With the Israeli government release of a 100-page report containing damning evidence that Yasser Arafat personally authorized the funding and execution of terrorist activities, the United Nations needs to dispatch a fact-finding team to investigate these credible allegations. Only, they won't.
The U.N. has a long history of ignoring Arab and Palestinian misdeeds, while at the same time attempting to manufacture lies about atrocities committed by Israel, most recently with the alleged "massacre" at Jenin. "The U.N. has been consistently anti-Israel and never sought balance except when forced to by threat of a U.S. veto in the Security Council," says a senior administration official.
Though U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was champing at the bit to examine possible war crimes in Jenin where Israeli soldiers were fighting armed combatants, he expressed no interest whatsoever in investigating the role of Arafat or other Palestinian leaders in the Passover Massacre, which claimed far more innocent civilian lives.
For the same reason that Annan has resisted looking into the slaughter of innocent Israelis, he will not pursue the solid evidence of Arafat's role in directing terror: The U.N. has never been, and likely will never be, fair to Israel. Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney offers a cutting assessment for the motive behind the international body's biased record: "The U.N. is a hateful and anti-Semitic mobocracy."
The U.N.'s opposition to the very existence of the Jewish state was made official in 1975, when the General Assembly passed resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. Not surprisingly, representatives from the Arab nations pushed hard for the resolution demonizing the very support of the existence of the Jewish state of Israel as racist. The resolution was repealed in 1991, solely because of U.S. pressure and leadership, spearheaded by now-Undersecretary of State John Bolton. Every single Arab nation opposed the repeal.
Lest anyone think that the U.N. has moderated its bigotry in the past decade, the U.N. passed on an easy opportunity to condemn Palestinian malfeasance earlier this year. After the interception of the Karine-A, which contained arms and munitions, including the explosives used as the instrument of death in suicide bombs, the U.N. declined to even criticize Arafat for clearly violating the terms of the Oslo peace accord.
Throughout the current 19-month intifada, the U.N. has sat on its hands while Palestinian terrorist organizations recruit and brainwash impressionable teenagers for the explicit purpose of murdering innocent Israelis. Blood on the streets from one attack is not even dry when another human bomb explodes, yet the U.N. does nothing.
The U.N., however, has not merely marked its bias against Israel with inaction. Until 1967, U.N. peacekeepers patrolled the Sinai Peninsula, serving as a buffer to prevent a repeat of Egypt's aggression against Israel. When Egypt asked the U.N. peacekeepers to pack up and go, the U.N. quickly complied — giving Egypt the breathing room it needed to launch another assault on the Jewish state.
In 2000, U.N. peacekeepers in the demilitarized area of Lebanon witnessed the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists, and did nothing. Well, not entirely; they did grab a camera to videotape the whole incident. After the kidnapping, the U.N. did not notify Israeli officials, and in fact, denied the very existence of the videotape. The only logical conclusion, says Heritage Foundation senior fellow Ariel Cohen, is that the "U.N. was complicit in the kidnapping of Israelis by one of the worst terrorist organizations on earth."
During the latest intifada, the U.N. itself has played a role in funding and facilitating the terrorist infrastructure, including in Jenin. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) created the refugee camp in Jenin that produced fully 22 suicide bombers — more than one per month during the intifada. UNRWA also administers the schools in Jenin, which make Chinese reeducation camps look tame by comparison.
Palestinian students in Jenin are indoctrinated into Arafat's culture of death, taught that "Palestine" exists not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also in all of Israel. This climate of seething anti-Semitism has been willfully and knowingly advanced by UNRWA, and is doubtless part of the reason terrorist outfits have been so successful in recruiting suicide bombers in Jenin.
The most enduring action by the U.N., however, has been its steadfast refusal to condemn the death to Israel clause of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's charter. In the same Oslo agreement that called for the creation of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian National Council (PNC), the PNC was given a May, 1996 deadline for repealing, among other sections, Article 15 of the Palestinian National Charter, which calls for all Arab nations to support an "armed revolution" to achieve the "elimination" of the state of Israel.
In a cunning political move, the PNC in April of 1996 voted to change the charter. While Arafat told the world and the U.N. that this meant the death to Israel clause had been scrapped, the council literally voted only to change the charter at some time in the future, without specifying which changes would be made, or by what deadline. The PNC action did not even reference the offending language, let alone make any actual changes to any of the various articles that deny Israel's right to exist or support armed struggle to "liberate" Israel from Jewish rule.
"Arafat has been like Lucy with the football, treating the rest of the world as Charlie Brown. He and the PNC keep telling everyone they've changed the charter, without actually changing it," notes former CIA director Jim Woolsey.
Though the motive for Palestinian terrorism — the destruction of Israel — is clear, the U.N. remains blissfully ignorant, and instead incessantly focuses its attention on the democratic Jewish state.
When the U.N. relentlessly hounds Israel in the coming months while remaining eerily silent about homicide bombings, outrage, and not surprise, should be the appropriate response.
nationalreview.com |
