The U.N.'s Israel Obsession
EDITORIAL The U.N.'s Israel Obsession In 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel—in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a...
...The "Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories," for example, "investigates" Israel's continued "practice" of "occupying" not just the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land within its internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders...
...Surely the American tradition of refraining from publicly making reasonable demands on the Saudi monarchy has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had...
...UNRWA rents the buses that regularly take residents of Jenin on tours of the Israeli countryside— where "their" property, "stolen" by the Jews, is carefully pointed out...
...American pressure could help reformers in Saudi Arabia bring this about...
...On September 11, our cities, not theirs, were brutally attacked by 15 of their nationals, not ours...
...During the whole of the present intifada, now six months old, far fewer Palestinians than that have died as Israel has attempted to rescue itself from a national security threat far graver and more immediate than any America faced in East Africa...
...Indeed, the Saudi regime continues to speak out of both sides of its mouth, and the United States continues to maintain a double standard when dealing with Arab states...
...Foremost among them should be a public, detailed, and thorough investigation of Saudi involvement in September 11, beginning with the ideological preparation and continuing with the financing and recruitment of the participants...
...The summit was preceded by an amazing article in the New York Times that appeared the day of the meeting...
...Why is it that our government must refrain from making demands on our longtime petroleum partner...
...During summer vacation, those very same schools host training camps in which those very same students are instructed in the arts of kidnapping and rock-throwing and bomb-manufacturing and martyrdom...
...Maybe the U.N...
...It is a question for the ages...
...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...
...And that meant a discreet encounter, with Washington continuing to downplay the abuses of the Saudi regime—namely, its central role in inspiring and funding (or, to be generous, its failure to crack down on Saudi citizens who inspire and fund) anti-Western Islamic extremist terror...
...military, and the threat that the world's most reactionary regime would align itself with Saddam Hussein and other militarist radicals...
...The "world community" will howl, of course, and Israel's many enemies will believe the worst...
...member states has ever been subjected to the rebuke of a General Assembly "emergency special session...
...If this is the case, it is in the interest of both the United States and Saudi Arabia for the crown prince to prevail...
...And, quite apart from the controversy over what its staff should look like, the whole idea of a U.N...
...And it should be complemented by U.S...
...But Abdullah did not, it seems, condemn those on his own territory and in his state media who preach the murder of Americans, and who fund and acclaim the massacre of Jewish and Arab civilians by terror bombers in Israel...
...No new guidelines for the Saudis' increasingly overdue investigation of their citizens' involvement in September 11 and al Qaeda were revealed...
...No, almost certainly not...
...The Saudi crisis is moral...
...Some of this carnage Hansen even claims to have seen "with my own eyes...
...Sources inside the Saudi kingdom describe Abdullah as wishing to extricate the country from the grip of the radical Wahhabi clerics and their supporters among the princes who control the royal bureaucracy and the main armed forces...
...Such an investigation is the only hope for the current regime to turn a new page in Saudi history...
...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...
...And why, even if its death toll had proved a hundred times higher, would it warrant a U.N...
...Zionism may no longer be racism at the United Nations...
...and that Abdullah opposes bin Laden, wherever the Wahhabi warrior may be hiding...
...And no evidence, literally nothing that would indicate the presence of a civilian "massacre," has yet emerged...
...Quite the contrary, rescue workers in Jenin have so far recovered the bodies of six—not the rumored six hundred, but six—women, children, and elderly Palestinians...
...But they believe the worst already...
...David Tell, for the Editors Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch What was the point of Saudi crown prince Abdullah's trip to Crawford, Texas...
...Grounded in quotes attributed to a "person familiar with the Crown Prince's thinking," the article, headlined "Saudi to Warn Bush of Rupture Over Israel Policy," was a litany of demands and "blunt messages" and grievances...
...Assuming Annan's investigators do eventually make their way to Jenin, is it possible they might actually find the "facts" they are looking for...
...The Arabian oil autocrat said nothing at the end of his meeting with President Bush...
...If we can make demands on Israel, why not on Saudi Arabia...
...And in response, President Bush publicly offered predictable assurances: that he was assured that oil will not be used as a weapon...
...In the history of such regimes, there is often a single incident that rips the mask away from its true face...
...Ghazi Algosaibi, the Saudi ambassador to London, chose two days before the Crawford chat to post on his embassy's website an insulting defense of his recent "poem" in support of suicide bombing...
...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...
...This is a "massacre...
...UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own administrative offices in Jenin are festooned with graffiti celebrating some of the world's most notorious terrorist organizations...
...In 1993, just after the events lately made famous by Hollywood's Black Hawk Down, a two-week U.S...
...The Israelis have been out of Jenin—and foreign journalists and other international observers have been back in— for more than a week...
...But he is a bald-faced liar...
...While we are on the subject of terrorism," he wrote to a British Jewish group that had complained about his verse, "I am most curious to know your view of Samson of the Old Testament...
...It bears mentioning, though one rarely hears it mentioned, that the UNRWA camp at Jenin has been for years what the Palestinians call a'simat al-istashidin, the "suiciders' capital," from which dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Al Aksa, and Tanzim terrorist attacks have been launched, killing hundreds of Israelis...
...There is nothing to be gained by pretending there is no crisis in the relationship, or reassuring ourselves that the royal family is in control, or arguing in the style of countless former diplomats to the kingdom that the United States ought not make demands on the kingdom...
...UNRWA, as it happens, is centrally relevant to its parent organization's latest outburst of naked Israelophobia...
...UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from fall through spring each year, children are taught that all of "Palestine," from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them...
...Nor did the American side unveil any new agreement for common action on Iraq...
...It would be comparable to Nikita Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin's crimes in 1956...
...The gist: Abdullah would call the tune in Texas...
...fact-finding mission to Jenin is scandalous to begin with, it seems to us—an assault on Israel's honor, even its basic legitimacy as an independent nation, that no similarly situated democracy would ever be expected to endure...
...The crisis is here...
...Yet the arrival in Texas of Abdullah was preceded by aggressive rhetoric aimed at placing President Bush on the defensive...
...And did not send a fact-finding mission...
...For more than 50 years now, the Jews have been its favorite subject...
...That will be perfect justice, we think...
...Indeed, if a faction of the Saudi regime is worried about the country's role in September 11, American candor should help that group...
...And if, at the end of the day, they aren't...
...resolution has ever so much as mentioned...
...Israel has, though, repeatedly, simply for refusing to surrender in the face of terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds and injured thousands of its citizens—murders that no U.N...
...UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and counterfeit currency factories are housed in the public shelters it has constructed in Jenin...
...Was he a suicide terrorist...
...In other words, the U.S.-Saudi summit seemed to be business as usual...
...EDITORIAL The U.N.'s Israel Obsession In 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel—in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"—the United Nations sat on its ass...
...This has yet to become a crisis of the regime...
...No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N.—two of them directly supervised by Kofi Annan's governing secretariat—do nothing but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide distribution of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist...
...official, UNRWA commissioner general Peter Hansen, who has given dozens of lip-smacking interviews recounting "wholesale obliteration," "a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history," "helicopters . . . strafing civilian residential areas," and "bodies . . . piling up" in "mass graves...
...In curricular materials published by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education, "Objective Five" for high school history teachers reads as follows: "The student will understand why the people of the world hate the Jews...
...Saudi Arabia, not the United States, would issue demands...
...Or how some of the world's most notorious terrorists might have found their way onto the agency's payroll—to the point where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, extreme even in the context of Palestinian extremism, now openly controls the UNRWA workers' union...
...There has been a genocide in Rwanda, an ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, periodic and horrifying communal "strife" in Indonesia's East Timor, the "disappearance" of a few hundred thousand refugees in the Congo, a decades-long and culturally devastating occupation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China . . . but none of those U.N...
...picks on Israel simply because it can...
...Which would explain why the U.N...
...It will not go away...
...And the peasant-in-chief has been a U.N...
...This, in a now ruined central area of the camp where countless armed gunmen rained days of nonstop sniper fire on Israeli foot patrols from the windows of still-occupied residences they had booby-trapped with high explosives...
...If, on the other hand, the reformers are too weak to succeed, the United States has no stake in preserving a status quo characterized by the poisonous formula of Saudi money promoting Wah-habi ideology...
...And the corrupt Saudi monarchy does not speak for the Palestinians, except in funding Yasser Arafat's parasitical bureaucracy and the Hamas terror network...
...It is to the site of this alleged "atrocity" that Kofi Annan now intends to dispatch a commission of inquiry chaired by Yasser Arafat's favorite European diplomat, former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and seconded by Cornelio Sommaruga, retired chief of the International Red Cross, a man who once likened the Star of David to a swastika...
...And they will continue to believe the worst no matter what...
...But, oh, how the U.N...
...bombing campaign against Mogadishu killed a thousand Somali civilians...
...has been making up for that oversight ever since...
...Or maybe, just maybe, there is a darker impulse at play...
...The demands should be flowing from Washington to Riyadh, not the other way around...
...It did not...
...officials—to have just perpetrated a "massacre" of "unarmed civilians...
...But anti-Semitism is forever...
...All by themselves, Annan's personnel choices here are a genuine scandal, and as this issue of The Weekly Standard goes to press, Israel's understandable objections, to Sommaruga in particular, have left it a still open question when and whether the secretary general's designees will ever be allowed to reach their destination...
...congressional hearings into the same matter...
...Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell affirmed in Senate testimony last week that money raised in a Saudi telethon for Palestinian "martyrs" goes to Hamas...
...Because UNRWA wholly funds and largely administers the West Bank refugee camp in Jenin where the Israeli army is purported—by various Palestinian militants and local U.N...
...William Kristol...
...Media accounts of Israel's incursion into a football-field-sized sector of the camp have bubbled over with lurid details worthy of a medieval peasant's worst anti-Semitic fantasies...
...In either case, it is time for the American government to speak truth to Saudi power...
...fact-finding mission...
...But did it ever occur to the United Nations to convene an inquest into the "human catastrophe" that was Somalia...
...He would sternly admonish Bush to rein in Ariel Sharon or face a renewed oil boycott, an end to Saudi cooperation with the U.S...
...For the Saudis, September 11 was such an event...
...Nothing substantial emerged from the so-called summit...
...has spent decades, in the guise of refugee assistance, providing active, organized, and enthusiastic auxiliary services to the most delusional and violent strains of Jew-hating Palestinian irre-dentism...
...that Abdullah condemns the murder of American citizens...
...The investigation should conclude with the arrest and prosecution of any and all Saudi nationals involved in September 11...
...This same United Nations, the blood of Israeli civilians still wet on its hands, now dares to question the morality of a modest, defensive, and long-overdue Israeli reprisal...
...What possible grievances can Riyadh have with us...
...And then there is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, an operation originally established in December 1949 to assist those Palestinian refugees created by the Arab world's botched attempt at a second Final Solution...
...The country—its religious establishment especially—is deeply implicated in the worst terror attacks of modern times...
...UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to do double duty as munitions dumps...
...But it could become one...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 33
