By Anne Bayefsky
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
The United Nations played the Holocaust game last week so
it could play another lethal game this week. The ruse consists of making a big
deal about the gas chambers for Jews back then, while stoking the fires of
anti-Semitism burning right now.
On January 31, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon penned a New York Times op-ed to say at one and
the same time that “people will always resist occupation” and “nothing excuses
terrorism.” That follows a statement he gave to the Security Council on January
26, in which he said “Palestinian frustration is growing” and “it is human
nature to react to occupation, which often serves as an incubator of hate and
extremism.”
Reaction to the claim that it is human nature to stab
pregnant women and mothers in front of their children — as Palestinians had
done the week before — has been unanimous across the Israeli political
spectrum. In the words of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January
26: “The secretary-general’s remarks give a tailwind to terrorism.”
Nevertheless, the spokesman of the secretary-general
doubled down in a press briefing on January 27 with these words: “Absolutely
nothing justifies terrorism. . . . At the same time, if we want to see an end
to this violence . . . we must address the root causes, the underlying frustrations.”
In short, for the United Nations, nothing justifies
terrorism except Palestinian frustration.
It is hardly a secret that the UN agenda is to find
reasons for treating the Jewish state differently — notwithstanding the UN
Charter’s promise of equality for nations large and small. The settlements
bandwagon is one of many.
In effect, the “occupation” rant is the PC version of
ISIS’s “Allahu Akbar.” It has been the Arab cry since the minute of Israel’s
birth in 1948 and is the verbiage that presages destruction, not peaceful
coexistence. It is the complaint about Jews living on Arab-claimed land,
despite the fact that ultimate ownership of this land — according to legal
agreement — is to be decided by negotiations, not UN fiat.
The bigger picture tells the story. The UN just wrapped
up a year in which there were a total of 26 General Assembly resolutions
condemning specific countries for human-rights abuse: 19 — that’s 73 percent —
against Israel and one, for instance, against Syria. In 2015, the UN Commission
on the Status of Women adopted one resolution condemning a country for
violating women’s rights: Israel — for violating the rights of Palestinian
women.
Finding excuses for demonizing Jews, discriminating
against Jews, delegitimizing Jewish self-determination, and just plain old
Jew-hatred, is thousands of years old. It has a name, anti-Semitism.
Which is where the UN’s international Holocaust
Remembrance Day comes in. At the UN, it provides cover. So on January 27, Ban
Ki-moon showed up at the General Assembly’s annual commemoration of the
liberation of Auschwitz.
After checking-off “present” in his Holocaust remembrance
speech, the secretary-general could manage to mention anti-Semitism only once,
and only together with “anti-Muslim bigotry.” His UN secretariat also used the
day to promote the claim that there were multiple Holocausts, adding for the
first time to the rostrum of the annual event a Sinto speaker, who repeatedly
referred to “the forgotten Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma.”
The occasion was further desecrated by the Palestinians
and their UN collaborators, who managed to hijack the day to hold the annual
kickoff of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the
Palestinian People (CEIRPP). The secretary-general delivered his
anti-Semitism/anti-Muslim-bigotry speech at the Holocaust(s) event and then
walked into the CEIRPP event and delivered another speech on Israel’s
international crimes.
Here is Ban Ki-moon on Holocaust Remembrance Day when he
was not in the presence of survivors: “Palestinians are losing hope. Young
people especially are losing hope. . . . If we hope to see an end to this
violence . . . we must address the underlying frustration.” He said nothing
about the “frustration” — actually the deep psychological burden — of necessary
and mandatory military service for millions of Israelis throughout the prime of
their lives. Nothing about Palestinian responsibility for their own lives, or
their choice of more terror over more land, or their refusal to negotiate, or
their installation of a terrorist organization to govern the land they already
occupy in Gaza.
In late November 2015, Palestinian UN representative
Riyad Mansour announced at an exhibit opening held in the public lobby of the
UN: “We are so proud that in this popular uprising, the backbone of this
uprising are the youth of Palestine.” On January 17 a 16-year old Palestinian
stabbed to death an Israeli mother of six — a.k.a. a “settler” — in front of
her children. And now the UN secretary-general expresses his empathy and
understanding of this normal, to-be-expected, “youthful frustration.”
We know what comes next, because that’s a straight line
if there ever was one.
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