The U.N. General Assembly has been back in session for almost two weeks but already two anti-Israel resolutions have been voted on.
Syria sponsored a Security Council resolution — ultimately vetoed by the United States — calling on Israel to reject its decision to remove Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Later last week, the General Assembly held a special emergency session, passing a resolution demanding that Israel cease its threats against Arafat.
More such resolutions are expected during the General Assembly’s three-month session. On the average, the United Nations votes on about 21 anti-Israel resolutions each year.
This year, however, Israel is more of a sacrificial lamb because of the failure of the “road map” for peace, and increased tensions between Jews and Palestinians.
European U.N. members seem to continually vote pro-Palestinian. French president Jacques Chirac, for example, believes Israelis and Palestinians share blame equally for the Mideast situation. Yet France nevertheless supported both anti-Israel resolutions last week.
Chirac blames Arafat for starting the intifada but he says it won’t end until Israel negotiates directly with the Palestinians leader. Israel, on the other hand, keeps talking about expelling Arafat, not talking to him. The United States opposes an expulsion, but U.S. officials won’t talk to Arafat, either.
An exasperated Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, said this week, “I continue to be disillusioned that while we’re hearing a lot of good things” in meetings with France, Turkey and Britain, “when they get in the international arena, they play that pro-Arab tilt, and they’re not willing to break it.”
As we all know, most European countries have not been very supportive of the United States, either. Clearly they opposed the war, but it’s hard to fathom why other democratic countries are not more involved in rebuilding a shattered Iraq. Don’t members understand that post-war Iraq needs to be tamed or it could become the new Afghanistan, full of militants and terrorists?
Meanwhile, Arab militants — who want to dominate that part of the world — are flowing into Iraq to fight U.S. troops. Even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Sept. 11, the militants moving into Iraq now clearly support the killing of Americans.
They are rallying in Iraq to prevent the United States from establishing a democracy, which is obviously threatening to most Arab leaders. If a democracy is born in Iraq, what would stop it from spreading to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and other Arab lands, threatening oppressive regimes?
You’d think that would be clear to European leaders. Instead, they are saying they will only help Iraq if the United States no longer controls the military forces there.
What sense does that make?
By now U.S. troops know the terrain. They know the people. They know where the danger spots are.
It’s obvious that our country never planned for post-war Iraq, but have any of the European leaders presented a better plan to deal with an increasingly unruly country?
The United Nations is in desperate need of leaders, not rivals. If we are ever to achieve even a semblance of world peace, the nations of the world need to hear one another out.
Perhaps it’s time for U.N. members to take another look at the organization’s charter, which clearly spells out its mission: “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace….”
By equating Israel’s security measures with terrorist assaults on civilians, U.N. members are making a mockery not only of their organization’s charter, they’re sabotaging world peace. It’s easy to understand why Israelis have become cynical.