MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-04-03 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout of NYLXS] More than Just Another Anti-Israel U.N. Farce
|
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445879/un-report-israel-apartheid-accusation-outrageous-anti-semitic
A new United Nations report libels Israel, promotes hatred, and makes
peace even less likely.
It isn’t easy to get worked up at the United Nations, an institution
where the egregious is merely business as usual. But even veteran
observers of the world body had to sit up and take notice when its
Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia published a report about
Israel that Secretary General Antonio Gutteres himself immediately
disavowed. The lengthy document purported to prove “beyond a reasonable
doubt” that the state of Israel was guilty of “the crime of apartheid”
according to international law. As such, it didn’t merely criticize
Israel’s policies in the West Bank; it called into question the
legitimacy of the Jewish state itself, even with pre-1967 borders.
The immediate reaction to this piece of libel from both the head of the
U.N. and the U.S. government was quick and appropriate. Through his
spokesman, Gutteres said he was not consulted by the report’s authors
and its contents did not reflect his views. Nikki Haley, the American
ambassador to the U.N., said that the United States was “outraged’ by
the report and demanded that the secretariat officially withdraw it.
Gutteres agrees, and today said the report should be withdrawn from the
U.N. website where it was published. But whether or not it is pulled
from that site, the damage is already done. The report is a
pseudo-scholarly compendium of specious charges, distortions, and
outright lies. Even for an institution in which agencies devoted to
human rights are run by representatives of Saudi Arabia and Iran — an
institution that has made grossly unfair accusations against Israel
something of a sport over the years — this one stands out, because it
goes beyond merely smearing the Jewish state offering legal
justification for future attacks against Israel and Jews. Never before
has the U.N. officially tied Israel to apartheid. At a time when,
despite the efforts of the Trump administration to revive talks, Middle
East peace seems more unlikely than ever, the report’s findings will
make it even harder to persuade the Palestinians to compromise and
finally accept the necessity of giving up its war on the Jewish state.
And by putting the U.N. seal of approval on the “apartheid” libel, the
report will provide aid and comfort to those whose anti-Zionist
incitement provides a thin veil of legitimacy for the growth of
anti-Semitism across the globe.
The report is the work of two Americans, Princeton law professor
emeritus Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley of the University of Southern
Illinois. As a 9/11 truther and an anti-Israel extremist, Falk is
particularly unqualified to evaluate the conflict. Yet together with
Tilley, he has put together a document that lists Palestinian grievances
while ignoring those of Israel in a complex conflict where both sides
have suffered. And that’s not all: Rather than merely claim that Israel
must evacuate the territories it won in a defensive war in 1967, as most
of its critics assert, their report goes straight to the heart of the
matter by using Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state to justify the
apartheid charge.
By arguing in this way, it dismisses the obvious differences between
what happened in South Africa — where a tiny white majority denied all
rights to the black majority — and Israel, a Jewish-majority country
where the Arab minority has full rights, including suffrage,
representation, and equality under the law. It similarly considers
irrelevant the fact that the standoff over the disputed territory of the
West Bank is the result of Palestinian unwillingness to recognize
Israel’s right to exist within any borders, stubbornly maintained
through repeated refusals of peace offers that would have created a
Palestinian state. And by denying legitimacy to Israel’s basis for
existence as the one Jewish state on the planet, surrounded by multiple
nations that are explicitly Muslim or Arab, it implicitly legitimizes
the century-long war that has been waged against the Zionist effort,
positing that Jews may be legally denied rights granted to others as a
matter of course.
The report comes at a particularly inopportune time for those hoping
President Trump’s surprising interest in reviving peace talks might bear
fruit. The Palestinians rejected President Obama’s efforts to tilt the
diplomatic playing field in their direction. They torpedoed the
negotiations sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry, embracing
efforts to get the U.N. to grant them statehood without first requiring
them to make peace with Israel. Their unwillingness to make compromises
will only be strengthened by a report that encourages them to regard
Israel as having no rights whatsoever. They are likely to make Falk’s
and Tilley’s findings the basis for renewed efforts to sue Israel in the
International Criminal Court, as well as for renewed provocations in
other U.N. bodies such as the Human Rights Council or even UNESCO, which
in the past year has taken up measures that denied the historical Jewish
ties to Jerusalem and some of Judaism’s holiest sites.
Those looking for the reason behind the rising tide of hate against
Jews around the globe would do better to read Falk and Tilley than to
read Trump’s tweets.
Just as unfortunate is the way the report will be used to buttress the
BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel, which
is one of the primary engines of anti-Semitic incitement both in Europe
and the United States. While BDS claims to be merely a protest against
Israel, wherever its banner is raised, anti-Jewish hate speech and
actions soon follow. Those who subscribe to the notion that the Jewish
state has no rights that need be respected are not merely promoting bias
on the international stage, but also are part of an effort that leads
inexorably to anti-Semitic hate speech.
Liberal groups have labeled President Trump as the main source of
encouragement for the uptick in anti-Jewish incidents in the United
States. This is due in part to his inflammatory statements during the
election campaign, the support he received from anti-Semites in the
small but loud alt-right and far-right elements of his base, and his
refusal to quickly disavow such hate once he became president. Partisans
have overstated this argument while failing to take into account Trump’s
close Jewish ties, his support for Israel, and the things most of those
actively promoting anti-Semitism actually care about. The U.N. report is
a reminder that in our time, the singling out of Jews for discriminatory
treatment is primarily driven by anti-Israel propaganda, which serves as
a thin veil for a new and insidious form of anti-Semitism. Those looking
for the reason behind the rising tide of hate against Jews around the
globe would do better to read Falk and Tilley than to read Trump’s tweets.
— Jonathan S. Tobin is the opinion editor at JNS.org and a contributing
writer for National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter -at-jonathans_tobin.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://www.nylxs.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
