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The world waits for leadership
The world waits for Kofi Annan’s leadership, but it cannot afford to wait much longer
Stephen E. Herbits
As a sovereign state that yearns for peace and security, Israel should want to welcome the leader of an institution created specifically to help guarantee those rights. Instead, Kofi Annan’s arrival is being met with hesitation. And with good reason.
Throughout the recent conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, the UN served as a bastion of moral-equivalency and anti-Israel demonization. The newly “reformed” Human Rights Council held two special sessions to condemn Israel and has already devoted more time and ink to demonizing Israel than on any other subject.
On the same day that the conflict in Lebanon sat before the Security Council, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination took time to condemn Israel, in apparent violation of UN rules prohibiting such deliberation on a matter before the Security Council.
The Secretary General not only seems to tolerate this environment, but apparently encourages it through his own rhetoric.
On July 20, 2006, Mr. Annan insisted that Israel’s “excessive use of force is to be condemned.” He then went further, putting Hizbullah and Israel in the same sentence, equating their activities: “Both the deliberate targeting by Hizbullah of Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons and Israel's disproportionate use of force and collective punishment of the Lebanese people must stop.”
Having introduced the condemnation of “disproportionate response” into the international media spin, the Secretary General failed to define what constitutes a “proportionate” response from a sovereign nation that values human life to nearly 4000 terrorist-fired missiles raining down on civilian centers at an average of almost one missile every 12 minutes during a month-long conflict.
On July 25, Mr. Annan went even further, hastily and incorrectly condemning Israel for its “apparently deliberate targeting” of a UN post. The Secretary General failed to condemn Hizbullah for using UN posts as cover for attacks against Israeli civilians and failed to chastise UN forces for allowing Hizbullah to use those posts as cover.
One analysis shows that during the war Hizbullah used a long-built terrorist tunnel meters away from a UN post - within a proximity that virtually guaranteed that UN officials stationed there were aware of its existence.
Like UNIFIL, the Secretary General should not be judged on past failures, but on the choices he now makes. The metrics are clear and the civilized world, especially those who care about the UN, should watch to see if the Secretary General and the United Nations will:
- Allow a return to the status quo ante
- Allow Hizbullah to remain a military force in southern Lebanon
- Allow Hizbullah to remain armed
- Allow Hizbullah to rearm
- Allow Syria and Iran to continue to arm Hizbullah
- Force Syria and Iran to explain their financial and military support for Hizbullah terrorists
- Report how many missiles were fired from Southern Lebanon into Israel
- Report the national origin of the weapons used by Hizbullah terrorists (including Iranian and Syria rockets used to kill civilians and Iranian and Russian anti-tank missiles used to kill Israeli soldiers)
- Report the extent of the vast network of underground military tunnels, weapons caches and missile launchers located in southern Lebanon
- Report the degree to which Iran and Syria train, support, supply and control Hizbullah terrorists
- Report the degree to which Iran supplied military and related expert professionals to Hizbullah
- Force Iran and Syria to explain their support of Hizbullah
- Force Russia to explain Hizbullah's use of Russian-made weapons
- Denounce the Iranian regime’s call for the destruction of the state of Israel and use of Hizbullah to further that goal
- Condemn the Iranian regime’s violation of the UN’s Genocide Convention
- Denounce the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitic cartoon contest
- Lead the civilized world in confronting Iran and Syria as the world’s largest state sponsors of terrorism
- Lead the civilized world in confronting the Iranian regime over its nuclear program and violation of international treaties
In facing looming challenges in the Middle East, Kofi Annan must choose between the unqualified defeat of state sponsors of terrorism or their victory. Will he vigorously preserve and defend the UN Charter or will he seek to arbitrate between outlaw terrorists and law-abiding nations.
In the 1930s, the League of Nations failed to confront the aggressions of the German, Italian and Japanese dictatorships. The League managed only to muster weak paper statements that increased the contempt and boldness of the Axis powers.
In 1938 Churchill urged the unification of democratic forces under the banner of the League of Nations in confronting Nazi Germany. He hoped that by marshalling a Grand Alliance honorably bound to the Covenant of the League of Nations “the ferocious passions which now grip a great people would turn inwards and not outwards in an internal rather than an external explosion, and mankind would be spared the deadly ordeal towards which we have been sagging and sliding month by month.”
The UN was created in the aftermath of the League’ failure to heed Churchill’s words which were as wise then as they are today.
The final measure on which Mr. Annan will be judged is his contribution to preserving humanity’s “last best hope for peace.” The world waits for Mr. Annan’s leadership, but it cannot afford to wait much longer.
Stephen E. Herbits is Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress
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