The international body has become a mouthpiece for the most genocidally minded advocates of the ‘Palestinian’ jihad, while the supporters of Israel lack both conviction and unity.
By Robert Spencer, FrontPage Magazine
The United Nations arose out of the ashes and rubble of World War II with the promise of genuine international cooperation and lasting world peace. But that promise has long since turned into a cruel joke, as was vividly and revoltingly demonstrated on May 15, when for the first time in its history, the UN observed Nakba Day, the Palestinian Arabs’ lamentation over the “catastrophe” of the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Would the UN mark the founding of any other nation as a “catastrophe”? Of course not. But the august international body has become a mouthpiece for the most genocidally minded advocates of the “Palestinian” jihad, while the supporters of Israel lack both conviction and unity.
The centerpiece of the UN festivities was a vicious speech from Palestinian Authority President-For-Life Mahmoud Abbas, who at 87 years of age makes Old Joe Biden look youthful and vigorous.
Abbas, now in the nineteenth year of the four-year-term to which he was elected in January 2005, lashed out at Britain and the U.S. for inflicting Israel upon the poor, suffering Palestinian people: “Britain and the United States, specifically,” he declared, “bear direct political and moral responsibility for the Nakba of the Palestinian people. They are the ones who participated in making our nation a victim, when they decided to establish and plant another entity in our historical homeland, and this for their own colonialist purposes. It was called a land without a people so that it would be given to Israel. The truth is that these countries, the Western [countries], wanted to get rid of the Jews and enjoy having them in Palestine – two birds with one stone.”
These statements, as you likely expect, are riddled with falsehoods.
As The Palestinian Delusion demonstrates, the Jewish presence in the land that now comprises the State of Israel has been continuous for several thousand years. The Romans did formally expel the Jews from the area in 134CE, after the Bar Kokhba revolt, but many Jews never left; they remained there through the Arab invasion, the Turkish occupation, and up until the advent of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century. That movement had its impetus in the work of Theodor Herzl and others, who argued that the persecution of Jews worldwide could be ended if they had their own land, and indeed, reclaimed the land of their forefathers, in which some had always remained. The impetus for this didn’t come from Britain and the U.S., but from Jews themselves.
Nor was Abbas telling the truth when he said that “it was called a land without a people so that it would be given to Israel.”
In reality, in 1857, the British consul in Palestine wrote that “the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.”
Henry Baker Tristram, an English traveler, reported in the 1860s that “the north and south [of the Sharon plain] land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. Since the year 1838, no less than 20 villages there have been thus erased from the map and the stationary population extirpated.”
The most celebrated chronicler of Palestine’s pre-Zionist desolation was Mark Twain, who wrote in 1869 that “Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour’s presence….Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village.”
Undaunted by facts, Abbas called on the UN to suspend Israel’s membership. Emboldened by the organization’s recognition of the founding of Israel as a “catastrophe,” he added: “I am certain and hope that this international organization will spare no effort to restore the Palestinian people’s status… through action to realize the Palestinian people’s national rights, including the right to self-determination… and the refugees’ [right to] return to their homes from which they were removed.”
Ironically, the “Palestinian people” didn’t even exist when Israel was founded. The world didn’t start hearing about them until the 1960s, after the KGB and Yasir Arafat devised their existence as a strategy to undercut Israel’s image as a plucky underdog facing off against twenty-two massive and hostile Arab states.
What’s more, the Arab “refugees” were not “removed” from their homes. In reality, the Arabs for the most part left Israel because they were ordered to do so by Muslim Arab leaders. Contrary to the contention of the Palestinians and their allies today, the Arab Higher Committee actually exhorted Arabs to leave the new State of Israel, and they obeyed in large numbers.
The Economist magazine reported on October 3, 1948 that “of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa, not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained.
Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit…. It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.” The Jordanian daily Falastin complained on February 19, 1949, that “the Arab state which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees.” The Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station confirmed this on April 3, 1949: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.”
The UN knows all this, or should know it. Yet it sides with entities that have repeatedly declared their determination to destroy Israel utterly, which would result in a new genocide of the Jews and the deaths of millions of innocent people. The UN is, accordingly, a terrorist organization. It is no surprise that the criminal Biden regime would support it wholeheartedly, but if we get an administration that has the best interests of the American people at heart, it should end all funding for the UN and expel it from New York. Would we tolerate an organization that marked the destruction of National Socialist Germany as a “catastrophe”? So why tolerate the UN?