The election of Syria to the United Nations Security Council is just the latest in a long line of instances where the UN has willfully and knowingly violated its own charter in its campaign to de-legitimize Israel. Indeed, whole books have been written on this tendency, and the last word has not yet been said on the matter.
What bothers me is not so much the election itself, which is really not surprising after so many decades of anti-Semitism in the hallowed halls of the UN, but the events and trends that surround it.
First, compare Syria with Israel. Syria is a dictatorship, with basically two pursuits at the core of its national policy: to become the hegemon among Arab states, and to destroy Israel. In the first instance, offensive power is necessary. To that end, Syria maintains one of the largest armies in the Middle East, and has for the past 23 years been using that army to oppress and occupy another state. On the day of the election, an official statement carried on Syrian radio said that “occupation is the most ugly kind of terrorism”.
In the second case, Syria gives aid, shelter, training, weapons, and logistical infrastructure to all of the world’s most brutal terrorist organizations. Most of them are based in Damascus, and the rest make use of Syrian generosity to obtain arms from third countries such as Iran or Iraq.
Among those terrorist organizations making use of the Syrian arms pipeline and political backing is Hizbullah, the terrorist militia that controls the southern part of Lebanon with Syrian blessings. The election of Syria to the Security Council came on the first anniversary of Hizbullah’s kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers from the border region of northern Israel.
United Nations forces were implicated in that kidnapping, and even videotaped the entire event, without lifting a hand to prevent such a flagrant violation of international law. That Syria, the country most fully behind the kidnapping, is now a member of the body charged with overseeing such peacekeeping forces is the height of the absurd.
Or so one would believe. Indeed, even Israel Ambassador to the UN Yehuda Lankry used that term to describe the election. Lankry and others are either being overly diplomatic, or overly na?ve. For there is nothing absurd about anti-Semitism. And that is exactly what is driving UN policy in the Middle East. If Syria had attacked the US, or Canada, or even Micronesia, the UN would have placed Syria under sanctions rather than in the Security Council. But since it was only Israel that was attacked, there is nothing wrong with Syria’s actions, according to the UN.
Israel would never stand a chance being elected to any UN governing body. It can’t even stand as a candidate since the UN’s institutional anti-Semitism has failed to put Israel in any regional grouping, a necessary pre-requisite for election to UN agencies. This despite Israel being a democracy, a state of freedoms unparalleled anywhere else in the region, and the only bulwark against terrorism in the entire Middle East.
As I said before, though, none of this is surprising. It has long been known that the primary purpose of the UN is to legitimize the anti-Semitism that went out of fashion with the Holocaust.
What is more surprising, and certainly more ominous, is that the United States did not oppose the election. Here we are, in the very week that the US began its offensive against Afghanistan in response to international terrorism, and the largest single state sponsor of international terrorism is elected to the Security Council – without US opposition.
The US State Department maintains a list of states that officially sponsor, aid and abet terrorism. That list includes Syria, and has for a long time. That list does not, and never did, include Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan is the target in the US war against terrorism, and Syria enjoys US complicity in its election to the world’s top security body.
What is absurd is not the UN’s election of Syria to the Security Council. What is absurd is that the US has, at least tacitly, supported that election.
In order for the US to have any credible role in Middle East diplomacy, for it to have any credibility in its international fight against terrorism, a more unyielding policy must be implemented against the prime state sponsor of terrorism in the world. More attention should be paid to what is really going on in the world, and far less to the political expediency of the moment.
Copyright 2001. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
