SETTING THE FOX TO INVESTIGATE THE HENS :

Israel is right to suspect UN inquiry at Jenin may lead to kangaroo court (Tom Cooney, 4/30/02, Irish Times)

IT SUITS the UN to blame Israel in order to deflect attention from its own culpability in being an accomplice to Palestinian terrorism. The UN has responsibility for providing relief and social services to the Jenin camp. It allowed the camp to become the centre for suicide bombers. The terrorists use young people as bombers in violation of Article 38 of the UN Convention on Children's Rights. Yet neither Terje Larsen nor Peter Hansen spoke out.

The UN Human Rights Commission has failed to make the Palestinain Authority answerable for this abuse. Under the very eyes of the UN, Jenin became a terrorist military base, and jeopardised its status as a refugee camp. This quietism is complicity. It's not surprising, then, that the UN would fund a Palestinian map on which Israel does not exist.

The UN's title to be Israel's judge is questionable. The UN's complicity with Palestinian terrorism means that it is acting as a judge in its own cause. Its malice towards Israel is incompatible with the qualities an impartial fact-finder requires.

The UN has given the Palestinian Authority its apologia for its vicious campaign of terror against Israel. It has done this by distorting international legal principle to promote the notion that Israel is an occupying power in Palestinian territory. This enables Arafat's apologists (including those European states who allowed Europe's own Jewish civilisation to be liquidated) to assert that Israel's presence on the West Bank and Gaza is an offshoot of a desire to exert colonial power over Palestinian people.

This assertion is false. Israel's presence in those lands is the outcome of the 1967 war in which several Arab states set out to liquidate Israel and its people. Israel
entered those areas lawfully in self-defence. Consider the West Bank area. Jordan occupied it from 1948 to 1967 as the outcome of an unlawful invasion. It acquired no title to the lands. When Jordan attacked Israel in 1967, Israel drove Jordan out of the West Bank and took control of the area. Under international law, Israel is entitled to hold those lands so long as the dictates of self-defence require.

Israel is entitled not to withdraw from the lands until proper measures are set in train to ensure that the area will not be used as a base to use force against it.

One fondly recalls the days when conservatives were viewed as cranks for believing the U.S. should get out of the U. N.; who now disagrees? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 30, 2002 6:52 AM