VOLUME II:5 (No. 17)
May 2002 -- Sivan 5762
TO FOLLOW THE WAYS OF DARKNESS
(Proverbs 2:13)
Various "practical" reasons economic and political -- are cited to account
for hatred of Israel and Jews, and the cheering of Arab terrorism in much
of the Western world. These do not sufficiently account for the gleeful malice
flaunted by governments and diplomats and humanitarian organizations, news
media and labor unions, professionals and academics and poets.
These could be honest and balanced disagreements with or criticisms of Israel.
But its shortcomings and flaws are not enough to justify such a frenzy of
hatred, so slanders and fantasies must be dredged up from the dark recesses
of imagination. By no coincidence at all, this is most likely to happen where
there is the most historic guilt against the Jewish people.
A sequence is traced in "Europe and 'Those People' -- Anti-Semitism Arises
Again" by Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 26 April 2002:
[. . . . ] Israel -- that ****** little country, as the French ambassador
to Britain recently said at a London dinner party. "Why should we be in danger
of World War III because of those people?" This contemptuous sneer at "those
people" occasioned a minor scandal. No, the scandal was not the ambassador's
statement but the hostess's indiscretion in revealing it -- and then adding
how utterly commonplace the ambassador's sentiment had become in London's
better circles.
And not just among the cocktail set. The European "street" has lately been
expressing itself on the subject of Jews as well. In France, synagogues have
been burned to the ground and Jewish youths savagely attacked. In Belgium,
two synagogues were firebombed, a third sprayed with bullets. A Berlin police
official advised Jews, for reasons of safety, not to wear outward symbols
of their religion. In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew. How could
this be?
The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up
anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old
urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is
not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century.
That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for
that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.
This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred
of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place.
Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What
is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood.
And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state.
What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain
seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That
Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well
. . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of
the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, 'Don't tell me they want
to kill me again'.
Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had
reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor
who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize
-- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling
to apologize for its own existence.
The French were the vanguard of this modern anti-Semitism that can tolerate
the Jew as victim but not as historical actor. It was 35 years ago at the
outbreak of the Six Day War that Charles de Gaulle cut off French support
for Israel, denouncing its audacity in fighting for its life over his objections.
But he did not stop there. He later went on to famously denounce the Jews
as 'an elite people, sure of itself and domineering'.
The rejection of docility "sure of itself" -- was Israel's real crime 35
years ago. It remains Israel's crime today. Israel's recent three-week Operation
Defensive Shield, the boldest and most justified Israeli military offensive
since the Six Day War, provokes precisely the same reaction, though not always
expressed with de Gaulle's candor.
[. . . .] [Such people] will sit in judgment of the Jews. Marx was wrong
when he said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the
second as farce. The second time is tragedy too.
* * * * * * *
Labor Unions in European countries are demanding boycotts of trade with Israel.
* * * * * * *
After the city of Jenin was turned over to PLO rule it became a terrorist
base with its epicenter in a "refugee camp" run by the United Nations. It
was the launching site of a series of mass murders of Israel civilians. The
IDF could have cleaned out the terrorist enclave by a comparatively safe
attack from the air the tactic of the United States in Serbia and Afghanistan.
Instead, it moved on the ground from street to street and house to house.
This was a tactic of self-sacrifice; that spared Arab casualties at the cost
of more Israeli casualties.
The truth was unpalatable to humanitarians who needed "war crimes" and "massacres"
to enjoy their
frisson of rage and
anguish. Their hysteria is examined in "Jenin Lies" by Mark Steyn,
National Review
, 18 April 2002:
So what do you think of this Israeli "massacre" at the Jenin refugee camp?
In the British accounts of the alleged worst human-rights atrocity since,
oh, the Dutch took charge at Srebrenica, you can't help noticing a curious
sameness. All reports rely on the same couple of eyewitnesses 'Kamal Anis,
a labourer' (The Times), 'A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis'
(The Independent), 'Kamal Anis, 28' (The Daily Telegraph) [. . . . ] You'd
think with so many thousands massacred there'd be a bigger selection of victims
and distraught loved ones, wouldn't you? But apparently not. [. . . .]
"All British officials tend to become pro-Arab, or, perhaps, more accurately
anti-Jew," wrote Sir John Hope-Simpson in the 1920s wrapping up a stint in
the British Mandate of Palestine. "Personally, I can quite well understand
this trait. The helplessness of the fellah appeals to the British official.
The offensive assertion of the Jewish immigrant is, on the other hand, repellent".
Progressive humanitarianism, as much as old-school colonialism, prefers its
clientele "helpless", and, despite Iranian weaponry and Iraqi money and the
human sacrifice of its schoolchildren, the Palestinians have been masters
at selling their "helplessness" to the West.
Odd, isn't it? The Americans are routinely accused of being (in Pat Buchanan's
phrase) Israel's men corner. But Washington is at least prepared to offer
the odd, qualified criticism of Sharon. The rest of the world, by contrast,
is happy to parrot Yasser's talking points without modifying a single semi-colon.
In the last month, I've found as many Jew-haters on the Continent as in the
Middle East, but the difference is that the Arabs are fierce in their hatred,
no matter how contorted their arguments, while the Europeans are lazy, off-hand
Jew-haters -- they don't need arguments, they're happy to let the Arabs supply
the script.
Thus, the extraordinary resolution this week by the UN Human Rights Commission
which accuses Israel of many and varied human rights violations, makes no
mention of suicide bombers, and endorses the movement for a Palestinian state
by "all available means, including armed struggle" -- i.e., terrorism. The
resolution could have been drafted by the Arab League or the PLO. Forty of
the 53 nations on the Commission approved it, including six EU members: Austria,
Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Only five countries could summon
the will to vote against: Britain, Canada, Germany, the Czech Republic and
Guatemala. (The U.S. is not a member of the HRC, having been kicked off by
a coalition of Euro-Arab schemers.)
This is only the most extreme example of how the less sense the Arabs make
the more the debate is framed in their terms. For all the tedious bleating
of the Euroninnies, what Israel is doing is perfectly legal. Even if you
sincerely believe that 'Chairman' Arafat is entirely blameless when it comes
to the suicide bombers, when a neighbouring jurisdiction is the base for
hostile incursions, a sovereign state has the right of hot pursuit. Britain
has certainly availed herself of this internationally recognized principle:
In the 19th century, when the Fenians launched raids on Canada from upstate
New York, the British thought nothing of infringing American sovereignty
to hit back -- and Washington accepted they were entitled to do so.
But the rights every other sovereign state takes for granted are denied to
Israel. "The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations
are forbidden to the Jews," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher
Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Other nations drive out thousands, even millions
of people and there is no refugee problem . . . . But everyone insists that
Israel must take back every single Arab . . . .
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms.
But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the
Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
Thus, the massive population displacements in Europe at the end of the Second
World War are forever, but those in Palestine a mere three years later must
be corrected and reversed. On the Continent, losing wars comes with a territorial
price: The Germans aren't going to be back in Danzig any time soon. But,
in the Middle East, no matter how often the Arabs attack Israel and lose,
their claims to their lost territory manage to be both inviolable but endlessly
transferable."
In this article, Mr. Steyn also disperses the fog of ignorance and obfuscation
of the historic facts on Arab claims against Israel:
So even the so-called "two-state solution" subscribes to an Arafatist view
of the situation. Creating yet another fetid Arab dictatorship in the West
Bank would be, technically, a "three-state solution" and, indeed, a second
Palestinian state, Jordan, whose population has always been majority Palestinian.
It was created in the original 'two-state settlement' 80 years ago, when
the British partitioned their new Mandate of Palestine, carving off the [eastern]
three-quarters into a territory called 'Transjordan' and keeping the surviving
[western] quarter under the name 'Palestine'. [. . . .] Churchill, as Colonial
Secretary, thought the fairest way to fulfill Britain's pledges . . . .]
The only thing he got wrong was the names: If instead of inventing the designation
"Transjordan", he'd just called the eastern territory "Palestine" and the
west "Israel" (or "Judah"), the Arafatist claim would be a much tougher sell.
The Zionists have been trading "land for peace" ever since the Great War,
and the result is they've got hardly any land and less peace than ever before.
As early as 1921, Chaim Weizmann wrote to Churchill protesting the ever shrinking
borders of the potential Jewish homeland. To the north, Britain had surrendered
traditionally Palestinian land to France in fixing the Mandate's border with
Lebanon and Syria and, by giving the eastern three-quarters to Abdullah,
had removed the rich fields of Gilead, Moab and Edom. The 1947 UN Partition
took more land -- a partition of the previous partition -- but the Zionists
accepted it. In 1993, Oslo was the biggest gamble yet, the creation of a
mini-fiefdom for their bloodiest enemy. The 'Palestinian Authority' was an
unlikely bet for a state but, from Arafat's point of view, it would make
an ideal launch-point from which to kill Jews in the very heart of their
tiny sliver of territory.
[. . . . ] An Arafatist squat on the West Bank and Gaza would be insufficient.
[. . . .] Therefore, Arafat would seek to augment it with territory from
either west or east, Israel or Jordan. The likelihood is that he'd be able
to destabilize Jordan far more quickly than he could destroy Israel. If it's
a choice between an Arafat sewer straddling the Jordan River or the Hashemites,
I know which I'd prefer.
[. . . .] But the last eight years should have taught Israel that it cannot
live within its 1967 borders next to a thug statelet whose sole purpose is
to liquidate it. The Arabs have succeeded in luring the West into their bizarre
alternative universe, where land lost by a foolish king is mysteriously transformed
into the personal property of a terrorist organization, where the 'armed
struggle' of wired schoolgirls is UN-approved, and where the 'right to exist'
is something to be negotiated. Fantasy land is fun, but we've encouraged the
Arabs in their peculiar dementias for too long. It's time to get real.
* * * * * * *
A Jewish member of the British Parliament has launched an international movement
of academics to boycott all scholarly or scientific contacts with Israeli
academics.
* * * * * * *
Amnesty International, self-appointed guardian of human rights worldwide,
has a long record of rushing to misjudgments and falsehoods on Israel.
A current example is described in "Best of The Web Today" by James Taranto,
Wall Street Journal Opinion
, 24 April 2002:
Amnesty International says it stands for human rights, presumably including
the right to due process. And yet here's what passes for 'evidence' when
Amnesty is trying to convict Jews of war crimes:
Professor Derrick Pounder, a forensic pathologist at Dundee University, visited
Jenin hospital on behalf of Amnesty to examine some of the bodies that had
been recovered. But what surprised him most was the absence of severely injured
patients, since the hospital is less than a kilometer from the camp. "In
a conflict of this type in a densely populated are, where the Israeli army
lost a substantial number of men, it is inconceivable that there were not
also large numbers of severely injured," he said.
Normally, he would have expected to find three people severely injured for
every one killed. Even if one accepts the Israeli claim that 'only' 40 Palestinians
died, there ought to be another 120 lying badly wounded, in hospital. But
they are nowhere to be found. "We draw the conclusion that they were allowed
to die where they were," Professor Pounder said.
[Comment: In fact, the casualties the professor predicted never occurred.
He did not consider this explanation in his scientific analysis.]
A similarly irresponsible attitude of the international news agency Reuters
is also cited in this article:
The guys at Reuters even attempt to use Palestinian atrocities against the
Jews. A dispatch titled 'Israel Rejects U.N. Jenin Probe' is accompanied
by a photo showing a body being dragged through the street. There's no caption,
so readers would naturally assume the photo is from Jenin, but in fact it
is from Hebron, and it depicts an Arab "collaborator" who was lynched by
his fellow Arabs.
* * * * * * *
The United Nations, launched to supervise peace and international co-existence.
Its elaborate headquarters, on prime real estate in Manhattan, has turned
itself into the planet's Front Office for the war against Israel and the
Jews. There have been more sessions held to condemn Israel than for any other
purpose, an investment in World Peace that takes up billions of dollars that
might have been put to use for health care, famine relief, education, or
even cleaning up some of its own massive internal corruption.
In the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the various committees,
where decisions are made by vote of member states, there has never been a
single vote to protect Israel's rights as a member state. Even when Arab
states proclaim in advance their intent to attack Israel and destroy it and
annihilate its people, there is no vote to discourage it. There has never
been a vote to deplore Arab terrorism, but many to encourage it. But after
the Arabs start and lose a war, then the UN intervenes to save them and get
them back whatever they lost. There is, however, a long, long list of resolutions
that condemn Israel including one for the offense of planting sapling trees.
Other activities come under the supervision of the Secretary-General and
his minion bureaus. These activities include "peacekeeping" in Lebanon, where
the UN troops witnessed and perhaps abetted an Arab terrorist incursion into
Israel in which three young Israeli soldiers on guard duty were kidnapped
and presumably murdered. The UN made and then hid a video-tape of the event,
and found personal belongings of the victims that it hid even from the men's
own parents.
Part of the record is surveyed in "The U.N.'s Israel Obsession", by David
Tell,
The Weekly Standard
, 6 May 2002:
When the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn
Israel--in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war
of extermination" against "the Jews" -- the United Nations sat on its ass.
And did not send a fact-finding mission. But, oh, how the U.N. has been making
up for that oversight ever since. For more than 50 years now, the Jews have
been its favorite subject.
Among the nearly 200 nations represented at the U.N., only Israel has ever
been assigned special reduced-membership privileges, its ambassadors formally
barred, for 53 straight years . . . from election to the Security Council.
Meanwhile, and right up to the present day, that same Security Council has
devoted fully a third of its energy and criticism to the policies of a single
country: Israel. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which regularly --
and unreprovingly -- accepts delegations from any number of homicidal tyrannies
across the globe, has issued fully a quarter of its official condemnations
to a single (democratic) country: Israel.
There has been a genocide in Rwanda, an ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, periodic
and horrifying communal 'strife' in Indonesia's East Timor, the 'disappearance'
of a few hundred thousand refugees in the Congo, a decades-long and culturally
devastating occupation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China . . . but
none of those U.N. member states has ever been subjected to the rebuke of
a General Assembly 'emergency special session'. Israel has, though, repeatedly,
simply for refusing to surrender in the face of terrorist attacks that have
killed hundreds and injured thousands of its citizens--murders that no U.N.
resolution has ever so much as mentioned.
No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N. -- two of
them directly supervised by Kofi Annan's governing secretariat -- do nothing
but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide distribution
of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist. 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.
And then there is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, an operation
originally established in December 1949 to assist those Palestinian refugees
created by the Arab world's botched attempt at a second Final Solution. UNRWA,
as it happens, is centrally relevant to its parent organization's latest
outburst of naked Israelophobia. Because UNRWA wholly funds and largely administers
the West Bank refugee camp in Jenin where the Israeli army is purported --
by various Palestinian militants and local U.N. officials -- to have just
perpetrated a 'massacre' of 'unarmed civilians'. It is to the site of this
alleged 'atrocity' that Kofi Annan now intends to dispatch a commission of
inquiry chaired by Yasser Arafat's favorite European diplomat, former president
Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and seconded by Cornelio Sommaruga, retired
chief of the International Red Cross, a man who once likened the Star of
David to a swastika.
[. . . .] And, quite apart from the controversy over what its staff should
look like, the whole idea of a U.N. fact-finding mission to Jenin is scandalous
to begin with, it seems to us -- an assault on Israel's honor, even its basic
legitimacy as an independent nation, that no similarly situated democracy
would ever be expected to endure.
[. . . .] Media accounts of Israel's incursion into a football-field-sized
sector of the camp have bubbled over with lurid details worthy of a medieval
peasant's worst anti-Semitic fantasies. And the peasant-in-chief has been
a U.N. official, UNRWA commissioner general Peter Hansen, who has given dozens
of lip-smacking interviews recounting "wholesale obliteration", "a human
catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history", "helicopters . . .
strafing civilian residential areas", and "bodies . . . piling up" in "mass
graves". Some of this carnage Hansen even claims to have seen "with my own
eyes". But he is a bald-faced liar. The Israelis have been out of
Jenin -- and foreign journalists and other international observers have been
back in--for more than a week. And no evidence, literally nothing that would
indicate the presence of a civilian 'massacre' has yet emerged.
Quite the contrary, rescue workers in Jenin have so far recovered the bodies
of six--- not the rumored six hundred, but six -- women, children, and elderly
Palestinians. This, in a now ruined central area of the camp where countless
armed gunmen rained days of nonstop sniper fire on Israeli foot patrols from
the windows of still-occupied residences they had booby-trapped with high
explosives.
And why, even if its death toll had proved a hundred times higher, would
it warrant a U.N. fact-finding mission? In 1993, just after the events lately
made famous by Hollywood's 'Black Hawk Down', a two-week U.S. bombing campaign
against Mogadishu killed a thousand Somali civilians. During the whole of
the present intifada . . . far fewer Palestinians than that have died as
Israel has attempted to rescue itself from a national security threat far
graver and more immediate than any America faced in East Africa. But did
it ever occur to the United Nations to convene an inquest into the 'human
catastrophe' that was Somalia? It did not.
This article goes on to expose the UN's active complicity in terrorism:
Maybe the U.N. picks on Israel simply because it can. Or maybe, just maybe,
there is a darker impulse at play. Which would explain why the U.N. has spent
decades, in the guise of refugee assistance, providing active, organized,
and enthusiastic auxiliary services to the most delusional and violent strains
of Jew-hating Palestinian irredentism. It bears mentioning, though one rarely
hears it mentioned, that the UNRWA camp at Jenin has been for years what
the Palestinians call
a'simat al-istashidin
, the 'suiciders' capital', from which dozens of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah,
Al Aksa, and Tanzim terrorist attacks have been launched, killing hundreds
of Israelis.
UNRWA funds and staffs the schools of Jenin, where, from fall through spring
each year, children are taught that all of 'Palestine', from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea, belongs to them. During summer vacation, those
very same schools host training camps in which those very same students are
instructed in the arts of kidnapping and rock-throwing and bomb-manufacturing
and martyrdom. UNRWA rents the buses that regularly take residents of Jenin
on tours of the Israeli countryside -- where 'their' property, 'stolen' by
the Jews, is carefully pointed out.
UNRWA allows its food warehouses in Jenin to do double duty as munitions
dumps. UNRWA pretends not to know that explosives and counterfeit currency
factories are housed in the public shelters it has constructed in Jenin.
UNRWA cannot understand how it might be that its own administrative offices
in Jenin are festooned with graffiti celebrating some of the world's most
notorious terrorist organizations. Or how some of the world's most notorious
terrorists might have found their way onto the agency's payroll -- to the
point where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, extreme even
in the context of Palestinian extremism, now openly controls the UNRWA workers'
union.
This same United Nations, the blood of Israeli civilians still wet on its
hands, now dares to question the morality of a modest, defensive, and long-overdue
Israeli reprisal? . . . .
The UN mission was cancelled, lest it could not find the particular kind
of facts it wanted. Thus the PLO need not have bothered to prepare evidence
by exhuming cadavers from local cemeteries to bolster the number of their
innocent victims of Israeli crimes.
After the mission was cancelled, a special session of the General Assembly
was convened and voted 74-4 to condemn Israel anyway.
* * * * * * *
Arab nations are trying to have Israel banned from international sports competitions.
* * * * * * *
Those searching for war crimes in the wrong place are re-directed, in "Jenin's
[Palestinian] War Criminals", Jerome Marcus,
Wall Street Journal, 30 April
2002:
The United Nations is intent on investigating charges that Israeli forces
violated the human rights of Palestinians during this month's raid on the
Jenin refugee camp. Because noncombatants were killed there, the word 'massacre'
is being bandied about in the press. Many in the 'human rights community,'
however, have already reached a verdict. 'When we are confronted with the
extent of destruction of the Jenin refugee camp,' says Rene Kosirnik of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, 'it is difficult to accept that
international humanitarian law has been respected.' Amnesty International
claims it too has evidence of human-rights abuses in Jenin.
Mr. Kosirnik and friends are right about one thing: International law was
violated in Jenin, and the violations should be investigated. But the law
was not broken by Israel, which has responded carefully and proportionately
to the daily murder of its citizens. Under international law, the people
violating the human rights of Palestinian noncombatants are Palestinian terrorists,
who have hidden themselves and their weapons -- without uniforms or other
identifying insignia required by the laws of war -- among the civilian population
of the West Bank.
In Article 58 of its Protocol relating to the Protection of Victims of International
Armed Conflicts, the Geneva Convention says those in control of territory
must "endeavor to remove the civilian population, individual civilians and
civilian objects under their control from the vicinity of military objectives;
Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas;
Take the other necessary precautions to protect the civilian population,
individual civilians and civilian objects under their control against the
dangers resulting from military operations."
George H. Aldrich, the chief American negotiator of this treaty, has explained
that under it, 'a party in control of territory' -- as the Palestinians were
in each West Bank town until the Israelis defeated them 'is instructed
to take all feasible measures to protect civilians and civilian objects from
the effects of combat, largely by trying to separate them to the extent possible
from military objectives.' Such a party must therefore 'avoid unnecessarily
siting military objectives near civilian dwellings.'
The Palestinian terrorists did the exact opposite. . . . they hid such 'objectives'
almost exclusively in dwellings and other civilian buildings: The bomb factories
Israel found throughout the West Bank were located in homes, schools and
other civilian sites. . . . . the Palestinians went out of their way to hide
military objectives behind, in, around and under civilian (and even humanitarian)
objectives. The ambulance containing the bomb belt; the pregnant young woman
in "labor" who turns out to be about to give birth to a bomb -- these are
the most explicit possible violations of the international human rights of
the population in whose midst these military objectives are hidden.
In a post-battle interview with the Cairo weekly Al-Ahram, an Arab bomb maker
named Omar proudly laid out the Palestinians' strategy of militarizing homes:
'We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp,' he said. Unarmed
women lured Israeli soldiers to their deaths. The Palestinians used the civilian
population like this, we know, because that is part of their strategy: make
victims and then cry about victims. Plus, knowing they cannot face the IDF
in the field, the Palestinians tried to cripple the Israeli army by hiding
among civilians, thereby forcing the real soldiers to hold back. The Palestinians
knew that the Israelis a disciplined army of husbands and fathers -- would
restrain themselves to avoid killing noncombatants.
[. . . .] Can it be any clearer? The 13 Israeli soldiers killed in that Jenin
deathtrap died precisely because they were trying to discriminate between
military and nonmilitary 'objectives' the way a Daisy Cutter can't. In other
words, they were trying to undo the effect of the human-rights violations
inflicted on the population of Jenin by the terrorist army that made its
home there.
[ . . . .]
The only proper question for the U.N. to ask about Israel's conduct, by contrast,
is whether it was a proportionate response to this provocation and to these
methods of fighting. If the U.N. wants to investigate that question again,
it should be free to do so. But it cannot even pose the question properly
without an accurate understanding of the unceasing human-rights violations
that Israel confronted as its soldiers walked slowly down the booby-trapped
streets of Jenin, trying to tell the difference between innocent victims
of war and the terrorists hiding among them, using them as human shields.
That fraud is the real human-rights violation in Jenin, and throughout the
West Bank.
* * * * * * *
The World Medical Association rejected attempts by Denmark and other countries
to expel the Israel Medical Association, on the grounds that Israeli doctors
did not oppose the action against terrorists.
* * * * * * *
The EU (European Union) has been understanding or downright sympathetic to
Arab terrorism against Israel. It has been correspondingly indignant when
Israel not only refuses to surrender to it but actually takes action against
it. The EU support has gone beyond official statements and media campaign,
to thinly-veiled subsidies for terror in the cause of promoting peace.
As reported by IMRA (Independent Media Research Association) based on on
the Dutch newspaper
Handelsblad
, 8 May 2002:
The EU has deliberately refrained from monitoring the misappropriation of
European money by the Palestinian Authority over the past few years. EU diplomats
said this on the occasion of new Israeli accusations published earlier this
week in Jerusalem. The EU has deliberately never raised the issue of the
diversion of European relief money to finance terrorism and corruption because
it feared that this would jeopardize the resumption of the Middle East peace
process, according to the diplomats.
One EU diplomat also said that the monitoring of Palestinian leader Yasir
Arafat's budget by the IMF could not prevent European money from being used
for terrorist purposes either. "Everybody has known for quite some time now
that money ended up in the wrong hands. Officially, however, they feigned
ignorance so as not to jeopardize attempts to revive the peace process. The
IMF [International Monetary Fund], too, did not want this to happen," he
said.
[. . . . ] More than one half of all the EU's international aid goes to the
Palestinian Authority. Between 1994 and 2001, the EU gave 1.446 billion euros
in aid to the Palestinians, including 256 million euros in loans from the
European Investment Bank. The EU member states also supported the Palestinian
Authority with 1 billion euros.
In an interview for The Jerusalem Post, 12 May 2002, EU Ambassador
to Israel Giancarlo Chevellard complained that he is not shown sufficient
respect. He also asserts that he is not yet persuaded by evidence that Arafat
is involved in terrorism, stating: "For the time being this doesnt disqualify
him . . . it is not at all evident that our money has gone to people perpetrating
acts of terrorism." He further contends that Israel, besides showing insufficient
respect for him and for the EU that he represents, "violates human dignity"
in its tactics against terrorists.
The interview concludes: "Chevellard is ready to justify the double standard.
'You are one of us . . . We expect from Israel more than we expect from Cambodia
or Colombia.'"
[Comment:The Ambassador of Europe did not explain why that continent, soaked
in Jewish blood for 2000 years, should suppose that Israel "is one of us",
or why Europe has the right to demand "more" or, indeed, anything at all
from it.]
* * * * * * *
Hubert Vedrine, Foreign Minister of France, has thought of a way to improve
the scene in the Middle East. He has decided that for the "intransigence"
that blocks Europe's vision of Middle East Peace, American Jews are even
worse than Ariel Sharon. Thus the EU, which subsidizes that pro-Oslo "peace
camp" in Israel, has to take on the challenge of inducing American Jews to
mend their ways.
In the words of one EU diplomat: "What is wrong with trying to convince a
target group that their attitudes are mistaken or bring negative results.
If Europe is convinced that the solution -- a long lasting solution -- will
only come through restoring a political dialogue, then the next logical step
is to convince all the players of this reality."
[Comment: Bon chance, messieurs.]