Aletho News

To imagine a world free from fascism and Israel, imagine a world without the UN

By Greg Felton | January 27, 2018

Cowardice in the face of Zionist/corporate coercion is not confined to individual state actors; it is also found among groups of states. The crippling power of groupthink and the fear of reprisal for defying the hegemonic power can inhibit states from behaving ethically. To stand against tyranny is admittedly dangerous and difficult, so perhaps cowardice is too strong a term for those that don’t, but tyrants have only as much power as their victims are willing to give them; at some point they have to stop giving: There is no cowardice as strong as a shared cowardice, or as Edmund Burke so aptly said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” For an assemblage of do-nothing good men, I give you the United Nations.

The UN’s role in creating our neo-fascist world order goes virtually unremarked as the world’s propaganda organs and gossip networks fixate on the U.S.’s warmongering bombast. To condemn the UN in this manner likely seems absurd to anti-war activists and those indoctrinated with the dogma of liberal internationalism, but it is no coincidence that the 20th century, the most violent in human history, is also the first century when the world succumbed to the conceit that war could be rationalized out of existence.

The UN did not prevent wars; it centralized and depoliticized their execution. Before the UN, states had to make the conscious decision to declare war before engaging in hostilities. War was an instrument of politics. After the UN, war was divorced war from rational politics. It became an aggression sanctioned by the Security Council, like the no-fly zones over Iraq, or a self-proclaimed right to attack based on contrivances like “responsibility to protect” and “violations” of Security Council resolutions. These are the excuses invoked to lay waste whole countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Victims of great power aggression, like Palestine, on the other hand, have no hope of redress.

Like the League of Nations, the UN is founded on high moral principles but has neither the military strength nor the political will to enforce them. It could hardly be otherwise. The U.S. emerged from WWII as the world’s pre-eminent economic, military and political hegemon, so to think that it would willingly subordinate itself to an objective moral code or an international body was preposterous. In fact, the UN exposed its hypocrisy within a mere 25 months of its founding. I discussed the matter in a July 22, 2011, column concerning the possible UN membership of Palestine, which of course never happened.

The essay’s most remarkable aspect is not its scintillating prose but the fact that it could be reprinted today with no loss of relevance, especially concerning the Arab League’s announcement that it would lobby the UN to recognize the state of Palestine because of Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient Canaanite city of Jerusalem. In theory, the league’s idea is perfectly sound. According to Article 4 of the United Nations Charter:

Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.

In practice, the announcement is farcical. The league does not seem to have learned anything from the UN’s failure to do so 2011. Why should it expect the UN to behave any differently now? If the league wants the UN to recognize the state of Palestine, it must go about it a different way. It has to make Israel, not Palestine, the issue. The following excerpt from my article shows UN cowardice in the face of U.S. terrorism.

Original Cowardice

By late November 1947, the issue of a Jewish national home had yet to be settled. On one side were those who sympathized with partition of Palestine because of the persecution the Jews suffered under Hitler’s Reich. On the other were those who recognized that such a plan was grossly illegal and a violation of fundamental UN principles of justice. By the 25th, the Zionist lobby realized that it did not have the requisite two-thirds majority in the General Assembly to support partition. Extraordinary measures had to be taken.

Vijayalakshmi Pandit, head of India’s UN delegation and sister of India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, received daily death threats warning her to change her vote. Nehru, though, refused to buckle in the face of threats or lucrative bribes. (Najma Heptulla, Indo-West Asian relations: the Nehru era (Allied Publishers, 1991, p. 158.)

Other, smaller, countries could not afford to stand on principle. In Palestine and Israel—A Challenge to Justice, Professor John Quigley recounts how Liberia, the Philippines, and Haiti—all financially dependent on the U.S.—were coerced into switching their votes:

“Liberia’s ambassador to the United Nations complained that the U.S. delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries. Some delegates charged U.S. officials with ‘diplomatic intimidation.’ Without terrific pressure from the United States on governments which cannot afford to risk American reprisals, said an anonymous editorial writer, the resolution would never have passed. The fact such pressure had been exerted became public knowledge, to the extent a State Department policy group was concerned that ‘the prestige of the UN’ would suffer because of ‘the notoriety and resentment attendant upon the activities of U.S. pressure groups, including members of Congress, who sought to impose U.S. views as to partition on foreign delegations.’” (p. 37)

On Nov. 29, the Partition Plan, known as UNGA Resolution 181 narrowly gained the required two thirds—33 in favor, 13 opposed, 10 abstaining and 1 absent—yet the resolution was a violation of the UN Charter since the UN has no authority to take land from one people and give it to another….

As a result, 726,000 Arabs were made refugees in their own land from November 29, 1947, until the end of 1948, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. Walter Eytan, Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, referred to the UNRWA’s figure as “meticulous” and believed that the real number was closer to 800,000. Moshe Dayan would later admit: “There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969).”

One can have sympathy for Liberia, the Philippines and Haiti—without economic freedom, political freedom is an illusion­­––but the issue never should have been brought to the General Assembly, especially since the voting was known to be coerced. As the last line said: “The UN has no authority to take land from one people and give it to another.”

The crowning cruelty is that Resolution 181 had nothing to do with Israel’s “creation.” President Harry Truman admitted that he refused to let it be ratified in the Security Council precisely because of Jewish savagery against Arabs. In a March 25, 1948, statement he wrote:

“It has become clear that the partition plan cannot be carried out at this time by peaceful means. We could not undertake to impose this solution on the people of Palestine by the use of American troops, both on Charter grounds and as a matter of national policy.”

Without ratification, Resolution 181 was merely a General Assembly recommendation, not a decision, so the partition never officially took place; however, because Zionists were in control of Congress on the matter, and the media and U.S. public were thoroughly indoctrinated with Holocaust™ propaganda, Truman did nothing to stop the Jewish atrocity because he needed Jewish votes in the 1948 election. Truman’s moral cowardice and the UN’s refusal to defend its Charter against obvious violation have given us the illegitimate state of Israel, from which emanates our terroristic, neo-fascist world.

At no time since 1947 has the UN done anything to atone for its cowardice or stop Israel from committing its slow genocide of Palestine. From this perspective, the Arab League’s asking the UN to grant statehood to Palestine is an exercise in futility. Instead it must demand that the UN acknowledge the non-existence of Resolution 181, and thereby the non-existence of Israel.

Cowardice Compounded

The second thing the Arab League has to do is have Israel expelled from the UN. On May 11, 1949, Israel was admitted as a member, but that decision cannot be justified since “Israel” failed the peace-loving criterion mentioned in Article 4 of the Charter. To get around this inconvenient fact, the UN cheated. As I had Ban Ki-Moon say on May 11, 2009:

Few people know that Israel is the only state to be given a conditional admission. Under General Assembly Resolution 273, Israel was admitted on the condition that it grant all Palestinians the right to return to their homes and receive compensation for lost or damaged property, according to General Assembly Resolution 181, paragraph 11. Suffice to say, Israel has never lived up to these terms, and never intended to. For 60 years Israel has violated its terms of admission, and for 60 years the UN has done nothing about it. It has watched as Israel heaped misery upon misery on Palestine, and violated international law with impunity.

It is not necessary for the Arab League to lobby the UN for Palestinian statehood. All it has to do is show that Israel violated its terms of admission to have it expelled. Since the General Assembly, not the Security Council, controls membership issues, vetoes would not come into play.

The league would also do well to consider the example of Taiwan’s UN membership. On Oct. 25, 1971, it was expelled because the UN chose not to recognize Taiwan as a country any longer. The UN decided that the People’s Republic of China was the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations, not the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. Although Taiwan considers itself an independent state, China considers it to be a province of China. The UN adopted a “One China” policy, just like the U.S. did, and did so asserting that Taiwan had unlawfully occupied China’s UN seat. Let’s let that sink in for a moment: unlawfully occupied.” Is there any more unlawful occupier than Israel?

The UN cannot accept two governments in Palestine any more than it could accept two Chinese governments. Because its “creation” and its membership in the UN are both unlawful, Israel must be expelled and its seat given to Palestine.

The Arab League, and all civilized nations, must demand that the UN adopt a “One Palestine” policy.

January 26, 2018 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, United Nations, Zionism