Kofi Annan's Palestinian Seminar

By Joseph Klein
May 1, 2006
FrontPageMagazine.com 
Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22262
 
Secretary General Kofi Annan has never understood the shadow he casts as the leader and prime spokesman for the United Nations.  He has allowed his words, and even his image, to be manipulated in the service of legitimizing Palestinian terrorism.  For example, last year the London-based Palestinian-owned daily newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi lauded Kofi Annan for using the “strongest words” in backing the Palestinians against Israel when he spoke about the suffering of the Palestinian people under the Israeli siege.  And Annan was oblivious to the message that he sent to the world last November, when he sat on the dais at a ceremony marking the UN 'Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People' with the Map of Palestine that eliminated Israel's existence in the background. 
Kofi Annan keeps missing his chance to illuminate the truth.  He can offer constructive criticism of specific Israeli policies without equating Israeli actions of self-defense with the violent rejectionist course that the Palestinian militants – who are now running the Palestinian government - have taken.  Instead, he continues to repeat the terrorists’ rhetoric of victimization and falsely condemns Israel for using excessive force, thereby legitimizing the terrorists’ justifications of their attacks against innocent Israeli civilians.
As case in point, Annan has just squandered an ideal opportunity to address the Palestinian people directly and tell them that there can be no chance for real peace and prosperity for the Palestinian people so long as their Hamas-led government refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, appoints a militant terrorist to be in charge of security and praises Islamic Jihad homicide bombers as resistance fighters.  Instead, Annan played to his audience’s sense of aggrievement, even though so much of it is self-inflicted.
 
In his April 26, 2006 message to the United Nations Seminar on Assistance to the Palestinian People held in Cairo [delivered by Ms. Angela Kane, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs], Annan pledged that the United Nations “will continue to support international efforts aimed at bringing an end to the occupation that began in 1967” and excoriated Israel for imposing “considerable daily hardship and humiliation on the Palestinian population”.   He blamed the “deterioration in the living conditions of the Palestinian people” on Israel and the Western nations which have cut off funding to the Hamas terrorist regime and said that the scale of the United Nations’ own activities in the Palestinian territories may have to increase as a result.  When he did mention Palestinian-initiated violence in passing, it was in the context of calling both sides to task for not respecting international law:

“I remain extremely worried about the intensification of violence, including Palestinian rocket attacks and suicide bombings, as well as Israeli air strikes, shelling and ground operations. Civilians on both sides have been killed and injured from this violence, igniting feelings of anger and revenge. I reiterate my call on both sides to abide by their obligations under international law, and refrain from further actions that might escalate the situation and put civilians at risk.”   http://www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=2005

The Palestinians only heard the part that supported their delusion of innocent victimhood.  Here is how Annan’s message was headlined on the Electronic Intifada (which calls itself ‘Palestine’s Weapon of Mass Instruction):  “Seminar on Assistance to Palestinian People opens in Cairo, Secretary-General calls on international community to intensify support for Palestinians”.   
 
The best message for a seminar devoted to assisting the Palestinian people is to help them figure out how to turn away from the path of self-destruction that has prevented the Palestinians from having a state of their own for the last sixty years.  Annan should have used the seminar platform to tell Hamas and its backers in Iran, Syria and other terrorist sponsoring states that they are the rejectionists, who are continuing more than a half a century of international law violations by threatening to destroy completely the one member state that was established originally by a United Nations General Assembly resolution (the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947).   Annan should have reminded them that Israel had not occupied any of the West Bank for nearly twenty years after it was established.   The first three wars between Israel and the Arab states which attacked it were waged when the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands.   Instead of using those two decades to help the Palestinians build a state in the West Bank and Gaza territories, which were then controlled by Jordan and Egypt respectively, Israel’s neighbors used the territories to launch further attacks against Israel proper.   Meanwhile, the UN remained silent when the Jordanians destroyed synagogues in the old city of Jerusalem, desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and enforced apartheid laws preventing Jews from accessing their holy sites at the Temple Mount and Western Wall.
 
Historical context is what Kofi Annan always omits when he condemns Israel’s occupation of these lands as a violation of international law.  The truth is that Israel had not taken control until the third major war launched against it in 1967 convinced the Israeli government that its security could not depend on the good will of its neighbors.  It needed a buffer to avoid a dagger poised at its heart.   In contrast to Jordan’s exclusion of Jews from their holy sites while Jordan was in control, all Muslim and Christian holy sites have been accessible to all faiths since Israel has taken over.  
Citing the unsubstantiated findings of the International Court of Justice which did not have proper jurisdiction over the matter, Annan reflexively supported the Palestinian objections to the security barrier that Israel started building in 2002 after repeated suicide bombings and attacks by Palestinian militants on Israeli citizens.  Israel has adjusted the barrier’s boundaries to reflect valid humanitarian concerns.  However, Kofi Annan is wrong when he denies Israel’s right to physically separate the West Bank from Israel to prevent further attacks on its citizens.   Does Kofi Annan buy the bogus Palestinian line that the barrier is, as they call it, an “Apartheid Wall”?  Or does he understand that it is a non-violent means for Israel to defend its own citizens against terrorist attacks that the Hamas-led Palestinian government actually encourages?  In any case, he will never satisfy the extremists like the “Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign” who have actually accused poor Kofi of mirroring “the rhetoric of the Zionists.”  http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7482
Exactly what rhetoric are these fanatics talking about?   That Israel has been willing to give up its occupation in return for a true and lasting peace but have not found a partner to negotiate with in good faith?   That it was the Palestinians who squandered the opportunity to obtain more than 90% of the occupied territory for their own state when Yasser Arafat walked away from Israel’s offer that President Clinton had brokered?   If only Kofi Annan had actually pointed out Yasser Arafat’s deceitful strategy of feigning an interest in peace as a step to total conquest, he would not have been parroting any rhetoric coming from Israel on that score.  He could have simply quoted from al-Quds al-Arabi Editor-in-Chief Abd Al-Bari Atwan, who said the following about Arafat’s intentions in an interview aired on ANB TV on February 16, 2006 (as recorded by the Middle East Media Institute’s TV Monitoring Project):
            When the Oslo Accords were signed, I went to visit [Arafat] in Tunis. It was around July, before he went to Gaza. I said to him: We disagree. I do not support this agreement. It will harm us, the Palestinians, distort our image, and uproot us from our Arab origins. This agreement will not get us what we want, because these Israelis are deceitful…He took me outside and told me: By Allah, I will drive them crazy. By Allah, I will turn this agreement into a curse for them. By Allah, perhaps not in my lifetime, but you will live to see the Israelis flee from Palestine. Have a little patience.   http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1046 
Arafat died a broken man, who delivered nothing but suffering to his people.  Not learning from the failed policies of the past, Hamas continues the rhetoric of hate against Israel rather than seek to co-exist in peace.  According to the Charter of Hamas, which references the long discredited “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” as justification for obliteration of the Jewish state:
 The time (salvation) will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them… There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility… Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”
 The United Nations has never denounced this odious call for genocide.
And Hamas’s countenance of violence does not end with the Jewish people.   Christians are also under attack in the West Bank.  As reported by the Daily Telegraph, Muslim clerics recently demanded the closure of a YMCA in a Hamas stronghold.  It was subsequently firebombed.  The local Hamas-run council had stood by and done nothing to protect this charitable institution.  The deputy mayor (and Hamas member himself) was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying about the YMCA incident, “I know it is not civilized to attack it but it is a challenge to the feeling of our people.”
This ought to be a wake up call to Kofi Annan that Hamas preys on the ignorance of the Palestinian populace to instill fears and arouse hatred against Jews and Christians.  They have no interest in any genuine peace, but unfortunately Annan still pretends otherwise.  Obviously, the Secretary General cannot be much of a teacher if he is such a slow learner.