OpEdNews - Page 4 of Article: Countering Benjamin Netanyahu's Orwellian Spin at the UN

E: Are the members of the UN also up to the challenge to demand the same of Israel that is demanded of Iran?

From Ashkelon prison in 1987, Mordechai Vanunu asked:

"Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger. Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened - when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens - and this is true in most cases - they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation"Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?" [11]

Another reason the UN is limp is due to America's exercising its veto 32 times to shield Israel from critical draft resolutions. Between 1972 and 1997, which constituted nearly half of the total of 69 U.S. vetoes cast since the founding of the U.N.

On July 26, 1973, a draft resolution affirmed the rights of the Palestinians and established provisions for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories as embodied in previous General Assembly resolutions. But, Washington killed this international effort to end Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. [12]

N: Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism? Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

E: Many people in America believe Bush stole a presidential election too, and those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, so I say to you:

You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.- Lewis Mumford, 1946

N: Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.

We heard nothing -- absolutely nothing -- from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one. In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn't get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare.

You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent. Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country's civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.

E: I stated above many reasons why the UN is limp, and I cannot ignore such ignorance!

Why even a little one such as me wrote in 2005:

"Since the cease-fire agreement of February 8, 2005, seventy-five Palestinians, including seventeen innocent children, and fourteen Israelis, including two innocent children, have been murdered. Two thousand Palestinians arrested; 2,306 checkpoints imposed, and 8,700 acres of Palestinian land confiscated by the Israeli government"settlers attacked Palestinians 394 times since the cease-fire agreement"[and] they are a cult that has been allowed to get out of control. The Israeli government enticed and encouraged them to settle in illegal land, and this is what it has come to! And yet, the illegal settlements continue!

"And, what a farce the so-called disengagement in Gaza was. The Israeli government still controls all access to Gaza by land, sea, and air. Dr. Mustafa Bargouthi, documented that only 25 of over 150 settlements will be dismantled, and only 8,475 of over 436,000 settlers [less than 2 percent of settlers] have been evacuated. Meanwhile, [in less than a year] 12,800 new settlers have moved into the West Bank--50 percent more settlers than were evacuated.

"This is no withdrawal, this is BS! Until Palestinians have control of Gaza's borders and a guaranteed passage between Gaza and the West Bank, it is not a withdrawal; it's just BS propaganda! And Gaza is less than 6 percent of the occupied territories, and that leaves 94 percent of Palestinian territories under the boot of the IDF. The corruption in the PA government and hot tempers from those under occupation are a powder keg that's getting ready to blow! What's it going to take to wake the world up to the fact that most of our problems with radical Islamist fundamentalist militants leads us back to the conflict in Israel and Palestine?

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10