RUTHFULLY YOURS

On October 13, 2016, the United Nations General Assembly appointed by acclamation António Guterres of Portugal as the next UN Secretary-General. Guterres was the top choice of the Security Council, which forwarded Guterres’s nomination to the General Assembly on October 6, 2016. Guteres will replace the current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on January 1, 2017, and will serve for a 5-year term. Guterres was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015.

Given the UN’s preoccupation with the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state, Guterres’ views on Israel would likely have factored into the enthusiasm of UN members for his appointment.

For instance, in a 2014 address to the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Guteress analogized the Arab refugee flow of 1948 – created by a failed effort to destroy the nascent Jewish state – with Palestinians fleeing ISIS and Assad’s killing machine in Syria. He condemned Israel’s counter-terrorism operations and claimed Palestinians were better off in Syria than Gaza. In his words:

“The refugee situations under UNHCR’s mandate pale in comparison to the desperate situation of the Palestinians, the largest protracted refugee situation in the world… It was devastating to me to see Palestinian refugees in Syria being forced to flee for the second time. But even worse, in addition to the terrible loss of life and the tens of thousands of people displaced, it was shocking that Gaza’s inhabitants could not even flee to seek safety from the recent conflict. No one wants to be a refugee. But for the people of Gaza, not even that was an option.”

The United Nations (UNESCO, to be specific) recently adopted an anti-Israel resolution that disregarded the Jewish connection to the faith’s two holiest sites, the Temple Mount and Western Wall. The motion was supported by 24 nations, including Russia and China. Only six countries opposed it.

Now, the UN is too impotent to make history, much less redraft it. Still, it’s never a waste of time to remind people of its long record of empowering cheerleaders and perpetrators of violence against Jews.
It’s not merely that UN organizations like the “human rights commission” or UNESCO are often led by Islamic supremacists, but that the majority of first-world nations have — with few exceptions, like the United States and the United Kingdom — been enablers of anti-Semitism for over 50 years.

This new motion, which claims freedom of worship has been curtailed by “escalating aggressions and illegal measures,” was submitted by the Palestinians and backed by various other twelfth-century strongholds like Morocco (where it’s illegal to possess a Bible written in Arabic), Algeria (where Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men and insulting Muhammad is punishable by death), Iran (with restrictions too long to list), Pakistan (where the death penalty or life in prison is mandated for apostasy), and Sudan (where converting to Christianity is punishable by death.)

Did I mention UNESCO is an organization that claims it encourages “international peace and universal respect for human rights”? Why would the United States lend its credibility to such a sham?

For those of you unfamiliar with the specifics of this effort: The UN has long fueled the false hope of Palestinians that they will rule an ethnically cleansed, Judenfrei West Bank (regrettably, a position embraced by United States, as well) with Jerusalem as its capital. Since the very case for a modern Palestinian state is built on a historical myth (read Benny Morris’s recent Haaretz piece debunking the biggest myth of Israel’s founding), historical fiction has been an enduring feature of anti-Israel doctrine.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited his religion’s holiest site in September 2000, Arabs used it as a pretext to launch the Second Intifada. Anti-Israel activists still talk about this Sharon visit as if the man were leading the Crusaders towards Mecca. Most often, though, Israel does what it can to avoid irritating the prickly sensibilities of Arabs offended by the sight of Jews or Christians. The site itself is administrated by an Islamic trust, not Israel. Politicians are told not to go there. And so on.

“The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania.

“First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa.

“[T]he Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.” — Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman.

As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally passed.

The recent discovery that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was a KGB spy in Damascus in 1983, was discarded by many in the mainstream media as a “historical curiosity” — except that the news inconveniently came out at the time that President Vladimir Putin was trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, the Palestinian Authority immediately dismissed the news. Fatah official Nabil Shaath denied that Abbas was ever a KGB operative, and called the claim a “smear campaign.”

The discovery, far from being a “historical curiosity,” is an aspect of one of many pieces in the puzzle of the origins of 20th and 21st century Islamic terrorism. Those origins are almost always obfuscated and obscured in ill-concealed attempts at presenting a particular narrative about the causes of contemporary terrorism, while decrying all and any evidence to the contrary as “conspiracy theories.”

There is nothing conspiratorial about the latest revelation. It comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from the Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files with him to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) together with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.

Musbah Abu Sbeih is now the latest “hero” of many Palestinians and not only his family. He is being hailed as a “brave” man and a “hero” because he woke up in the morning, grabbed an M-16 assault rifle and set out on a mission to kill as many Jews as possible.

These calls have come not only from Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists, but also from “moderate” leaders such as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction.

“We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will reach Paradise and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.” – Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian leader.

As holders of Israeli ID cards, they were even entitled to drive cars with Israeli plates, which is what Abu Sbeih took advantage of to carry out his attack in Jerusalem. His family owns at least two homes in the city and are considered middle-class. Still, this did not stop Abu Sbeih from setting out on his deadly mission. And it did not stop his family members from celebrating the attack.

This is the inevitable result — as in the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, Rwanda, Darfur, or Nazi Germany — of the poisoning of a people.

The family of Musbah Abu Sbeih say they are “very proud” of what their 40-year-old son did. So are many Palestinians representing all walks of life in Palestinian society. Members of his family, including his parents and daughter, have appeared on too may TV stations to keep track of to commend Abu Sbeih. They have even gone out onto the streets to hand out sweets in jubilation over the terror attack that he carried out in Jerusalem this week, which resulted in the death of a 60-year-old grandmother and a 29-year-old police officer.