ANNE BAYEFSKY: THE UN’S TERRORISM APOLOGISTS
www.HumanRightsVoices.org.
The world body places the blame almost everywhere but at the criminal culprits themselves
While we are looking for terrorists sneaking across borders, lurking in mosques and holed up in caves, pro-terrorist ideology is spreading across America and around the globe — disseminated in plain sight from the United Nations, in the heart of New York City.
Over the past week, the UN’s top legal committee — a General Assembly body where all 193 states are represented — met to discuss terrorism. The webcasts are broadcast globally in multiple languages. The documents are translated and disseminated on a mammoth website free of charge.
It’s a two-step charade. First, since the UN has no definition of terrorism, state sponsors of terrorism happily denounce “terrorism” at the very same time as they promote it. Second, the terrorist funders and weapons suppliers redirect the world’s attention to the supposed “root causes” of terrorism.
Conveniently, the catalog of root causes of terrorism dreamed up in these circles never includes religiously driven bigotry doled out by anti-Semites and misogynist, homophobic sociopaths — whose need to torture, rape and kill requires no deep explanation.
A quick moral inversion, and the terrorist becomes the victim.
The UN was full of such dangerous canards last week.
On Oct. 7, at the legal committee meeting at UN headquarters, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon listed “root causes that may lead to radicalism such as . . . poverty, social exclusion and marginalization” along with “Islamophobia.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani played the same card in an address to the General Assembly in September when he whined about “Iranophobia.”
Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism. And to the organization’s great shame, Iran is also the president of the so-called “Non-Aligned Movement” — a group of nations routinely aligned against the West. As such, Iran speaks for 120 UN member states — a majority of the 193 UN countries.
Here’s the Iranian speech to the UN legal beagles that was webcast Oct. 7: “Terrorism should not be equated with the legitimate struggle of peoples under colonial or alien domination and foreign occupation for self-determination and national liberation.”
Here’s state sponsor of terrorism North Korea on the same day: “Domination and interference, poverty and social inequality, and racial or religious discrimination constitute the root cause of terrorism. International efforts to put an end to terrorism should be preceded by removing the root cause of terrorism.”
All 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have signed on to the Islamic Convention on Combating International Terrorism, which gives a green light to killing Israelis, Americans and anybody else deemed fair game. The treaty says: “Peoples’ struggle, including armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination . . . shall not be considered a terrorist crime.”
Speaking on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on Oct. 7, Egypt reiterated this pro-terror exemption clause. Over the course of Oct. 7 and 8, the UN trumpeted support for the Iranian and Organization of Islamic Cooperation call to arms from half of all the speakers.
Compounding the efficacy of this outrage, unfortunately, is the Obama administration. With great fanfare, on Sept. 24,, President Obama chaired a Security Council meeting that unanimously adopted a resolution on foreign terrorist fighters.
But the only reason everybody could agree that “terrorism constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security” was because terrorism was left undefined.
Moreover, the Security Council didn’t just denounce terrorism. It demanded we “address the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism.” Next it insisted we “counter the violent, extremist narrative that can incite terrorist acts.” And then it ordered us to “address the conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism.”
In other words, Obama sold us an infinite regression. Because at the UN, the buck never stops with radical Islamists or the governments that support them.
Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her @AnneBayefsky.
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