UN remembers the Holocaust as it abandons the Jewish People

 

The United Nations (UN) ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day was held on January 27, 2022 - as the UN was simultaneously continuing its incessant assault on the Jewish People that is once again giving rise to increasing Jew-hatred worldwide.

UN-sponsored Jew-hatred began with the establishment of The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People under resolution 3376 (XXX) and the scurrilous “Zionism is racism” Resolution 3379 (XXX) – both passed by the General Assembly on November 10, 1975.

The following 47 years has seen three totally-fabricated statements formulated and repeatedly propagated by the UN and some of its various agencies: 

• Jews have no right to live in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem 
• Jews living there are doing so illegally in flagrant violation of international law 
• Jews are the major obstacle to peace 

Secretary-General of the UN – Antonio Guterres - enunciated these false statements demonizing the Jewish People as recently as December 15, 2021:

“I call on Israel to put a stop to all settlement activities immediately. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law and United Nations resolutions. They undermine the prospect of achieving a two-State solution by systematically eroding the possibility of establishing a contiguous, independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian State”

Guterres was pushing his master’s odious three-point narrative – when he should have been forcefully rejecting it for the following reasons:

• Jews have the inalienable right to live in these specifically-designated areas of former Palestine for the purpose of reconstituting the Jewish National Home (“Inalienable Right) – legally conferred on them by article 6 and article 25 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and preserved by article 80 of the UN Charter.

• Israel’s first Prime Minister – David Ben-Gurion – then the Representative of the Jewish Agency – emphasised the importance of the insertion of Article 80 into the UN Charter in evidence before the UN Special Committee for Palestine at Lake Success, New York on 7 July 1947:

• Article 80 preserves the Jewish People’s Inalienable Right notwithstanding the demise of the League of Nations on April 19, 1946 and remains as alive and exercisable today as it was when unanimously adopted by all 51 Member States of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 – (see image following)

The following headline appearing over a media release on January 27th by UN News – the official UN  media outlet - indicates the lengths the UN will go to to bury Article 80:

“The Holocaust “defined the United Nations”, Secretary-General António Guterres told a virtual ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, recalling that the UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco “as the Dachau concentration camp was liberated”.

The Charter defined the UN - giving it the responsibility under Article 80 to ensure the rights of the Jewish People created by the Mandate were preserved.

Excluding any mention of Article 80 contained in that Charter and the reasons for its inclusion continues to be the fuel that enables the UN to falsely condemn 600000 Jews for illegally living in areas where they are legally entitled to do so and from where all Jews were driven out and expelled between 1948 and 1967.

Abandoning the Jewish People by failing to recognise its vested rights under the Mandate for Palestine and the UN Charter brands the UN as the world centre for disseminating and inciting Jew-hatred. 193 Member States need to evaluate their continuing membership. 

“Never again” is threatening to become “Yet again” – whilst the UN continues to act in flagrant violation of article 80 of its own Charter. 

Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.

Another anti-Jewish textbook gets the publisher's thumbs down

[Published 21 January 2020]


The decision by Pearson Education Limited (Pearson) to withdraw Hilary Brash’s text book — The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change, 1917- 2012 — comes after trenchant criticism by blogger David Collier.

Collier questioned — among many other criticisms — why two timelines did not mention the Holocaust and why references to massacres of Jewish communities had been branded as “clashes”.

Collier said:

“It is almost impossible for the untrained eye to pick apart fantasy from fiction.”

A spokesman for Pearson said:

“An independent review of the texts by an educational charity found no overall evidence of anti-Israel bias. It identified some areas where the balance of sources could be improved and we are updating the texts and offering existing customers the option of replacing them for free.

We always welcome feedback and are committed to creating engaging, accurate and objective content. We are the only awarding body that tackles this subject matter at both GCSE and international GCSE level. We do it as we think it is an important topic, even though it is likely to provoke emotive responses.”

Pearson is the UK’s largest organisation offering academic, vocational and work-based learning qualifications.

Brash’s book was a textbook for Pearson Edexcel General (GCSE) and International (iGCSE) Certificate of Secondary Education studies.

Last year, 2,341 students took the General unit on the conflict for GCSE and 1,509 for iGCSE.

Pearson’s decision follows McGraw Hill’s decision in 2016 to trash copies of its textbook Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World.

Catherine Mathis — a spokeswoman for McGraw-Hill — then explained the Company’s reasons for destroying the textbook — which contained four misleading and inaccurate maps of “Palestine”:

“As soon as we learned about the concerns with it, we placed sales of the book on hold and immediately initiated an academic review. The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards. We have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment to anyone who returns the book.”

McGraw-Hill’s action followed criticism received by “MSNBC Live” after earlier airing the same series of maps. Host Kate Snow and her then guest Middle East expert Martin Fletcher subsequently acknowledged that they realized after they went off the air that the maps were not factually accurate and regretted using them.

The worst source of false information on the Jewish-Arab conflict is the United Nations Study titled “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988” (“Study”) which has disseminated false information on the Arab-Jewish conflict since its first publication in 1978. The Study is published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Educational institutions and books regurgitating the Study’s false information include:

1. “politics.ie” – claiming to be one of Ireland’s leading politics and current affairs discussion websites

2. “Academia.edu” – a platform for academics to share research papers and claiming it attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.

3. “iasexamportal.com” – which describes itself as “India’s Largest Online Community for IAS, UPSC, Civil Services Exam Aspirants.”

4. “UK essays” – which claims to use over 4,000 thoroughly vetted experts with the qualifications and experience to write you the best possible essay.

5. Handbook of Ethnic Conflict: International Perspectives - Dan Landis and Rosita D Albert

6. Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging - Madeleine Arnot and Sharlene Swartz

7. Bridges Over Troubled Waters - Dahlia Moore and Salem Aweiss

False narratives constitute a real obstacle to achieving peace between Jews and Arabs.

Ilhan Omar needs to rethink her flawed position on Palestine

[Published 20 March 2019]


For far too long political debate has been reduced to name-calling and identity labeling with facts and reasoned arguments taking second place — consigning civilized discourse and the exchange of ideas and opinions into the trash bin.

Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar has taken a positive step in reversing this burgeoning practice of personal denigration and arbitrary dismissal of opinions of those with whom one doesn’t agree — in setting out her opinion on resolving the Arab-Jewish conflict in an op-ed article in the Washington Post on 17 March.

Omar’s opinion is based on factual errors and her failure to take into account other relevant facts — as this sentence by sentence analysis of her position makes clear:.

1. “The founding of Israel 70 years ago was built on the Jewish people’s connection to their historical homeland, as well as the urgency of establishing a nation in the wake of the horror of the Holocaust and the centuries of anti-Semitic oppression leading up to it.”

The founding of Israel pre-dated the Holocaust - back to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1. Palestine — within boundaries to be determined - which had formed part of the territory of the Ottoman Empire for the previous 400 years - was designated by the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo Conference held in April 1920 as the location for the ”establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.” This decision was unanimously endorsed by the League of Nations when granting Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine in 1922. The Mandate’s boundaries comprised what is today called Israel, Jordan, Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza. However the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Transjordan - 78% of Mandatory Palestine - was postponed or withheld under article 25 of the Mandate.

2. “We must acknowledge that this is also the historical homeland of Palestinians.”

The “Palestinians” were not recognized as an identifiable people in 1917. The Mandate for Palestine regarded the Arab residents of Palestine as forming part of the “existing non-Jewish communities” in Palestine - whose civil and religious rights were not to be prejudiced. The “Palestinians” were only defined for the first time in the 1964 PLO Charter — article 6.3.

3. “And without a state, the Palestinian people live in a state of permanent refugeehood and displacement.”

The Palestinian Arabs acquired their own state and independence in 1946 in Jordan - 78% of Palestine. Hamas exercises full administrative control over the Arab residents of Gaza. The PLO exercises full administrative control over 95% of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

4. “This, too, is a refugee crisis, and they, too, deserve freedom and dignity.”

A refugee crisis exists in Lebanon and Syria because the Palestinian Arabs living there have been denied citizenship for 70 years.

5. “I support a two-state solution, with internationally recognized borders, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination.”

There are already two such states in 95% of former Palestine — one (78%) for the Arabs called Jordan — one (17%) for the Jews, called Israel.

6. “This has been official bipartisan U.S. policy across two decades and has been supported by each of the most recent Israeli and Palestinian leaders, as well as the consensus of the Israeli security establishment.”

New solutions are required after negotiations spanning 25 years have failed to create a second Arab state in former Palestine between Israel and Jordan. Redrawing the international borders between Jordan Israel and Egypt could be game changers.

Hopefully Congressman Omar will rethink her flawed position and continue this dialogue…

Palestine - Obama's Ignorance Becomes His Nemesis

[Published 14 January 2016]


President Obama enters his final year as President having given up on trying to resolve the Jewish-Arab conflict - following in the footsteps of so many other American Presidents whose similarly-shared lofty and noble aspirations ended in abject failure.

In Obama’s case his inability to fully comprehend Jewish history and the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel was the catalyst for his inevitable failure - as tellingly illustrated in his landmark speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009:

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

Israel’s current Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Dore Gold - has now revealed how Israel’s then leadership viewed Obama’s above remarks in this frank exchange published in Frontline on 6 January:

“When the president goes to Cairo for the speech, and you heard him speak, what did you think?

Well, everybody that was in my entourage focused on the whole notion that the state of Israel rose as a response to the Holocaust. That was something that was unacceptable.

Why?

Because Israel has an eternity to it that goes far back before the 20th century, the 19th century, and even earlier. All we have to do is know that there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem already at the time of the American Civil War. All we have to know is that we had a civilization here that was destroyed by the Romans. You can now find the catapult, the Ballista, used to fight the Jewish resistance at the time of the 1st century, 70 A.D. Our history is all over this city and all over the country. Therefore, an explanation that sees us as a bunch of Europeans who are looking for a refuge from the Nazis is a partial and not terribly accurate understanding of the soul of this country.

Does it surprise you that the president of the United States would make that error?

It surprised me that they have a speechwriter who would be allowed to write that kind of document, because I think Sen. Obama was presented with the four dimensions of Israel, but someone decided to take this partial approach in a presidential speech, and it didn’t earn him confidence with the people of Israel. …”

Blaming Obama’s ignorance on a speechwriter is being very charitable to President Obama and his administration including the State Department and his equally failed Secretary of State - John Kerry - who all must accept collective responsibility for Obama‘s further statement:

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Questioning the legitimacy of the right of the Jewish people to live anywhere in their ancient biblical and historical homeland - sanctioned by both the League of Nations and United Nations - was catastrophic.

Question the political wisdom - but not its legitimacy.

Obama got it wrong from the start and nothing was going to save him from failure in the end.

Palestine Blunder Costs UNESCO $167 Million in 2012-2013

[Published 5 January 2012]


UNESCO’s deficit has skyrocketed from an estimated $120 million to $167 million for 2012-2013 as a result of its decision to admit Palestine as its 195th member in breach of UNESCO’s own Constitution.

In addition UNESCO has lost another $65 million in American dues for 2011 - automatically withheld by the United States as required by domestic legislation existing on its statute books since the 1990’s.

UNESCO continues to refuse to review or to justify the legality of its decision to admit Palestine - which if reversed - could immediately restore this massive shortfall in its revenue and enable the resumption of essential programs suspended or curtailed as a result of this financial black hole.

Those 87 members of UNESCO who did not vote for Palestine’s admission to UNESCO must be increasingly alarmed at this blow out in the deficit - and also at two highly embarrassing issues involving UNESCO and Palestine - one of which came to UNESCO’s notice in December and the other which is set to explode in February.

The December issue has led to UNESCO withdrawing funding from a Palestinian children’s magazine - Zayzafouna - published by an NGO under the same name and coming under the patronage of the Palestinian National Commission of UNESCO - a national body set up by the Palestinian Authority.

The February edition of Zayzafouna contained an article by a 10-year-old girl in which Hitler was quoted by her as stating that he:

“killed [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation who wreak havoc on Earth”

In finding this statement may be interpreted as an apology for the holocaust and contrary to UNESCO’s constitutional mandate and values - UNESCO declared :

“UNESCO supported the publication of three issues of the Zayzafouna Magazine six months after the February 2011 issue. The support was provided for these issues following agreement with the editors that they would focus on building greater appreciation amongst Palestinians for their heritage and culture. They were to open the way for positive dialogue aimed at overcoming the consequences of the Middle East conflict, and to fight against stereotypes that may be conducive to violence. It was UNESCO’s intention to foster a positive view of Palestinian heritage based on the values of tolerance and UNESCO’s mandate of building peace in the minds of men and women. This vision guides all of UNESCO’s activities, and we urge all partners to work in this direction.

UNESCO is shocked and dismayed by the content of the February issue, and has requested more detailed information and clarification from the editors of the magazine and the Palestinian Authority.

UNESCO strongly deplores and condemns the reproduction of such inflammatory statements in a magazine associated with UNESCO’s name and mission and will not provide any further support to the publication in question.

The Organization, which is deeply committed to the development and promotion of education about the Holocaust, disassociates itself from any statement that is counter to its founding principles and goal of building tolerance in the full respect for human rights and human dignity. “

UNESCO’s approach to this outrage was principled and undoubtedly correct.

However any concern for complying with UNESCO’s “constitutional mandate” seems to have gone out the window when the charge is made that Palestine has not been constitutionally elected to UNESCO.

UNESCO - in announcing Palestine’s admission to membership incorrectly stated:

“Admission to UNESCO for states that are not members of the United Nations requires a recommendation by the Organization’s Executive Board and a two thirds majority vote in favour by the General Conference of Member States present and voting (abstentions are not considered as votes). “

The words “present and voting” do not appear in Article II (2) - the article that expressly deals with applications for full membership.

However those words do appear in Article II (3) - the article which deals with applications for associate membership.

The majority vote required in each case is therefore very different - more stringent for full membership and less stringent for associate membership.

Whilst the majority vote - 107 - would have been sufficient to admit Palestine as an Associate Member - it was insufficient to admit Palestine to full membership for which the majority vote required was 129.

The 87 members who did not vote for Palestine’s admission should themselves be asking for an urgent review. - given the substantially increased loss in funding just announced and the use of UNESCO funds by Palestine for unauthorized and morally offensive purposes.

I am still seeking answers from UNESCO - but it appears they continue to be reluctant to review or justify the provisions of the Constitution that enabled Palestine to apparently slip through the cracks and join UNESCO’s ranks.

The issue set to erupt next month - as revealed by Giulio Meotti - involves Palestine applying for UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron - a site holy to both Jews and Moslems.

Khaled Osaily - Hebron’s Mayor said recently:

“It’s a mosque!, You don’t have to be an architect to see it! Will you allow me to pray in a synagogue or a church?”.

Several days ago, the Palestinian Rehabilitation Committee raised the UNESCO flag next to the national ‘Palestinian’ flag in front of the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Osaily - just returned from Paris where he took part in a UNESCO conference at the Institut du Monde Arabe in support of adding Hebron’s holy sites to the World Heritage List stated:

“We started a campaign three years ago to add Hevron to the UNESCO list”, . Now the request is ready and we will present it to UNESCO in February”.

I have started an on-line petition to help gauge the strength of public reaction to getting UNESCO to review what appears to be a clear breach of its own Constitution - which already has had - and will have - serious and ongoing financial, operational and political consequences.

490 people have already signed the petition in the last 4 days. I invite you and your social network to do likewise and circulate it to others to follow suit.

Those who don’t live by the law are destined to get their just desserts at the hands of the law.

UNESCO needs to come clean and review or justify its questionable decision - or continue to wither on the vine.