The UN’s Real Mission in Jenin

Israel represents one-one thousandth of the world’s population. But you wouldn’t know it from the UN. Among the nearly 200 nations represented at the UN, only Israel has the distinct honor of having its ambassadors formally barred from election to the Security Council. This is the same Security Council that has devoted over a third of its time and energy criticizing Israel’s policies. The UN Commission on Human Rights regularly accepts resolutions from homicidal dictatorships around the world, yet fully one quarter of its official condemnations are reserved for (democratic) Israel. Of ten emergency special sessions held by the General Assembly, six have condemned Israel.

Yet, not one UN body has documented the human rights abuses of the Palestinian Authority.

There has been genocide in Rwanda and Syria, UN videotaped kidnappings of Israeli soldiers in Northern Israel by Hezbollah terrorists, ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, horrifying acts of human carnage in East Timor, the “disappearance” of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Congo, a decades-old devastating occupation in Tibet (by China), constant complaints of human rights abuses against Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, but none of these nations have ever been subjected to the ridicule, scorn and censure that Israel has, simply for refusing to surrender its existence to terrorism. Nor has any UN resolution so much as mentioned it.

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Four separate administrative units in the UN (two directly supervised by Kofi Annan’s own governing Secretariat) spend millions of dollars each year on the production and distribution of anti-Israel propaganda. The “Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,” for example “investigates” Israel’s continued “practice” of “occupying” not just the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders.

Then, there is the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) established in December 1949 to assist those Palestinian refugees who were created by the Arab world’s attempt at a second Final Solution. UNRWA wholly funds and administers the Jenin refugee camp where Palestinians are now busy moving bodies (according to the British press) buried in the cemetery next to the government hospital prior to Operation Defensive Shield, into a “mass grave” in order to “make the case” for an “Israeli massacre” in Jenin. It is to this site that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had intended to dispatch his “Commission of Inquiry” chaired by Arafat’s favorite European diplomat, former president Martii Ahtisaari of Finland, and seconded by Cornelio Sommaruga, retired chief of the International Red Cross (IRC), a man who likened the Star of David to a swastika, and who approved and publicly defended the IRC’s singling out of Israel as the only country in the world whose emergency medical service is denied membership. In fact, for more than 50 years, Magen David Adom (MDA), the Red Cross’s Israel counterpart, has been excluded from the ICRC and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies despite its meeting all international membership requirements.

Assuming that the UN does eventually make its way into Jenin, is it possible that they will find the “facts” that they’re looking for?

Answer – no, because it never happened.

The primary area of destruction was a football-field-sized section of the camp. But the media frenzy bubbled over with some of the worst anti-Semitic diatribes put forth by none other than UNRWA Commissioner General Peter Hansen who provided the media with dozens of interviews on “wholesale obliteration”, “a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history”, “helicopters strafing civilian residential areas,” and “bodies piling up in mass graves.”

Problem is, he’s a liar.

When the Israelis pulled out of Jenin, foreign journalists and other international observers went into the camp and found “no evidence, literally nothing, that would indicate the presence of a civilian massacre.” Quite the contrary. rescue workers in Jenin found evidence of very few civilian casualties. In the now ruined central area of Jenin countless armed gunmen rained days of nonstop sniper fire on Israeli foot patrols from the upper windows of the still-occupied residences that they had booby-trapped (along with the dead) with high explosives – which is why the Israelis started bulldozing right through the structures, leaving avenues for their tanks where such booby-trapped buildings had been. Such is the real world of “urban warfare” when fought from the ground and not the skies (as in Afghanistan).

Why, despite hundreds of outrages going on throughout the world, did the UN feel compelled to send a now defunct fact-finding mission to the West Bank? Why did the UN decline offers of blood plasma from Israeli donors for people caught in Jenin, causing a critical delay in humanitarian aid, preferring to wait for help from Jordan rather than accepting “Jewish blood.” Reuters reports that the UN Human Rights Commission voted in mid April not to investigate “torture, the independence of judges, freedom of opinion, arbitrary executions and violence against women” in Zimbabwe, and the Associated Press reports that the Commission “threw out a resolution criticizing violations in Iran, effectively ending two decades of special scrutiny and dropping the country from the list of worst offenders.”

Yet, this same UN Human Rights Commission, on April 15th, voted overwhelmingly to endorse terrorism against Israel and to censure it for “war crimes” that did not take place.

But there is a much more troubling question than the issue of the UN’s “double standard.”

From 1975-1991, the self-determination of the Jewish people (Zionism) was defined as “racism” by the UN General Assembly. Overtly anti-Semitic remarks are voiced in the UN Human Rights Commission whose resolutions speak of the “Judaization” of Jerusalem. Three days before the 9/11 attacks, the UN Durban World Conference Against Racism systematically deleted almost all references to Jewish victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

What is worse, the UN has spent decades, in the guise of refugee assistance, providing substantial auxiliary services to the most vicious, Jew-hating elements of the Palestinian radical movement on the West Bank. The UNRWA camp of Jenin has been the capital of homicidal bombers from which dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad,, Fatah, Al Aksa and Tanzim terrorist attacks have been launched against Israel’s civilian population. UNRWA staffs and funds the schools of Jenin where children are taught that “Palestine runs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” During the summer, UNRWA schools host training camps instructing Palestinian children in the arts of kidnapping, rock-throwing, bomb-manufacturing and martyrdom. UNRWA regularly rents buses to take Jenin residents on “tours” of the Israeli countryside where “their” property, “stolen by the Jews” is specifically pointed out. UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to also serve as ammunition dumps. UNRWA feigns ignorance that explosives and counterfeit currency factories are housed in the public housing facilities that it has constructed in Jenin. UNRWA is silent on how and why its own administrative offices in Jenin are covered with graffiti extolling the virtues of “martyrdom”. UNRWA is silent on how some of the world’s most notorious terrorists have found their way onto it’s payroll, or how the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization listed as such by our own Department of State, openly controls the UNRWA workers’ union.

This same United Nations now questions the morality of Israel’s retaliation against terrorists seeking her destruction. If the UN really wants to investigate something, how about UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN’s cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favors from children as young as four; and the UN-fueled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia.

There is a word that covers all of this.

It’s called “chutzpah.”