Every single day, hundreds of African tribesmen are killed in Darfur by militias acting with the blessing of Sudan's Arab Islamist government. Each day, Hamas bombs from Gaza deliberately target innocent Israeli civilians ..... Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, has ratcheted up its campaign of violence this week, assassinating a Maronite Christian cabinet minister in Lebanon in a blatant attempt to provoke a constitutional crisis. ... The life-span of Zimbabweans is 34 years, and 550,000 have died over the past three years due to deliberate policies of the Mugabe dictatorship.
All of these barbaric crimes are human and moral tragedies that call for international action, prioritization, even obsession. But that self-proclaimed source of international legitimacy, the United Nations is not obsessed or even particularly concerned with any of them. None of these abuses of human rights by authoritarian regimes or movements was the object of the General Assembly resolution "condemning the military assaults...which have caused loss of life and extensive destruction...of property...in particular the killing of many... civilians, including children and women." For none of these violations of the right to life did the UN summon righteous indignation to "emphasize the importance of the safety and well-being of all civilians" and demand "the immediate cessation of military incursions and all acts of violence, terror, provocation, incitement and destruction."
Rather, since November 7, the UN has been obsessed with one accident, committed in self-defense, by the world body's favorite pariah, the democratic State of Israel.
.... UN Commission on Human Rights Louise Arbour ... slammed Israel for "intolerable violations" of Palestinian human rights during a visit to Gaza's Beit Hanoun.
... the incredible rub, the impossible-to-explain-otherwise-than-as-anti-Semitism rub.....
The one Israeli missile that struck the Beit Hanoun apartment house was:
- launched in justifiable self-defense;
- reasonably produced and targeted; and
- absolutely not intended to kill civilians.
The daily Palestinian bombs, meanwhile, are
- acts of aggressive war;
- callously launched without any effort to aim them accurately at military targets ...; and
- in fact meant to kill and terrorize civilians.
This asymmetry is well understood by Palestinians. The Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza was the scene of Palestinian celebrations earlier this week. Locals celebrated the victory of female "human shields" in thwarting an air strike against the home of murderous terrorist Wail Barud. Note the implications of this celebration: it demonstrates that Palestinians know that Israel does not seek to kill civilians wholesale. Palestinians do not believe their own propaganda about the Zionist thirst for blood -- otherwise they would not have been able to recruit those human shields. Human shields are worthless in the face of the heinous enemy Israel is supposed to be. If Israel placed "human shields" in front of Hamas, they would be mowed down.
In the face of this asymmetry, how does the international community react? Why, by blaming the Jews, as Ms. Arbour has done. For fourteen days, despite all the tragedies in the world, the UN has done virtually nothing but condemn Israel for its reasonable act of self-defense.
...Only a U.S. veto, wielded by Ambassador John Bolton, avoided a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel which would have been legally binding, opening the way to sanctions. Ambassador Bolton was furious at the blatant perfidy of the international body. His remarks are worth quoting at some length. "This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist," he noted. "This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region."
"In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States," Bolton continued. "The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies." [This is the man the Democrats want to eliminate as our UN ambassador - we think he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.]
Last week the laughable UN Human Rights Council held its third special session in less than six months focusing on Israel alone... In its entire existence the Human Rights Council has failed to pass one resolution on any country other than Israel, events taking place in Burma, North Korea Cuba, and the states mentioned to at the beginning of this essay notwithstanding. (See our article earlier this year on the Human Rights Council.)
....Mark Steyn muses on the blatant double standard of the international community in an essay in the Jerusalem Post:
"The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country - not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand - would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty....
"...by ensuring that the ‘Palestinian question' is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled.... The Jew is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, as in Anthony Hope's Ruritania, he can never truly own the land. Once again the Jews are rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East.... With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of ‘Palestinian' can be seen as the need to demonstrate that where there is a Jew there is the Jew's victim. It's a very strange feeling to read 19th century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently reemerging in even more preposterous forms. These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies."
The threat of a second Holocaust grows more acute by the day. The mutation of the world's oldest hatred, in a West that stood by during the first Holocaust, cries out for immediate response. Who, apart from America, is willing to furnish one?
Michael I. Krauss is professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University. Both are adjunct fellows of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
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