http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,4190125,00.html
ON Sunday morning, Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill suggested
Australia
might commit troops to a peacekeeping force in the Middle East
to separate and
keep peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
But before that happens, Hill must convince us that our soldiers
will not be used
to advance UN policies that advocate more terrorism. The latest
indications are
not good.
Last week, with impeccable timing, the UN Commission on
Human Rights
condoned Palestinian violence only days after Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat
finally agreed to condemn terrorism
in his native language, Arabic.
The UNCHR resolution may have been in English, but I'll take Waterhouse
odds
it was translated into every language around the Arab world.
The UNCHR voted
40 to 5, with seven abstentions, to support the use of
"all available means,
including armed struggle" to achieve a Palestinian state. Although
it condemns
"mass killings" of Palestinian civilians by Israeli incursions
on the West Bank, it
fails to condemn Palestinian terrorism. Its silence on suicide
bombing of Israeli
civilians is deafening.
And so the resolution is symbolic for two reasons. It will be
used by Arafat and
his sympathisers in the Arab world and among the loopy
Euro-socialists to
legitimise the Palestinians' chosen form of warfare – suicide
bombings. Why
send Australian troops into such a quagmire
of legitimised terrorism?
The resolution is also symbolic for its transparent bias.
It exposes how the
UNCHR is completely captured by anti-American and anti-Israeli
forces. Although
the commission declined to condemn human-rights violations in
Zimbabwe and
Iran and by the Russians in Chechnya, Israel bore the
brunt of its wrath. Not
surprising given that the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Conference
drew up
the resolution and all but one OIC member on the UNCHR
voted in favour.
Of the eight European Union members on the UNCHR, six voted
in favour:
Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Britain
and Germany
sided with Canada to oppose
the resolution. Italy abstained.
Strangely, France and Austria indicated that they did not
fully support the
resolution but signed anyway. Canada's National Post reports
that Sweden's
ambassador approved the resolution "without joy" because
the resolution's
sponsors, the OIC, would not accept "improvements to the resolution".
Portugal's
ambassador said his country's support "did not imply total support
for some of
the formulations of the text".
If you're confused as to what the resolution
really means in light of this
well-executed, simultaneous diplomatic sidestep and backtrack
by some EU
members, it gets worse. The Post reports that Belgium's ambassador
saw the
resolution "as a call for peace".
Say that again. The UNCHR condemns Israeli violence but condones
Palestinian
violence and it's a "call for peace"?
The commission's British, German and Canadian members were in
no doubt as
to the real effect of the resolution. "The text contains formulations
that might be
interpreted as an endorsement of violence," said German ambassador
to the
commission Walter Lewalter.
Yes, and the voting pattern says a lot about UN politics these
days. As Alfred
Moses, a former US ambassador to the commission and now chairman
of UN
Watch, a monitoring group, said: "A vote in favour of this resolution
is a vote for
Palestinian terrorism. An abstention suggests ambivalence towards
terror. Any
country that condones – or is indifferent to – the murder
of Israeli civilians in
markets, on buses and in cafes has lost any moral standing to
criticise Israel's
human-rights record."
THAT hasn't stopped the UN from doing exactly that. Israel's incursions
into the
West Bank town of Jenin have been met with outrage by the Arab
world, the EU
and the UNCHR.
But even worse, while the UN is sending a fact-finding
mission to Jenin, the
UNCHR seems to have prejudged the facts it wants to find. It
said as much in its
resolution when it condemned the "acts of mass killings"
by the Israelis.
A fact-finding mission might uncover an Israeli
massacre of innocent
Palestinians. But why presume guilt? Yet the Western
media dupes have
swallowed
the EU-Arab-UNCHR line without query.
Buried among the claims of massacres are small, crucial details.
Jenin's roads
were liberally mined by Palestinians two or three days before
the Israeli assault.
Jenin was home to a large proportion of suicide bombers and
therefore was a
target for the Israeli offensive that sought to rout out any
future attackers. Israeli
forces in Jenin arrested 10 potential suicide bombers who already
had videotaped
their farewell "martyr" statements.
Given this latest resolution, what is
the UNCHR's end game in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict? As former Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu
said last week, those who fight as terrorists will rule as terrorists:
"People who
deliberately target the innocent never become leaders who protect
freedom and
human rights. When terrorists seize power, they invariably set
up the darkest of
dictatorships – whether in Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan or Arafatistan."
Despite our good intentions, we should be wary of hitching our
star to any UN
peacekeeping force – at least not until terrorist groups who
use suicide bombers
to target Israel, the US and their friends
are brought to their knees.
The latest UNCHR's resolution suggests that
won't be any time soon.
© The Australian
The Australian -- Australia's national daily newspaper.
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