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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. 24apr02

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