Former Sudanese slave Simon Deng stands in Washington after walking there from the Durban III conference in New York.
Conrad Black, National Post · Nov. 12, 2011
The Palestinian attempt to gain a seat at the United Nations seems to have backfired. The United States has made it clear that it will veto the move, if necessary. But it also seems unlikely that the Palestinian Authority will gain the nine Security Council votes needed to force a U.S. veto. In fact, the issue might not even get through the UN's membership-committee stage, in which case there wouldn't be any Security Council vote at all.
Meanwhile, Palestine's admission to full membership by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also has backfired in the form of withdrawn funding. The gesture also has focused irritation, particularly in the United States, on the hypocrisy and bigotry and corruption of UNESCO itself.
The antics of Fatah (the dominant PLO faction that eventually became known as the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank) has also driven Israel and Hamas (which governs Gaza) into more relatively congenial relations - under the logic of "the enemy of my enemy."
Most Palestinian leaders have never wanted peace with Israel, other than the peace that would come from the massacre, expulsion or subjugation of the Jews. The whole formula of "land for peace" has been a confidence trick - the trading of tangible territory for a revocable truce. The legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state has never really been accepted by most of the Arabs. To this day, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas still refuses to make this concession.
When former Israeli premier Ehud Barak conceded almost everything PLO leader Yasser Arafat was seeking at Camp David in 2000, Arafat demanded the right of six million Palestinian refugees and (mostly) their descendants to "return" to Israel and thereby swamp the state's Jewish population. For good measure, he unleashed a second Intifada in late 2000, which Ariel Sharon shut down very effectively over the following years.
Sharon and his successors, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, have promoted vibrant economic growth - including in the West Bank, which is now enjoying the greatest prosperity in its history. Meanwhile, Hamas, which has refused to negotiate with Israel until the recent prisoner exchange, has sunk further into poverty under the Israeli boycott.
The most prominent Palestinian demand in 2011, which has gained unwarranted credulity in the West, is for the end of new settlements, whether in the middle of the desert or as extensions to Jerusalem. This is just as much nonsense as the "right of return." Menachem Begin in Sinai and Ariel Sharon in Gaza have demonstrated a perfect Israeli willingness to uproot settlers and destroy or hand over settlements for genuine peace, and obviously Israel would do so again. But it will not make pre-emptive concessions again. Leaving Gaza just opened up a splendid launch-site for thousands of Hamas rockets aimed indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. And Israelis don't want to see this error repeated on a larger scale.
Despite the political uncertainties in Egypt, Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the gasconading of the Turkish government (formerly quite friendly to Israel, but now driven by the ethnocentric and sectarian hauteur of the European Union to fish for approbation from its former Arab satrapies), the position of the Jewish state is not precarious. Its standard of living is rising steeply and now exceeds that of many European countries; there have been large oil and gas discoveries offshore, and its military condition is still quite unassailable. And there has been a positive tectonic shift toward self-reliance in its attitude.
Even the ability of the anti-Israeli majority at the United Nations to go on tormenting Israel has been compromised by perhaps the most hopeful development on the Middle East stage in some years. The new country of South Sudan, set up in January of this year as a response to the genocidal outrages of the Sudanese Arabs against their Christian, Muslim and animist non-Arab countrymen, has taken its place squarely with the Jew-ish state and attacked the Arab-led conspiracy against Israel in international organizations.
Simon Deng, the South Sudanese delegate at the recent Durban III conference on racism (in New York), shattered the hypocrisy of the anti-Israeli front one normally witnesses at such meetings. Mr. Deng pointed out that while the UN has spent years adopting scurrilous resolutions against Israel, the body generally has ignored the Arab racists committing crimes against Black Africans far more heinous than those falsely alleged against Israel.
From 1955 to 2005, four million non-Arab Sudanese were murdered, seven million were ethnically cleansed, and hundreds of thousands, including Mr. Deng himself, were seized by Arab slavemerchants and sold into bondage to Sudanese and Egyptian Arab owners. Darfur was never a "tribal" conflict, as the UN long soft-pedalled it; it was Arab colonialist genocide against Black Africans. It took UN bodies 16 years to recognize what was afoot, and they did so then only at the behest of Jewish organizations in Israel and the United states.
One of the only Middle Eastern countries to which persecuted South Sudanese could escape was Israel, which, as Mr. Deng reminded his unappreciative audience, is a country with no colour bars: Black Muslims and Christians have found safety in Israel. Mr. Deng also emphasized the violent discrimination of Muslim countries against Coptic Christians (Egypt), other Christians (Iraq, Nigeria and Iran), the Baha'i (Iran) and Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir. Deng celebrated the fact that the South Sudanese president, Salva Kiir, has determined that his new country's embassy in Israel will be in Jerusalem, "the eternal capital of the Jewish people."
Mr. Deng's admirable and timely exposé was ungenerously received by the usual claque of Arabs and their anti-Semitic fellow travellers, and has been underpublicized. But it has put a banana skin under the anti-Israel movement in the Third World, and undermined, or even exploded, the prolonged, self-hating infatuation of sub-Saharan Africans and AfricanAmericans with militant forms of Islam.
Note: Thanks to reader David Walcott for pointing out that Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the aunt, rather than the niece, of Emperor Charles V. I am in a U.S. federal prison without Internet access and without a proper encyclopedia and I must rely on my generally reliable, but not infallible memory.
cbletters@gmail.com
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