Testing Annan's Sincerity
New York Sun Staff Editorial
July 12, 2005
For a secretary-general of the United Nations who ostensibly wants to repair the world body's tattered relations with the Jewish people, Kofi Annan is certainly missing an opportunity as an anti-Israel parley convenes today under U.N. auspices at Paris. The gathering is called the United Nations International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Middle East Peace. The Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman, in a letter to Mr. Annan, noted, our Benny Avni reports, that in the past the gabfest has served as a forum for anti-Israel propaganda, with fifty-year-old anti-Israel slogans. This year the conference has toned down its title; it now supports Middle East peace instead of the Palestinian people. But the ADL points out that in addressing only the concerns of the Palestinian Arabs, the conference takes a one-sided, anti-Israel approach to the situation.
What the ADL wants Mr. Annan to do is to reconsider sending a representative from his office to address the conference, and it strikes us as an eminently reasonable thing to be suggesting. Indeed, it's almost a gift, if Mr. Annan is sincere in his efforts to repair the United Nation's relations with the Jewish people. The secretary-general went so far, earlier this year, as to organize a gathering to mark the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz and to talk about the Holocaust and what it has meant. But we remarked at the time that opposing the Holocaust is all well and good, but not for much if the United Nations is going to be off the field in the current war against the Jews.
Part of that war is being prosecuted by the Palestinian Arabs and their collaborators by sending suicide bombers to kill Jewish civilians at wedding halls, restaurants, and even hospitals. Some of these attacks are taking place in Israel, and some are taking place elsewhere, including, say, the streets of Paris and Buenos Aires. But some of the attacks are coming not with bombs but with political rhetoric at conferences like the anti-Israel gathering the Ford Foundation helped prepare in Durbin and the conference that meets today in Paris. So everyone is watching to see what Mr. Annan is going to do, whether he really means what he signals publicly and speaks about in the salons around New York. If he were serious about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel agitation, he would withdraw his representative from the Paris parley and send a thank-you note to Mr. Foxman.