viewing the excellent Oil series on PBS. There’s scads of conflict zones around the world, where atrocities are the simple staple of everyday life, and where territorial conflict is never ending and ongoing for decades & generations. It’s the general ignorance of the public about these, and the studious neglect by the rest of the world community that makes Israel such a prime target. They can’t resolve Georgia, they can’t address genocide in Darfur, they can’t speak of the atrocities of Chechenia, to the dead millions in unaccounted civil wars in central Africa. But they can shake their fists at the Jews, and be highly indignant over all the strife in the Territories simply because it’s better known, and there’s more wider agreement by many ‘bad actors’ to use the Jews as scapegoats. That’s been a dynamic that’s not new, and in the UN it was present at the creation. Israel must bear the burden of the fact that it IS a democracy, and that it’s problems are widely televised and better known by the media and then to the wider world.
Again, that’s been the dynamic here for several decades running at the UN. In that time, since 1996 say, more people have been killed in almost any major war in Africa than have ever died in the various Arab-Israeli conflicts since 1948. And not enough people care about that, so we’ve evidently got to appease the Arabs & their ‘allies’ first. If the arab world were not to possess their strategic reserves of oil, they’d simply be irrelevant. That’s what it all comes down to, blood, money & oil. IMHO Cheers, ‘VJ’
That being said, there is a legitimate question: does the UN overall (forget our justified by myopic focus on Israel for a second) serve a positive purpose or negative purpose?
You’re asking that question, though, as if the UN occasionally dealt with Israel and we then blew it out of proportion. In fact, the General Assembly just spent three days on this new package of denunciations! The new human rights body is devoted almost exclusively to Israel.
Well, perhaps not so “violently” but Israel DID reject several approaches for dialogue.
As David Grossman put it in his recent Rabin memorial speech:
“Maybe, Mr. Prime Minister, you need to be reminded, that if an Arab leader is sending a peace signal, be it the slightest and most hesitant, you must accept it, you must test immediately its sincerity and seriousness. You do not have the moral right not to respond.
You owe it to those whom you would ask to sacrifice their lives should another war break out. Therefore, if President Assad says that Syria wants peace, even if you don’t believe him, and we are all suspicious of him, you must offer to meet him that same day.
Don’t wait a single day. When you launched the last war you did not even wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with the full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces, must you reject it immediately, dissolve it? What have you got to lose? Are you suspicious of it? Go and offer him such terms that would expose his schemes. Offer him a peace process that would last over several years, and only at its conclusion, and provided he meets all the conditions and restrictions, will he get back the Golan. Commit him to a prolonged process, act so that his people also become aware of this possibility. Help the moderates, who must exist there as well. Try to shape reality. Not only serve as its collaborator. This is what you were elected to do. ”
Full text here:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/784034.html
Nathan, good questions, though Muffti is a little hesistant (not everyone here is) of associating Israel bashing with anti-semitism, even if the two are frequently related. As Muffti’s trusty buddy Kenny pointed out, a search through Google News Archive will reveal that Israel was frequently the darling of the left pre-1967 and the occupation (even the Guardian was fairly pro-Israel back in the day).
As for the UN, we all know that it sucks and we know that any body that brings together representatives from everyone country in the world is bound to do things in a lopsided way. It was set up to be a political entity and no surprise that it is guided nearly entirely by politics. And since everyone knows this, no surprise that it’s deliverances are frequently ignored.
That being said, there is a legitimate question: does the UN overall (forget our justified by myopic focus on Israel for a second) serve a positive purpose or negative purpose? And Muffti thinks that having a forum whose job it is to fecilitate diplomacy is IN GENERAL a good thing, even if many of the roles we wish it would play it is clearly barred fro playing precisely because it is so incredibly inclusive.
So who gives a fuck if they issue directive after directive? The Israeli’s essentially ignore them, the Americans tend to veto the out-of-hand outrageous ones and no one really bats an eye either way at this point. Muffti isnt’ even sure why we bother giving it any press at all.
we knew this would happen… its a shame because he is one of the best suppporters of israel and seemed to genuinely support israel on true passionate grounds, not merely for political gain.
the flip side is that bolton alienated a lot of people, because he was so outright pro-israel, and also because he was sort of funny looking and was not the “best” diplomat… depending on how much you care about diplomacy will depend on how much you think this is a good/bad thing he has resigned. my final answer is that id rather have him, because he made me proud, for once, of any representation in the UN (other than elie weisel’s “honorary” UN status). And these countries mostly hate america anyway, having a partially better diplomat to kiss more tuchas will do little for american or israeli security and public image, so I say, might as well have a bad-ass, well-intentioned, and intelligent representative like bolton. BAR NONE, i cant think of anyone else who represents my ideals as much TODAY in America, a healthy mix of centrist conservative values and pro-Israel policy (doesnt mean i dont think he looked like a nut at times though!)
Appropriate timing, eh? See the press release below sent out this morning to “Jewish Student Leaders”…
THE WHITE HO– USE
Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release December 4, 2006
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
It is with deep regret that I accept John Bolton’s decision to end his service in the Administration as Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations when his commission expires.
Over a year ago, I appointed Ambassador Bolton because I knew he would represent America ’s values and effectively confront difficult problems at the United Nations. He served his country with extraordinary dedication and skill, assembling coalitions that addressed some of the most consequential issues facing the international community. During his tenure, he articulately advocated the positions and values of the United States and advanced the expansion of democracy and liberty.
Ambassador Bolton led the successful negotiations that resulted in unanimous Security Council resolutions regarding North Korea ‘s military and nuclear activities. He built consensus among our allies on the need for Iran to suspend the enrichment and reprocessing of uranium. His efforts to promote the cause of peace in Darfur resulted in a peacekeeping commitment by the United Nations. He made the case for United Nations reform because he cares about the institution, and wants it to become more credible and effective.
I am deeply disappointed that a handful of United States Senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate. They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time. This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country, and discourages men and women of talent from serving their Nation.
I thank John Bolton for the dedication and skill with which he performed his duties, and his wife Gretchen and daughter Jennifer Sarah for their support as Ambassador Bolton served his country. All Americans owe John Bolton their gratitude for a job well done.
recently, and I forget where, I read that Americans think that Jews make up 20% of the population here. Besides that fact that most Americans are dumb, this would mean over 60mil Jews in America alone. In our dreams, then maybe America would be as big a mess as Israel.
But the point of this article, and others that I have read recently, as well as the topic around the Tableman family is why is the world so fascinated with Jews? It is quasi-pathological.
I take cues from recent press/your blog: Descendants of slaves hate us because we supposedly were slave traders, Arabs for their reasons, Right wing Christians seem to half love us and half hate us – citing Talmud for proof of our wicked ways, When the Amish are beloved for being reclusive Jews are suspected of being up to something, when Central Americans want to speak and learn Spanish is “retaining heritage” but for Jews we are being cultist and anti-assimilationist (both the + and – meaning of this term), and on and on.
Listen to NPR and the BBC in the morning, never a day goes by where Israel isnt in the news.
Of all the nations do all the wrong in the world, Israel seems to get a lot of attention.
Can someone please give me a real redux, an intellectual redux, of this situation. Don’t give me that crock about “Chose people; chosen to suffer” that my grandmother says 3 times a day.
What if all the Jews moved to Utah – there is a Zion Park there – and it kind of looks like Israel. Would that be the end of the obsession?
Kofi Annan is a putz!