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been told by associates that it is worse now, but finds that hard to believe -- she cannot imagine anything worse than what she encountered, without, moreover, any protest being uttered by delegates, bureaucrats, or others in UN precincts. The most famous anti-Semitic resolution came in November 1975 when the UN officially repudiated the state at whose birth it had presided, ruling that Zionism was "a form of racism." (In December 1991, the UN finally voted to repeal the resolution, but without a single Arab state -- including Egypt with whom a peace treaty was nominally in force -- voting in its favor.)Prior to the Madrid Conference in 1991, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir commissioned an analysis of the UN voting record in relation to Israel. It found that from 1967-1988, the Security Council passed 88 resolutions against Israel, and zero resolutions criticizing any Arab state. Israel was "condemned" 49 times; not one Arab country so much as a single time. In the General Assembly, 429 anti-Israel resolutions were passed in those years, with Israel "condemned" 321 times, Arab nations not once.
Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia evidently possess spotless human rights records as they have been immune to criticism.
The UN's sub-agencies are no better. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has published books, studies, monographs, all bitterly critical of Israel, while ignoring the most blatant aggressions by the former Soviet Union and by so-called Third World countries. The groundwork for the UN General Assembly's "Zionism is Racism" resolution was laid by UNESCO's "intellectuals," whose behavior is all the more hypocritical in view of the fact that most come from states whose genuine intellectuals were repressed, censored, and/or in prison.
In 1974, a committee led by the late writer James Michener, playwright Arthur Miller, writers Frank Gervasi and Gerald Frank, and performers Lionel Hampton, Shelley Winters and Colleen Dewhurst, condemned UNESCO for its vicious anti-Israel canards.
The United States withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, citing ineffectiveness and organizational abuses. At the time of the action, a State Department official announced, "When UNESCO returns to its original purposes and principles, the United States would be in a position to return to UNESCO." Unfortunately, in his speech before the United Nations in September 2002, President Bush reinstated American participation in UNESCO in an effort to garner support for a campaign against Iraq.
UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), founded to relieve the suffering of and assist in the repatriation of Arab refugees from the 1948 war (and the only UN agency designed to serve only one group, i.e. refugees from Palestine and their descendants) has been complicit in sustaining Arab warfare against Israel. For the Arab states, maintaining these camps is essential in order to defame Israel and rally the Arab masses for the spurious cause of Arab homelessness. Endless plans were offered, which the Arabs absolutely refused to consider, for resettling the Arab refugees in Arab countries. In 1959, Elfan Rees, who had been closely associated with UNRWA, noted that "the organized intransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states" had brought all efforts to end the refugee problem to naught.
UNRWA has in effect turned over the camps, not only in Judea, Samaria and Gaza but in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, to the Palestinian Arabs, who constitute 99% of the staff in the 59 camps it operates. UNRWA's schools (and education is the largest item in its budget) have become inciters of hatred and poisonous slanders against Israel and UNRWA has turned a blind eye as the camps in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority became arms depots and recruiting and training schools for terrorists, including the recent "suicide bombers" that have devastated Israel's civilian life. Given that the U.S. provides more than 25% of the budget for UNRWA (almost $90 million in 2000) the U.S. is in cold fact helping to bankroll the suicide bombers.
The UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Commission), ostensibly founded to monitor human rights abuses, has become a macabre joke. Twenty-six percent of all the condemnations issued by that body over the years single out Israel. As David Harsanyi points out in "The United Nations Against Israel," Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia evidently possess spotless human rights records as they have been immune to criticism. Far from condemning Arab suicide bombers -- surely any group with pretensions to upholding human rights should be in the forefront of condemning the practice of loading young people with explosives to kill themselves and others -- the United Nations Human Rights Commission endorses them! It affirmed the right of Palestinians to pursue their goal of a Palestinian state using "all available means, including armed struggle."
In 2001, when this resolution was adopted, the 53-member Commission included Syria, the Sudan, Uganda, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam (but not the U.S., which had been voted out): it was, as Joanna Weschler, the UN representative of Human Rights Watch, aptly observed, "a rogue's gallery of human rights abusers." Six European nations despicably voted in favor of this resolution including France and Belgium -- the country which wanted to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes. European nations are little better than the above rogue's gallery in regard to Israel. Ann Buwalda, head of the human
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Outpost - 4 - November 2002