BedellBrave
It's OVER 5,000!
Interesting read from a liberal Arab writer. Link
"LONDON—Just before Christmas the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334, condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank. By allowing the motion to pass, President Barack Obama crowned his miserable track record in the Middle East with one last high school debating gesture. This was then embellished by Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning shot delivered to Israel Wednesday.
Israel is not the biggest problem in the Middle East, by a long shot. But you wouldn’t know that from the disproportionate way in which the UN has treated the country. Despite abstaining from the vote, America’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power herself noted that for as long as Israel has been a member of the UN it has been “treated differently” from other nations. And commenting only a week before this latest resolution, even outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-moon agreed that “decades of political maneuvering have created a disproportionate number of resolutions, reports, and committees against Israel… In many cases, instead of helping the Palestinian issue, this reality has foiled the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively.”
You would think that the head of the UN knows when his own organization is displaying an institutional bias. Resolution 465 already existed, rightly condemning settlements. To this day, 47 resolutions concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict have been adopted by the UNSC.
From 2016 alone one need only look at the 18 resolutions against Israel adopted during the UN General Assembly in September, or the 12 resolutions adopted in the Human Rights Council. These were more than those focused on Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan combined.
Arabs, Muslims, Islamists, liberals, leftists, and our international organizations share this institutional bias.
Opposing Israel is The One Ring that binds us all. It is the sacred god that must not be questioned. So deep runs this bias against Israeli transgressions, that to call it out is to arouse immediately incredulity and ad hominem abuse.
So entrenched is it, that few noticed how on the very morning of Resolution 2334 a motion seeking to stem the flow of weapons going to what the UN itself fears are genocidal killers in South Sudan failed.
The Security Council could not even bring itself to adopt the simplest of resolutions calling for a seven-day ceasefire to halt the tragedy of Aleppo. Yet when it came to pushing through a final year-end condemnation of Israel, the Security Council suddenly mustered the will to act.
...There is nothing unique about the Israel conflict deserving such disproportionate attention. Baluchistan, Kurdistan, Cyprus, Kashmir, and Taiwan are but a few other disputed territories not fetishized like Palestine is at the UN and in our media. All of these disputes involve deep religious, historic, and political meaning for their respective parties.
Only the overwhelming narcissism of our Abrahamic faiths - including those among us who define themselves against them—would deem the religious and historic significance of the “Holy Lands” to mean anything more than other lost holy lands for Buddhists in Tibet, or Sikhs in Khalistan, which was lost to Pakistan a year before Israel’s creation. Only by releasing the “exceptional status” pressure from this conflict, by stripping it of its religious hyperbole, by removing it from the spotlight, by simply placing it on a par with every and any other conflict in the world—tragic but not unique—do we stand a better chance of solving it, because the stakes are lowered and the frothing prophets of doom, with their Armageddon pathology, are taken out of the equation. Let us call this “Israeli unexceptconalism.”
I remain unaware of a single Middle East pundit not tied to Obama’s State department who holds that the outgoing president has done a good job in the Middle East. Obama cut a deal with Iran and conditionally lifted sanctions, while the Iranians, Hezbollah and Russian President Vladimir Putin aided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he used crude chemical bombs and massively destructive weapons against his own people. And just as Obama’s inaction allowed others to act in Syria, his inaction at the UN set the tone once again, this time reaffirming the notion that Israel is the region’s biggest problem. That is despicable. It is inexcusable. And I could remain silent no more."
"LONDON—Just before Christmas the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334, condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank. By allowing the motion to pass, President Barack Obama crowned his miserable track record in the Middle East with one last high school debating gesture. This was then embellished by Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning shot delivered to Israel Wednesday.
Israel is not the biggest problem in the Middle East, by a long shot. But you wouldn’t know that from the disproportionate way in which the UN has treated the country. Despite abstaining from the vote, America’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power herself noted that for as long as Israel has been a member of the UN it has been “treated differently” from other nations. And commenting only a week before this latest resolution, even outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-moon agreed that “decades of political maneuvering have created a disproportionate number of resolutions, reports, and committees against Israel… In many cases, instead of helping the Palestinian issue, this reality has foiled the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively.”
You would think that the head of the UN knows when his own organization is displaying an institutional bias. Resolution 465 already existed, rightly condemning settlements. To this day, 47 resolutions concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict have been adopted by the UNSC.
From 2016 alone one need only look at the 18 resolutions against Israel adopted during the UN General Assembly in September, or the 12 resolutions adopted in the Human Rights Council. These were more than those focused on Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan combined.
Arabs, Muslims, Islamists, liberals, leftists, and our international organizations share this institutional bias.
Opposing Israel is The One Ring that binds us all. It is the sacred god that must not be questioned. So deep runs this bias against Israeli transgressions, that to call it out is to arouse immediately incredulity and ad hominem abuse.
So entrenched is it, that few noticed how on the very morning of Resolution 2334 a motion seeking to stem the flow of weapons going to what the UN itself fears are genocidal killers in South Sudan failed.
The Security Council could not even bring itself to adopt the simplest of resolutions calling for a seven-day ceasefire to halt the tragedy of Aleppo. Yet when it came to pushing through a final year-end condemnation of Israel, the Security Council suddenly mustered the will to act.
...There is nothing unique about the Israel conflict deserving such disproportionate attention. Baluchistan, Kurdistan, Cyprus, Kashmir, and Taiwan are but a few other disputed territories not fetishized like Palestine is at the UN and in our media. All of these disputes involve deep religious, historic, and political meaning for their respective parties.
Only the overwhelming narcissism of our Abrahamic faiths - including those among us who define themselves against them—would deem the religious and historic significance of the “Holy Lands” to mean anything more than other lost holy lands for Buddhists in Tibet, or Sikhs in Khalistan, which was lost to Pakistan a year before Israel’s creation. Only by releasing the “exceptional status” pressure from this conflict, by stripping it of its religious hyperbole, by removing it from the spotlight, by simply placing it on a par with every and any other conflict in the world—tragic but not unique—do we stand a better chance of solving it, because the stakes are lowered and the frothing prophets of doom, with their Armageddon pathology, are taken out of the equation. Let us call this “Israeli unexceptconalism.”
I remain unaware of a single Middle East pundit not tied to Obama’s State department who holds that the outgoing president has done a good job in the Middle East. Obama cut a deal with Iran and conditionally lifted sanctions, while the Iranians, Hezbollah and Russian President Vladimir Putin aided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he used crude chemical bombs and massively destructive weapons against his own people. And just as Obama’s inaction allowed others to act in Syria, his inaction at the UN set the tone once again, this time reaffirming the notion that Israel is the region’s biggest problem. That is despicable. It is inexcusable. And I could remain silent no more."
