UN Is Hypocritical in Dealing With Israel

[dudeness]

by Ed Koch - Nov.10.2000
THE United Nations plays an important role in world affairs. It has had a number of successes in its 55 years. Unfortunately, the UN is also a monument to world-class hypocrisy.

This hypocrisy is glaringly evident when the UN Assembly or Security Council deals with disputes between Israelis and Palestinians. The UN Security Council recently denounced Israel for using "excessive force" against Palestinians who have been hurling stones, throwing Molotov cocktails, firing rifles and detonating car bombs aimed at Israeli soldiers and civilians for weeks.

But the UN failed to issue any condemnation against Yasser Arafat for the lynching of two captured Israeli soldiers held at a Palestinian police station and failed to condemn the destruction of Joseph's tomb, a Jewish holy place, by Palestinians.

The Israeli armed forces are responding as any civilized government would.

They are protecting Israeli civilians by using whatever force is necessary. The Israeli response to the current Intifada has included the use of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. The Israeli deputy consul general says there have been "123 wounded IDF soldiers, 158 wounded civilians and 10 dead Israelis" during the current insurrection.

Palestinian supporters denounce the deaths and injuries of adolescents. The Palestinian leaders and parents, however, tell the children that, if they die while attempting to liberate Jerusalem and killing a Jew, they become martyrs and go straight to heaven.

The insurrection has now gone on for 30 days. Arafat apparently believes the Palestinian deaths, particularly of adolescents, and the pressures applied at the UN will force the Israelis to surrender to his demands and turn over the ancient city of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. He is tragically mistaken. The majority of observers said Ehud Barak, during the most recent meeting at Camp David, made the most sweeping concessions to Arafat but he rejected them.

http://christianactionforisrael.org/un/hypocrisy.html

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[La_Serpiente]

2. Ed Koch is really right wing I noticed

However, I think there is a lot of blame to go to both sides.

I think they should just pull out Arafat and Sharon.

[bluesoul]

3. What a load of BS

"The Israeli armed forces are responding as any civilized government would. "

Of course they are. Nice source btw! :toast:

[dudeness]

4. for an old article..its tone is familiar..

the more things change..the more they stay the same.

[The Magistrate]

5. For Better Or Worse, Mr. Soul

They are indeed responding as any state on earth would to a similar assault. There simply is nothing out of the ordinary to the Israeli campaign of guerrilla suppression, nor much out of the ordinary to the guerrilla campaign directed against Israel by various armed irregular Arab Palestinian bodies.

Koch is indeed a skunk of the worst water, but there is some substance to the charge he makes, that there is a good deal of hypocrisy in many United Nations votes regarding this matter.

[judge_smales]

6. I've gotr to take issue w/ this-

"They are indeed responding as any state on earth would to a similar assault"

1) They attack and kill Arabs.
2) Arabs fight back.
3) Israel then declairs "See! They're animals! We MUST kill them!!"

I think it's a bunch of shit.

[bluesoul]

8. As

far as I know, most of the other nations in this world are not occupying foreign land, building illegal settlements. I fail to see how what Israel does is common practice elsewhere Magistrate, I am sorry..

[The Magistrate]

9. Many Nations, Sir

Are occupying and settling foreign teritory, at least as some define it: the list runs from Kashmir through Aceh and Irian Jaya to Chechnya, the north of Ceylon, and portions of the Amazon basin, currently, without exhausting possibilities. Nor is there anything particularly exceptional about conquest throughout human history. Old patterns may, perhaps, seem novel when played out before one's eyes, and not on the pages of books.

Any state, Sir, confronted by a guerrilla force which directs murderous attacks against that state's civilians in its metropolitan districts, on the scale and with the regularity the various armed bodies of Arab Palestine do, would conduct itself militarily in a similar wise to the military actions of Israel.

The building of settlements is a seperate question from the military actions aimed at breaking these guerrilla groups. Certainly, the building of settlements is a principal grievance of the population which supports the guerrlla groups, and so works against the military success hoped for. Similarly, the building of settlements reflects a policy aimed at conquest of territory, which ought to be abandoned.

[guernica]

12. The Basque have done the same

The Irish, the Kashmiri, the Chechens, the Kurds.

Upon further reflection Turkish, Iraqi, and Russian reaction has been comparitively noxious and brutal but not sustained at a constant pace for so long.

Still the point remains that military solutions do not work and tend to exacerbate the problem. If the RAF had started bombing Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast, Jerusalem would be safer than London today.

[The Magistrate]

14. My Point, Sir

Is that it is usual, not that it is wise. In an impish mood, the proposition that what was usual is not, by that very consideration, wise, could well be advanced, for when has wisdom been usual human conduct?

The Basques have never reached anything like the scale of activity against Spain in the present or the recent past that marks the conflict involving Israel, not have the Irish "ultras" managed it. Earlier in the twentieth century, of course, tremendous military force was employed over these questions, in the period known as "The Troubles" in Ireland, and in Franco's northern campaign during the Spanish Civil War.

Because the Kashmiri seperatists are shielded by a poweful state sponsor, the actions of India are somewhat circumscribed. It is not possible for India to use the full panoply of modern war to attack them in thir bases, as this would certainly issue in war with Pakistan. But in terms of policing the restive population of the province in those areas under Indian control, there is little to choose between its practices, and Israel's. Nor can any be sure the matter will not, in fact, lead at any time to a renewal of war between Insia and Pakistan.

[guernica]

16. depressing viewpoint..

I chose not to lump Franco's fascist aggression as normal but an abberation. It certainly wasn't viewed as an "anti-terrorism" campaign by anyone but fascists of the day.

[The Magistrate]

17. The Basque Attitude At the Time, Sir

Was hardly congenial to a radical leftist: their association with the Republic was a text-book marriage of convenience.

Franco's campaign was certainly a suppression of seperatism, and no abberation whatever in Spanish history.

[The Magistrate]

10. Your View, Mr. Smales

Is somewhat circumscribed. The peoples of Israel and Arab Palestine have been at war for a very long time, and it is hardly so simple a sequence as you present.

[guernica]

7. like who?

Israel is not the only state in the world that deals with seperatist violence. Israel is the only place I can think of that deals with it using fighters and helicopters to attack civilian areas.

[The Magistrate]

11. Israel, Sir

Deals with a rather greater incidence of attacks directed against its civilian population than do most other nations currently so engaged.

As guerrilla forces necessarily conceal themselves among their own civilian populace, they cannot be struck at except within populated areas.

[guernica]

13. Kashmir is probably worse numerically

As unsavory as the Indian government acts toward the Kashmiri they still haven't found it necessary to bomb the place.

[The Magistrate]

15. Proportionaly, Sir

There is no comparison, as the affected population is hugely larger. The seperatists operating in Indian controlled territory are susceptible to an unettered military police; those based and operating outside Indian controlled territory are effectively shielded by the military power of Pakistan.

[edzontar]

18. If I may step in....

The main problem from my point of view is that Israel is an OCCUPYING power of many decades standing, which has taken the opprtunity to move hundreds of thousands of its own citizens into significant areas of Palestinian land that it seized in a war against JORDAN.

Resistance to an occupation of this sort, in and of itself, is to be expected and has been exacerbated by increasing Settlement activity, among other things.

The tactic of suicide bombings and targeting civilians can never be defended, or condoned, and it is the duty of responsible PA authorities to put a stop to this, insofar as they can.

But the main reason for the present mess, I would contend, is the Occupation itself, which is illegal.

I realize that some areas have come under PA rule over the past decade...but we all realize that, for a variety of reasons, progress has ben slow, and that more recently, the situation has drastically worsened.

What is needed is some gesture from whatever side that could actually inspire HOPE.

I am not holding my breath for this to happen, but I would argue that the Settlements are just as much an obstacle to a solution as the suicide atrocities have been--and that the people who have promoted and protected these Settlements are perfectly HAPPY with this--they WANT to conquer Palestine (Judea and Samaria, as they call it), they WANT to drive the Palestinians out---many of them are religious fanatics just as much as Hamas and other Islamists are.