Sweeps week at UN

Editorial

Global attention turned to the United Nations last week and that, by definition, is not particularly good for Israel. The international forum, inspired in part by the history of the Jewish people with the intent to prevent future genocides, has become a tragic inversion of its intended mandate. The Orwellian nightmare exemplified by the most despotic regimes taking lead roles in UN bodies dedicated to human rights has destroyed the faith of many in the potential of the international organization.

Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, who spoke Monday at the launch of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s annual campaign, offered few rays of hope in a bleak overall assessment of the situation. He wittily alluded to “theatre week” in New York – the opening of Broadway’s new season. The real theatre, he suggested, was a few blocks away, at the UN. While theatre nuts were poring over early reviews of the new shows, diplomacy nerds and foreign policy wonks were glued to live webcasts of world leaders marching one after another to the podium in the grand General Assembly. U.S. President Barack Obama gave the most pro-Israel speech of his presidency, according to Gillerman. Canada reprised our role as Israel’s most reliable ally. Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave a speech that married on-the-ground realism with a bracing wake-up to those who would dismiss the existential dangers facing Israel. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas reinforced his role as an intransigent hard-line enemy of Israel, citing 1948 as the beginning of “the occupation,” thereby negating the right of Israel to exist even as he demanded autonomy and recognition for his still-nonexistent state.

Then there was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian dictator.

More concerning, probably, than Ahmadinejad’s words themselves is the global reaction to them. Many people, it seems, are prepared to dismiss the speech as the continued rantings of a madman. Others seem to find pearls of wisdom in Ahmadinejad’s conspiracies of 9/11 as an inside job and appear cheered by his chutzpah in taking on the West. Since perception probably counts more than reality in this diplomatic sweeps week, it is important to see what perceptions dominated last week. Comparing Ahmadinejad’s speech with a review of the news coverage creates a sobering dissonance.

We do not pretend to have undertaken a scientific analysis of the coverage, but a review of English-language media in the aftermath is troubling for its emphasis. One of Ahmadinejad’s cruelest jibes, and one we’ve heard before, was to attribute Israel’s creation to European guilt; accusing Europeans of using “the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists.…”

The inhumanity and ahistoricity of this statement is galling. After the 1947 Partition Resolution vote, European countries did nothing to create the state of Israel, leaving instead the ragtag militias of the yishuv to fight their battles entirely by themselves.

Despite this, last week’s media coverage focused on Ahmadinejad’s claim that the state of Israel is illegitimate – a part of the Iranian leader’s speech with which plenty of casual Western observers more or less agree – while largely ignoring the parts of his speech that accused “slave masters and colonial powers” of every sin under the sun and glossed right over the patently classic antisemitism that underpinned his entire address. The most inflammatory radicalism of the speech went unreported by most media, while the comments that reinforce typical global prejudices about Zionist influence and Jewish “over-sensitivity” around the Holocaust made the news.

It should be extremely alarming that, while 30 or so countries walked out of the assembly to protest Ahmadinejad’s speech, another 140 or so stayed put. Also bad: the reaction of even the well-meaning among the North American commentariat continues to dismiss Ahmadinejad as a madman whose explicit threats are not to be taken seriously.

But Ahmadinejad is a madman to be taken with the utmost seriousness. He has consistently idealized a world without Israel and he has obvious intentions to dominate the Muslim world, all the while terrorizing his own people.

Though Jews and Israel are a main focus of his rhetoric and design, this is not just about Israel. This is not just about us. Ahmadinejad is fast-tracking a nuclear program to make his goals real. Given his clearly stated objectives and his planned method of implementing them, this is a concern for everyone, regardless of religion or geography. This is what the media should be reporting.

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